Michael T. Klare

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil. Consider this essay a preview of his newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, which has just been published by Metropolitan Books.

How will Washington’s Third Gulf War Play Out?

The way to war, which will surely prove to be the road to hell, seems open with a Third Gulf War looming on humanity’s horizon.

Michael T. Klare
By Michael T. Klare
Iraqis pass by a British tank as they flee Basra, southern Iraq, as smoke looming over the city can be seen in the distance, March 29, 2003. (AP/Anja Niedringhaus)

With Donald Trump’s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American experience in the Greater Middle East, is that it won’t be pretty. The New York Times recently reported that U.S. Army

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The Pentagon Is Planning a Three-Front ‘Long War’ Against China and Russia

Officials in Washington should be thinking hard before committing Americans to a strategy that will make this increasingly likely and could turn what is still long-war planning into an actual long war with deadly consequences.

Michael T. Klare
By Michael T. Klare
U.S. Army M2A2 and M2A3 Bradley fighting vehicles are unloaded at a pier in Busan, South Korea, June 29, 2011. (AP/Yonhap, Kim Sun-ho)

Think of it as the most momentous military planning on Earth right now. Who’s even paying attention, given the eternal changing of the guard at the White House, as well as the latest in tweets, sexual revelations, and investigations of every sort? And yet it increasingly looks as if, thanks to current Pentagon planning, a twenty-first-century

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How Donald Trump Is Normalizing Nuclear Weapons

As the seemingly threat-free zone of a post-nuclear era is drawing to a close, the possible use of nuclear weapons – barely conceivable even in the Cold War era – is about to be normalized.

Michael T. Klare
By Michael T. Klare
An anti-war protester wears a mask showing US President Donald Trump in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017 during a demonstration against nuclear weapons near the Brandenburg Gate. (AP/Michael Sohn)

Maybe you thought America’s nuclear arsenal, with its thousands of city-busting, potentially civilization-destroying thermonuclear warheads, was plenty big enough to deter any imaginable adversary from attacking the U.S. with nukes of their own. Well, it turns out you were wrong. The Pentagon has been fretting that the arsenal is insufficiently

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Oil Industry Poised To Make West Africa The New Middle East

Historically, the US has been mostly ambivalent to the genocide, terrorism and famine that is daily life for most of Africa, why the sudden change of heart?

Michael T. Klare
By Michael T. Klare
Cameroon Boko Haram

N’Djamena, Chad  –  As of this weekend, the Nigerian extremist organization, Boko Haram, has officially pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) of Iraq and Syria.  This news comes only 2 weeks after the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) began its “Operation Flintlock 2015″ in Chad’s capital city.  In fact, the “diplomatic” military

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Our Fossil-Fueled Future

The world’s reliance on oil is hitting a new high as prospects for peace hit a new low.

Michael T. Klare
By Michael T. Klare
Oil Pump Jack

What sort of fabulous new energy systems will the world possess in 2040? Which fuels will supply the bulk of our energy needs? And how will that change the global energy equation, international politics, and the planet’s health?  If the experts at the U.S. Department of Energy are right, the startling “new” fuels of 2040 will be oil, coal, and

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