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Farming innovations lead to Middle Eastern oil independenceLugar, their author, 2K(Richard, Senator from Indiana, Plant Power,

http://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/143/lugar.html,JS)

The United States can take a leading position in a productivity revolution. Andour success at increasing food production may

play a decisive humanitarian role in the survival of billions of people and the health of our planet.

Directly related to our challenge to feed a growing world is the necessity of providing a sustainable

resource for fuels, chemicals and materials. I believe thatagricultureand the wider sphere of plantsrepresent a

resource not only for food, but also for the fuel, energy and materialsessential to modern society.Scientists

have developed biotechnologiesgenetically engineered yeasts, enzymes and bacteriacapable of breaking down plants, trees,grasses and agricultural residues (known as biomass) into their constituent chemical building blocks, principally in the form of complex sugars.From this intermediate step, we can produce a wide variety of bio-based products including animal

feed, chemicals andimportantlyfuel .If a significant percentage of products currently derived

from petroleum can be produced from biomass, the major industrial economies will improve their

strategic security by reducing their dependence on Middle Eastern oil and all countries, rich and poor, can spend

far less on oil imports, dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help strengthen their own rural communities while simultaneously

building a new bio-based industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide per year.Loss of oil revenue causes widespread shift to arms traffickingmultiple examples prove

MILLER 2010(Gregory D. Miller, assistant professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, The Security Costs of Energy Independence, Centerfor Strategic International Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 107- 119, April 2010, http://www.asiaresearch.ir/files/10apr_Miller.pdf, Sawyer)Historically, when states have been unable to generate revenuethrough normal trade channels, they sought other sources of wealth. As oil-exporting

states experienceeconomic turmoil,particularly if their governmentsfeel they must generate wealth to maintain control or to avoid some of

the issues discussed above, many willprobably turn to the sale of illicitgoods such as drugs and military hardware. There are

several examplesof states engaging in such behavior when economic needs arise. For example, Ukraineslack of hard currency since itsindependence in 1991 has led it to become one of the most active suppliers of legal and illegal small arms. 9 Although the Taliban in Afghanistan initially claimed to

oppose drugs on religious grounds, they turned a blind eye to the cultivation of drugs when revenue coming into the country from any other sources dried up. 10

For other examples of states turning to illicit trade resulting from the loss oflegitimate revenue,one need only examine the behavior of

states following the imposition of trade sanctions. North Korea and Libya each developed networks for arms sales,

including nuclear and missile technology.11 North Korea continues to lack outlets for legal trade because of international sanctions andrelies on several illicit ways of earning money. According to the Institu te for Defense Analyses Andrew Coe: In the 1990s, North Korea engaged in considerable

illegitimate trade, including large-scale narcotics trafficking, currency counterfeiting, ballistic missile sales, and industrial and sexual slavery. These new exports grew

in parallel with the decline in legal exports. 12 Missile technology and conventional weapons make upas much as 40

percent of North Koreas total exports.The regime earns $1.5 billion from missile sales alone, representing 8.8 percent of its gross domesticproduct (GDP). 13 Although this amount pales in comparison to the United States, which led the world in arms sales at $37.8 b illion in 2008, 14 the risk is the

potential growth in arms sales by countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, much of which would go to trouble spots in the Mid dle East and the rest of the developing

world. The danger here is not simply creating illicit trade networks but the link between such networks

and various forms of political violence, both within states and across borders. 15 For example, several terrorist groups, such as the IrishRepublican Army in Northern Ireland and the Euskadi ta Askatasuna in Spain, had links to narcotics as well as arms trafficking and were more active as a result of

those connections. 16 Therefore, rather than wait for illicit trade networks to developand then spend the kind of money the United

States has been spending in combating drugs in countries suc h as Colombia and Mexico, the West should actnow to prevent the growth

of such networks in oil-exporting states.

Precipitates regional conflict and fuels failed states

STOHL 2004(Rachel Stohl, senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, The Tangled Web of Illicit Arms Tracking, Center for American Progress,October 12, 2004, http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/terrorinshadows-stohl.pdf, Sawyer)Small arms traffickingin the 21st century isnothing if not a global operation.In 2002, traffickers acquired 5,000 AK-47s from Yugoslavian armystocks and moved them from Serbia to Liberia under the guise of a legal transaction with Nigeria. One of the planes used in this shipment came from Ukraine and

made a refueling stop in Libya while en route. That same year, a group of West African gun smugglers persuaded the Nicaraguan government to sell it 3,000 assault

rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition by pretending to be brokeringthe deal on behalf of the Panamanian National Police. Instead, the illegal goodswere routed to South America and sold to the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia, an international terrorist organization. These and thousands of similar

incidentscombine to make black marketsmall arms traffickinga $1 billion-a-year global business. But the financial profit comes at a

http://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/143/lugar.htmlhttp://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/143/lugar.htmlhttp://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/143/lugar.html

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tremendous cost to the world's security.Some 500,000 people are killed each year bythe 639 million small

armsin circulation,and in some conflicts up to 80 percent of casualties are caused by these weapons. Moreover, small arms are today the

weapons of choice for all warring parties around the globewhether they be government armies, rebel forces, or terrorists

because they are cheap,widely available, extremely lethal, simpleto use, durable,portable and concealable. In particular,

small arms fuel regional instability.Thesepersistent weaponsoften remain behind at the end of conflicts,thus

enabling disputes to reignite or spread to neighboring countries.Even when further war is avoided, small arms becomeinstruments for criminal violence and the disruption of development efforts. Ultimately, this kind of regional destabilization can cause

states to fail and create the conditions in which terrorist organizations emerge and thrive.

Failed states lead to poverty, disease, famine, terrorism, genocide, and great power

wars

Grygiel, 09 (Jakub, Associate Professor of IR @ Johns Hopkins, July/August 2009, The AmericanInterest, http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=622, Vacuum Wars, ADM)Mention failed statesin an academic seminar or a policy meeting and you will hear a laundry list of tragic

problems:poverty, disease, famine, refugeesflowing across borders andmore. If it is a really gloomy day, you will hear that

failed states are associated with terrorism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. This is the conventional wisdom that has developedover the past two decades, and rightly so given the scale of the human tragedies in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, just to mention the most

egregious cases of the 1990s.This prevailing view of failed states, however, though true, is also incomplete. Failed states are not

only a source of domestic calamities; they are also potentially a source of great power competition

thatin the past has often led to confrontation, crisis and war. The failure of a state creates a vacuum that,

especially in strategically important regions, draws in competitive great-power intervention. This more traditional view ofstate failure is less prevalent these days, for only recently has the prospect of great power competition over failed vacuum states returned.

But, clearly, recent events in Georgiaas well as possible future scenarios in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as

southeastern Europe, Asia and parts of Africasuggest that it might be a good timeto adjust, really to expand, the way

we think about failed statesand the kinds of problems they can cause.The difference between the prevailing and the traditionalview on state failure is not merely one of accent or nuance; it has important policy implications. Intense great power conflict over the spoils of a

failed state will demand a fundamentally different set of strategies and skills from the United States. Whereas the response to the humanitarian

disasters following state failure tends to consist of peacekeeping and state-building missions, large-scale military operations and swift unilateral

action are the most likely strategies great powers will adopt when competing over a power vacuum. On the political level, multilateralcooperation, often within the setting of international institutions, is feasibleas well as desirable in case of humanitarian

disasters. But it is considerably more difficult, perhaps impossible, when a failed state becomes an arena of

great power competition.The prevailing view of failed states is an obvious product of the past two decadesa period in which anentirely new generation of scholars and policymakers has entered their respective professions. A combination of eventsthe end of the Cold

War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prostration of states such as Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia, and most importantly the

terrorist attacks of September 11created two interlocked impressions concerning the sources of state failure that are today largely accepted

uncritically.The first of these is that weak states have unraveled because of the great powers disinterest in them, which has allowed serious

domestic problems, ranging from poverty to ethnic and social strife, to degenerate into chaos and systemic governance failure.1 The basic idea

here is that the Cold War had a stabilizing effect in several strategic regions where either the United States or the Soviet Union supported

recently fashioned states with little domestic legitimacy and cohesion for fear that, if they did not, the rival superpower might gain advantage.

Some fortunate Third World neutrals even managed a kind of foreign aid arbitrage, attracting help from both sides. When support from the

superpowers ended, many of these states, such as Somalia and Yugoslavia, were torn apart by internal factionalism. The state lacked the money

to bribe compliance or to generate a larger economic pie, degenerating rapidly into corruption and violence. The key conclusion: The most

egregious and tragic examples of failed states in the 1990s occurred because of great power neglect rather than meddling.

The related secondimpression that post-Cold War events have created is that the main threat posed by failed states starts f rom within them and subsequently

spills over to others. Failed states export threats ranging from crime to drugs to refugees to, most dramatically,

global terrorism.2 The lawlessness and violence of such statesoften spills across bordersin the form of wavesof refugees, the creation of asylums for criminals and more besides.As the number and severity of failed state cases rose, Western powers

reacted much of the time by hoping that the problems arising from the failure of states, even those geographically close to the United States or

Europe like Haiti and Bosnia, would remain essentially limited so that internal chaos could simply be waited out. Interventions such as in

Somalia, Bosnia or Haiti were driven by a Western public shocked by vivid images of suffering and slaughter rather than by a sense that these

collapsed states directly threatened U.S. national security. The 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States changed the perception that

failed states could be safely ignored. The Hobbesian world of a failed state could be distant, but it was also a breeding ground for terrorist

networks that could train their foot soldiers, establish logistical bases and plan attacks against distant countries. Failed states suddenly were

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not only humanitarian disasters but security threats. As Francis Fukuyama observed in 2004, radical Islamist terrorism combined with the

availability of weapons of mass destruction added a major security dimension to the burden of problems created by weak governance.3

However, 9/11 did not alter the conviction that the main threat posed by failed states stems from endogenous problems and not from a great

power competition to fill the vacuum created by their demise. At least in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, there was a naive

feeling that the Islamist threat festering in failed or weak states such as Afghanistan was a menace to the international community writ large,

and certainly to great powers like Russia and China, as well as the United States. It was therefore assumed that the great powers would

cooperate to combat terrorism and not compete with each other for control over failing or failed states. As Stephen David pointed out in these

pages, Instead of living in a world of international anarchy and domestic order, we have international order and domestic anarchy.4The

solution stemming from such a view of failed states falls under the broad category of nation-building. If the main challenge of failed states isinternally generated and caused by a collapse of domestic order, then the solution must be to rebuild state institutions and restore authority

and order, preferably under some sort of multilateral arrangement that would enhance the legitimacy of what is necessarily an intrusive

endeavor. Great powers are expected to cooperate, not compete, to fix failed states.U.S. foreign policy continues to reflect this prevailing

view. Then-Director of the Policy Planning staff, Stephen Krasner, and Carlos Pascual, then-Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at

the State Department, wrote in 2005 that, when chaos prevails, terrorism, narcotics trade, weapons proliferation, and other forms of

organized crime can flourish. Moreover, modern conflicts are far more likely to be internal, civil matters than to be clashes between opposing

countries.5The prevailing view of failed states is, to repeat, not wrong, just incompletefor it ignores the competitive nature of great power

interactions. The traditional understanding of power vacuums is still very relevant. Sudan, Central Asia, Indonesia, parts of Latin America and

many other areas are characterized by weak and often collapsing states that are increasingly arenas for great power competition. The interest

of these great powers is not to rebuild the state or to engage in nation-building for humanitarian purposes but to establish a foothold in the

region, to obtain favorable economic deals, especially in the energy sector, and to weaken the presence of other great powers.Lets look at

just three possible future scenarios. In the first, imagine that parts of Indonesia become increasingly difficult to

govern and are wracked by riots. Chinese minorities are attacked, while pirates prowl sealanesin ever

greater numbers. Bejing, pressured by domestic opinion to help the Chinese diaspora, as well as by fears that its seaborne commerce will beinterrupted, intervenesin the region. Chinas action is then perceived as a threatby Japan, which projects its own power

into the region. The United States, India and others then intervene to protect their interests, as well.In thesecond scenario, imagine that Uzbekistan collapses after years of chronic mismanagement and continued Islamist agitation. Uzbekistans

natural resources and its strategic value as a route to the Caspian or Middle East are suddenly up for grabs, and Russia and China begin to

compete for control over it, possibly followed by other states like Iran and Turkey.In a third scenario, imagine that the repressive government

of Sudan loses the ability to maintain control over the state, and that chaos spreads from Darfur outward to Chad and other neighbors. Powers

distant and nearby decide to extend their control over the threatened oil fields. China, though still at least a decade away from having serious

power projection capabilities, already has men on the ground in Sudan protecting some of the fields and uses them to control the countrys

natural resources.These scenarios are not at all outlandish, as recent events have shown. Kosovo, which formally declared

independence on February 17, 2008, continues to strain relationships between the United States and Europe, on

the one hand, and Serbia and Russia, on the other. The resulting tension may degenerate into violenceas Serbian

nationalists and perhaps even the Serbian army intervene in Kosovo. It is conceivable then that Russia would support Belgrade, leading to a

serious confrontation with the European Union and the United States.

A similar conflict, pitting Russia againstNATO or the United States alone, or some other alliance of European states, could develop in several post-Soviet regions, from Georgia to the

Baltics. Last summers war in Georgia, for instance, showed incipient signs of a great power confrontation between Russia and the United States

over the fate of a weak state, further destabilized by a rash local leadership and aggressive meddling by Moscow. The future of Ukraine may

follow a parallel pattern: Russian citizens (or, to be precise, ethnic Russians who are given passports by Moscow) may claim to be harassed by

Ukrainian authorities, who are weak and divided. A refugee problem could then arise, giving Moscow a ready justification to intervene

militarily. The question would then be whether NATO, or the United States, or some alliance of Poland and other states would feel the need

and have the ability to prevent Ukraine from falling under Russian control.Another example could arise in Iraq. If the United States fails to

stabilize the situation and withdraws, or even merely scales down its military presence too quickly, one outcome could be the collapse of the

central government in Baghdad. The resulting vacuum would be filled by militias and other groups, who would engage in violent conflict for oil,

political control and sectarian revenge. This tragic situation would be compounded if Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two regional powers with the

most direct interests in the outcome, entered the fray more directly than they have so far.In sum, there are many more plausible scenarios in

which a failed state could become a playground of both regional and great power rivalry, which is why we urgently need to dust off the

traditional view of failed states and consider its main features as well as its array of consequences.The traditional view starts from a widely

shared assumption that, as nature abhors vacuums, so does the international system. As Richard Nixon once said to Mao Zedong, In

international relations there are no good choices. One thing is surewe can leave no vacuums, because they can be filled.6 The power

vacuums created by failed states attract the interests of great powers because they are an easy way to expand their spheres of influence whileweakening their opponents or forestalling their intervention. A state that decides not to fill a power vacuum is effectively inviting other states

to do so, thereby potentially decreasing its own relative power.This simple, inescapable logic is based on the view that international relations

are essentially a zero-sum game: My gain is your loss. A failed state creates a dramatic opportunity to gain something, whether natural

resources, territory or a strategically pivotal location. The power that controls it first necessarily increases its own standing relative to other

states. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1915,the anarchy of the world is due to the backwardness of weak states; . . . the modern nations have

lived in armed peace and collapsed into hideous warfare because in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America there are rich

territories in which weakness invites exploitation, in which inefficiency and corruption invite imperial expansion, in which the prizes are so great

that the competition for them is to the knife.7The threat posed by failed states, therefore, need not emanate mainly from within. After all, by

definition a failed state is no longer an actor capable of conducting a foreign policy. It is a politically inert geographic area whose fate is

dependent on the actions of others. The main menace to international security stems from competition between these others. As Arnold

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Wolfers put it in 1951, because of the competitive nature of international relations, expansion would be sure to take place wherever a power

vacuum existed.8 The challenge is that the incentive to extend control over a vacuum or a failed state is similar for many states. In fact, even if

one state has a stronger desire to control a power vacuum because of its geographic proximity, natural resources or strategic location, this very

interest spurs other states to seek command over the same territory simply because doing so weakens that state. The ability to deprive a state

of something that will give it a substantial advantage is itself a source of power. Hence a failed state suddenly becomes a strategic prize,

because it either adds to ones own power or subtracts from anothers.The prevailing and traditional views of failed states reflect two

separate realities. Therefore, we should not restrict ourselves to one view or the other when studying our options. The difference is not just

academic; it has very practical consequences.First and foremost, if we take the traditional view, failed states may pose an even

greater danger to international security than policymakers and academics currently predict.

Humanitarian disasters are certainly tragediesthat deserve serious attention; yet they do not pose the worst

threats to U.S. security or world stability. That honor still belongs to the possibility of a great power

confrontation. While the past decade or so has allowed us to ignore great power rivalries as the main feature of international relations,there is no guarantee that this happy circumstance will continue long into the future.