BOOK REVIEW: The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Reviewed by Kristin Wood
Cipher Brief Expert Kristin Wood is a former senior CIA officer, and is a Harvard Kennedy School Intelligence Project fellow focused on climate and national security. During her 20-year CIA career, Ms. Wood served in the Director’s area and three Agency directorates – analysis, operations, and digital innovation – leading a wide variety of the Agency’s missions and served as Deputy Chief of the Innovation & Technology Group at the Open Source Center (OSC).
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin’s latest book, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, offers readers a global, strategic perspective on where the US and the international community are now, how we got here -- caught in the age of COVID-19 -- yet still facing enduring challenges related to geopolitics, which are energy, and climate.
The New Map is a must-read for those who are national security experts or aspire to be. Why?
Because most national security professionals, this one included, have deep expertise on certain issues or regions, but we do not have it across the full range of the world’s most pressing issues. In The New Map, Yergin demonstrates this global mastery. He reviews critical historical decisions of key nations and international coalitions, as well as the inflection points where opportunities were lost or created, bringing us to today’s geopolitical environment. In the telling, the reader gains a much broader understanding of other nations’ historical perspectives, their leaders’ goals in the new world order, and how both factors influence nations’ actions today.
The New Map is organized into separate “map” sections on the US, Russia, China, and the Middle East that reviews their energy histories, geopolitics and futures; a “roadmap” section on electric vehicles, artificial-intelligence driven vehicles, and ride sharing; and a climate map section that discusses energy transition, renewable resources, and new technologies. Peppered throughout are developments and implications from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. National security experts can easily review just the sections needed to enhance their understanding of areas about which their knowledge is limited or dated, but the whole book is an excellent read.
Whether that is Putin’s view that the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a great national humiliation, or how mapmakers from World War I victor nations created the Middle East nations they wanted to govern rather than those that made sense in religious, ethnic, or cultural terms, setting the stage for today’s power struggles; or how Beijing views its unequal treatment in international agreements as part of their “century of humiliation.”
Yergin most often tells these stories from first-person perspectives, which make them engaging to read and exposes how individual leader’s choices have created consequences that have become some of the worst moments in the international community, from the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 based on the incorrect belief that Kabul was working with the United States; to Saddam’s miscalculations about how easy winning a war with Iran would be in 1980; the US decision to topple Saddam over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in 2003; President Obama deciding to ignore his own “redline” for use of chemical weapons in Syria; or President Trump’s decision to step away in 2017 from the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, leaving China in the catbird seat for economic ties with key Asian allies.
Yergin tells these geopolitical stories through the lens of energy and transportation. “For more than a century, energy—its availability, access, and flows—has been intertwined with security and geopolitics and more than ever before, this nexus will shape the future.”
Yergin explains complicated energy pictures -- from Baghdad’s ruined infrastructure, to Iran’s ambitions to expand market share, to world leader Saudi Arabia’s efforts to use revenues to build a more diverse economic base for the future. Perhaps most powerfully, he explains how China’s burgeoning energy needs and fears of being cut off from it supplies affect Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea and global energy partnerships.
The New Map chronicles the new era of strategic competition and great power rivalry that is beginning to take on the character of a new cold war, with the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other. And unlike the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which was a small factor in the global economy of the time, Russia has become more connected in the Middle East and through providing energy to Europe while China is deeply embedded in economies around the world. Countries are beginning to fear that they will have to choose sides, and the ongoing Russian interference in US elections, a technology race (think Huawei and 5G), as well as China’s assertion of control over the South China Sea and its “Belt and Road” initiative will greatly complicate this new cold war.
While much of the book focuses on energy in the form of oil and gas, Yergin also includes a future-looking mobility conversation, offering an in-depth discussion of how ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, artificial intelligence being developed for self-driving cars, and electric vehicles may continue to reshape how we move people and goods, as well as influence the future of automobile and gas and oil companies.
On climate, The New Map offers an excellent strategic overview of major climate issues, why they matter for national security, and how and why climate concerns are now key factors influencing behaviors in both government and business. Yergin offers several practical hypotheses on the much-discussed energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables and how it may play out.
Yergin concludes the book by noting our dilemmas ahead and the key questions that will need to be answered, from recovery from the coronavirus and its worldwide economic damage, to managing even more fraught geopolitical dynamics, to determining the path to a lower-carbon world with a transition that also meets the energy demands of a developing world.
Do yourself a favor, read this one. You’ll be glad you did.
This book earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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