Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy

David Reed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138051492
• eBook ISBN: 9781351685467
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The prosperity and national security of the United States depend directly on the prosperity and stability of both partner and competing countries around the world. Today, U.S. interests are under rising pressure from water scarcity, extreme weather events and water-driven ecological change in key geographies of strategic interest to the U.S. Those water-driven stresses are undermining economic productivity, weakening governance systems and fraying social cohesion in scores of countries and, in the process, undermining the vitality of rural livelihoods, fostering local and ethnic conflicts, driving broad migratory movements and contributing to the growth of insurgencies and terrorist networks.

While the U.S. intelligence community has steadily expanded natural resource concerns in their global threat analyses, our overseas development assistance remains locked into provision of water and hygienic services rather than responding to the full sweep of global water challenges including governance and policy failures, growing conflicts over water and the need for promoting sustainable transboundary water arrangements in partner countries. A fundamental departure from the past is urgently needed.

Based on 18 case studies, Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy provides an analytical framework to help policy makers, scholars and researchers studying the intersection of U.S. foreign policy with the environment and sustainability issues, interpret the impacts of water-driven social disruptions on the stability of partner governments and U.S. interests abroad. The book also delivers specific recommendations to reorient U.S. development and diplomatic engagements that can forestall and prevent social disruptions and ensuing threats to U.S. prosperity and national security.

Part I

In Search of a Mission

1 In Search of a Mission

David Reed

Continental America’s water abundance has provided the natural-resource wealth to build and sustain the world’s largest economy and to fuel a centuries-long rise in our country’s living standards. For more than two centuries, engineers, hydrologists, agribusinesses, family farmers, politicians and government agents have pushed, pulled, stored and moved water across the continent to satisfy an insatiable demand for fresh water. Over the course of those two-plus centuries, we have become masters of hard-infrastructure construction, leaders in irrigation technology innovation and major suppliers to commodity markets that stretch around the world. We have accrued an unmatched set of water management assets: sophisticated and flexible regulatory instruments; water management institutions at local, regional, and national levels; consultation protocols; standards and technical capacities for new remote sensing; and data management and modeling technologies. Our national experience has been replete with risk-taking, extraordinary success, costly failure, institution-building, social displacement, violence, sabotage, treaty signing and peacemaking.

While richly endowed in general, U.S. water wealth is distributed highly unevenly across our land, with the 100th meridian and Continental Divide cleaving hard lines between regions that enjoy a natural abundance of water and those geographies marked by scarcity and weather extremes. Regardless of those sharp contrasts in natural endowment, no Congress and no president, with the exception of President Jimmy Carter in 1977, has dared deny the financial, legal and technical resources needed by states and local communities to ensure delivery of clean water in a stable, timely manner.¹ The construction of the world’s largest water-moving infrastructure and the steady growth of our water management systems were the result not only of deals cut in smoke-filled rooms of politicians and titans of American industry—those steel and concrete behemoths were the result of a long-standing recognition that America’s prosperity and economic well-being depended on the delivery of safe water to America’s farmers, industrialists, miners and households without impediment.

As the United States now stands as the world’s sole superpower, it would seem axiomatic that our centuries-long consensus on the centrality of water to America’s prosperity would extend naturally to the international sphere. Our domestic economy is inextricably interwoven into all corners of the world. Commodity supply lines of U.S. importers, traders and processors reach into small farmer communities and engage agribusinesses on all continents, providing American families with a steady provision of every imaginable source of nourishment. In the world’s largest economy, our prosperity depends directly on the prosperity and stability of our partners and competitors around the world.

In equal measure, U.S. traders and processors provide millions of farmers around the world with stable markets and economic opportunities. Water is the lifeline of those small-hold farmers and agribusinesses alike. The loss of those agricultural jobs, collapse of rural livelihoods in scores of developing countries and deprivation of safe water for the hundreds of millions of recent immigrants to the teeming cities of Southeast Asia and Africa can disrupt those global supply lines on which our economy depends. Moreover, as the Syrian civil war painfully reminds us, drought and weather extremes can unleash a chain of migration and social displacement that undermines governments without regard for political or ideological disposition. Lack of water at the local level can lead to conflicts that deepen ethnic and cultural cleavages, increase state fragility and raise tensions among neighboring countries along shared watercourses. The interconnectedness of the global economy and the attendant reliance on the stability of political allies and competitors alike weds our national security in ways previously unknown to the provision and sustainable management of fresh water in distant stretches of the planet.

It is precisely through the rising impacts of climate change that the links between sustainable water management and our national security multiply. For example, the stress and dislocations brought by climate change on societies with population bulges of unemployed youth in rural and urban areas are often sufficient to test the viability of local governments as they struggle to provide basic services to their constituencies. When dispossessed youth are captured by the ideological appeals of prophetic insurgencies, that explosive mixture can combust into social upheaval, swell the ranks of the insurgent movements and erode the rule of law at national and regional levels. As that increasingly familiar scenario unfolds, it is no longer possible to address water scarcity and extreme weather events through water partnerships, technical assistance, flood control programs and water infrastructure construction. The full range of U.S. development, diplomatic and kinetic measures are needed to attenuate the threats and to help societies build the economic foundations on which future stability and prosperity depend. In short order, new conditions and dynamics such as these will oblige our government to reconsider what constitutes a sound U.S. foreign policy as our planet’s climate continues to change.

Paradoxically, our government’s history in addressing rising global water challenges has been, at best, a checkered affair. U.S. water policy abroad has been inconsistent, incoherent and ineffective to the point that, despite our goodwill, we are not able to provide technical, material and policy support that will enable our partners to respond to protracted drought and extreme weather events whose destructive impacts are reinforced by deficient policies and weak institutions. In the following pages, I explore a 25-year kaleidoscopic history of confused and competing U.S. approaches that are implemented through our bilateral development assistance, channeled through multilateral institutions and translated through diplomatic and military engagements in geographies deemed strategically important. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this exploration is how competing domestic policies and leading political figures have both handcuffed and provided leadership in shaping U.S. water engagements around the world since 1992. As a foretaste of this complex history, I begin this exploration with a minor incident that unfolded shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A Nigh-Forgotten Incident

The chroniclers of the buildup, kinetic intervention and aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have laid bare the chronology, justifications and generally catastrophic outcomes of that 2003 military adventure. Sadly, the full cost of the misadventure has yet to be tallied as the country and the region remain locked in strife and human suffering. U.S. security interests still rest in the balance. One incident in the U.S. reconstruction effort has largely remained out of public view. That nigh-forgotten incident deserves a bit more attention for the simple reason that it sheds light on the central concern of this book: namely, the role of the U.S. government in responding to the ever-growing challenges to U.S. security associated with access to and the management of water around the world.

A mere four months after the U.S. assault began in March 2003, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) was advising the newly formed Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources to shape its strategy for rebuilding the country’s water infrastructure and management regime.² Though shocked at the parlous state of primary infrastructure, the corps’ representative claimed that “Iraq can become the contemporary ‘California of the Middle East.’ ”³ This is an extraordinary statement not only because of its fantasticality but also because it reveals a great deal about how operative assumptions derived from our domestic experience managing water are translated into our engagements with international partners. On a first level, it is hard to imagine that an agency centrally responsible for helping manage our own country’s waters could hold the conviction that the hydrological regime in California is sustainable and warrants replication in an even drier part of the world with millennia of water management experience. True, the recent five-year drought besetting California had not yet focused our national attention, but the repeated history of drought in the state and the region over the past century certainly should have been well-known to anyone vested with the responsibilities bearing on Iraq’s water future. Second, what understanding of regional dynamics could have led leaders of the post-invasion, reconstruction regime to ignore the fact that Iraq is held hostage to the water allocation decisions of Turkey and Syria, both upstream neighbors whose dams and reservoirs on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers control Iraq’s access to those waters? A simple unforeseen provocation with those neighbors could further reduce flows to Iraq, which had already experienced the negative consequence of its neighbors’ expanding water infrastructure and consumption hundreds of miles upstream.

On a third level, it is even more difficult to understand how the U.S. advisors could promote the “privatization of water facilities”⁴ in a country ravaged by civil unrest, where private enterprise had long been throttled under a state-driven economy and where creating a market-driven economy would require years of institutional and regulatory development. Then again, since privatizing the whole of Iraq’s economy was a goal set by the United States, it would seem natural that water management should also be brought under private-sector management. Finally, while the 2006–11 drought that precipitated the Syrian civil war lay several years in the future, the impacts of climate change on the driest region on the planet were predicted years earlier, with ample warnings about the attendant strains on the region’s water supplies. Given that such scientific warnings found little resonance in the U.S. administration at that time, reconstruction plans did not allow such distractions to be woven into the reconstruction of a country halfway around the world.

One clear lesson that this nigh-forgotten incident provides is that it is not possible to separate the policies and programs of U.S. overseas engagements from the centuries-long domestic experiences of managing water within our own borders. As I will explore below, government agencies and entire sectors of our economy were built on the premise of unlimited water availability and massive water infrastructure construction to solve our nation’s water challenges. Environmental constraints affecting one region of the country could be countered with unmatched engineering prowess and the capability to move unprecedented volumes of water across the plains, valleys and mountains. So why not in distant lands? With that shaky assumption, our market economy could be counted on to maximize water development and efficiency, with results sufficient to satisfy ever-growing domestic demand from mining, industry, agriculture, municipalities and household consumption. So why not apply that economic assumption to other quarters of the world?

So as not to repeat the oversights reflected in the “California dreaming” incident, this chapter will carry the reader through three context-setting discussions. First, I will reference four convergent trends associated with water use and management that pose new challenges to every community, every company and virtually every government on the planet. Second, I will explore three seminal lessons from our own domestic experience that spotlight the core of the American approach to managing our country’s water resources that we have at times ill-advisedly imposed on development and policy abroad. Those experiences allow us to reflect on the legal foundations, expansive engineering ambitions and competing management approaches we have taken to governing our nation’s water. Finally, my focal point will be to examine in greater detail the three pathways through which the U.S. has managed our water engagements in countries around the world. Those pathways include our bilateral development assistance; U.S. policies and practices transmitted through and with the multilateral development community; and the defense, development and diplomatic approach in regions deemed strategically important to our national security.

Four Convergent Trends

The world of water as we have known it is gone: Evaporated. Drained. Salinized. Desalinated. Allocated. Captured. Stored. Packaged. Bottled. Depleted. Contaminated. Shared. Appropriated. Diverted. Fracked. Heated. Cooled. Lifted. Injected.

The relative security in the volume, quality and accessibility of the world’s freshwater stocks that we once enjoyed has changed dramatically as water scarcity and variability have become the “new normal” in virtually all regions of the world. Underlying that shift from relative supply stability to increasing scarcity and variability lie four global trends that converge with a vengeance, albeit highly unevenly, on communities around the planet.

In many ways, this new normal should not be surp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Part I In Search of a Mission
• Part II Water and Social Disruptions
• Part III Financing Water Infrastructure
• Part IV New Challenges, New Directions
• List of Contributors
• Index