The New Energy Scenario and its Geopolitical Implications

If the energy issue came to the forefront of world attention with the outbreak of the Iraq crisis in the autumn of 2002 –after more than a decade of absence from the international community’s strategic concerns– over the past year it has emerged as the global strategic issue par excellence. It is not just that energy now exerts an enormous influence on the dynamism of the international economy, the stability of world geopolitics and the future of our environment on a planetary scale; it also appears that the energy issue will not recede into the strategic background again for several decades. The Gordian knot of the international system –in which nearly all our major strategic challenges are intertwined in some way or another– is energy, and it will continue to be well into the future.