Energy and the Three Levels of National Security: Differentiating Energy Concerns within a National Security Context

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Connections This content downloaded from 5.179.1.3 on Wed, 25 Oct 2023 11:40:53 +00:000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction The past several years have seen a renewed interest in the confluence of energy security and national security policy. Defining the intersection between such wide-ranging policy areas has been predictably inconsistent, and highly dependent on respective national and agent-based interests. At both national and multinational levels, conflicting objectives and definitions have driven confused attempts to develop singular "energy security" policies within an international security context. Since 2006, NATO has been engaged in a concerted if arduous and controversial process of defining the value the organization adds to the security environment. The new U.S. administration has put energy security front and center on its agenda, particularly in relation to foreign and security policy, but a confused inter-agency jumble has left many hands on the rudder of foreign energy policy. In the media as well as policy circles, cutoffs of Russian gas, Somali piracy, SCADA system vulnerabilities, terrorist attacks on Middle East pipelines, nuclear safety, and volatile gasoline prices have been too often lumped together. This article thus returns to basics, and proposes to define energy security in a national security context using a rudimentary three-level model of national security itself. That is, national security as the functionality and success of security services at the primary level; as the functioning of critical domestic services at the secondary level; and as economic well-being and prosperity at the tertiary level. While imperfectly separating admittedly interrelated spheres of national security, such a model can begin the process of differentiating challenges and threats of energy insecurity within a national security discourse. In reality, of course, similar threat-types may have different impacts across those levels, and indeed the second part of this essay shows how a few such outcome-based threat categories (such as those that portend short-run catastrophe or those that cause price fluctuations) do so. The aim is to begin a process of prioritizing different types of energy disruptions on national security. In the recent past, fears of energy insecurity have been stoked by a potent mix of rapidly rising oil and gas prices, increasingly nationalist and politicized energy policies, and greater reliance on a few foreign energy suppliers. And though en