The Revolution in Military Affairs: Water Wars

Water sloshing from a cup

Today, we move onto the backbone of civilizations, the lifeblood of (most) meaningful empires—water. Will future wars be fought over it?

The short answer is that it’s unlikely to happen. Water is a pain in the ass transfer, making it impractical for long-distance or military-scale operations. Water doesn’t make sense if you need to move it, you must settle, build, and expand with water in your backyard.

Of course there are some exceptions to the rule. The Nile will become a heavily disputed resource between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Over in Central Asia, diversions of water from the Soviet-era have drained the Aral Sea and countries like Uzbekistan may have to invade neighbors to secure dwindling water supplies.

Water scarcity is real, especially in these hotspots, but water wars are not likely to become a global threat.

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Transcript

Hey, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page specifically about water wars. Do I expect the distribution of water to be the source of military conflict in the future? Short version is this is something I usually don’t worry about, for the simple reason that water is really hard to move and it’s pretty corrosive to any system that you’re going to use to move it. 

So, for example, if you just spill some water on your countertop and touch it, you’ll notice how it clings to your finger in that weird drop. That’s something called hydrogen bonding. It’s an atomic feature that a small molecule that has some very strong positive and negative aspects tends to link together without actually forming. See ice. That hydrogen bonding basically causes a cling between water and everything, including itself. 

So pumping water outside of a municipal environment is very, very difficult and very, very expensive. So if you are going to move large volumes of water from one place to another, you’re generally not going to do it by pipe. You’re going to use gravity. And that means basically digging some sort of canal and allowing the, the world to do the work for you. 

There are some exceptions, of course. Whenever you have a municipal situation, you obviously need water treatment and distribution. That is all done by pipe. But again, it’s very, very energy intensive. And you will always have some places like, say China who work going to let something little like physics or economic rationale get in the way of national unity. 

And so the Chinese are in the process of basically diverting several of their rivers in order to ship water from the south, where it’s more humid and more jungly to the north, which is more heavily populated and more arid. But this comes at a huge cost environmentally and economically. What that means is it’s really difficult to imagine a situation where people will go somewhere to get the water and bring it back. 

If they’re going to get the water, they’re going to go there and they’re going to stay. And that is also very hard as a rule. Economic development follows, the same track. You start with water. You use that water to grow food. You use the food to expand your population. You use the capital from that population growth and then agricultural sales to establish a tax base and eventually an industrial base. 

You then use that industrial base to build a military. And it is all rooted in having water at the very start. If you don’t have that water, you’re never going to get the industrial base that is necessary to have a projection based military. And so if you look out throughout history, while you do sometimes have dry cultures that conquer wet ones, the only ones who then become meaningful cultures that can project power in the future are those that then stay, conquer, assimilate, wipe out the generation that they’re conquered and then move on. 

It’s just the technology that is required for the industrial age just doesn’t allow it to go any other way. So, are there exceptions? Of course. Every rule has exceptions. Let me give you the two big ones. The first one is the Nile region. Most of the rain that fuels the Nile River falls in the highlands of Ethiopia. 

It then flows down through the tributaries of the Nile, through Sudan, before eventually entering Egypt and becoming the riverine culture that we all know from history. Well, the water falls in one place, passes through another place, and is ultimately used in the third place in the existing treaty systems that date back to the colonial era say that Sudan, and especially Ethiopia, aren’t supposed to tap the river at all. 

It’s all for Egypt. Well that’s breaking. And we’re seeing the Ethiopians and the Sudanese starting to take more and more water from the river for irrigation purposes in order to stabilize their populations and have economic growth. Hard to argue with them, but that does mean there’s no longer enough flow coming down into Egypt to sustain Egypt long run. 

So sooner or later, something is going to crack. Either we face an economic and ecological collapse in Egypt, or the Egyptians, get creative with military power and go up river with the intent of blowing up the dams, preferably in a way that does not trigger a fresh biblical flood in Egypt. No easy solution, but there’s certainly not enough water for everyone to come out on top. 

The second big issue is in Central Asia, where the premiers provide the headwaters for a couple of rivers called the AMA. When the sphere and those two rivers flow through Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before dead, ending in the Aral Sea. Well, during Soviet period, cotton plantations were planted throughout these areas, most notably in Kazakhstan and especially Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. 

And now most of that water never even makes it to the Aral Sea. So it’s become desiccated. And right now, what’s left of the arrow, the little bits that are left are only about 10% the volume of what existed there. Back when these diversion systems were built, back in the 1960s. So the entire area is gradually drying out. 

And after having a few decades of agricultural runoff get into those rivers, they’ve basically polluted what is now the open salt plains of the formal Aral Sea bed. And hotter, drier conditions mean more winds, which means those salts are being whipped up in storms and dropped several hundred miles away and are causing health issues for everyone in Southeast Asia. 

So sooner or later, one of the downstream states, if it has the capacity, is going to invade the upstream states to control what little of the water there still is. Of the five stand countries, the one with by far the most military capacity is Uzbekistan, and it is very close to the physical borders of Kyrgyzstan into Guestand, which control the headwaters. 

So expect a hot fight there, with the Uzbeks moving in with the intent of taking over. And unlike the situation that we have, say, with Egypt and Sudan, there isn’t a big giant chunk of trackless desert to serve as a barrier. These population centers are all on top of one another. So for water, that’s what you’re looking at pretty much a local issue. 

We still obviously have issues with distribution in the United States, but it’s very rarely cross-border issue. And where it is, it’s really just limited to those two locations.

Things I (Don’t) Worry About: Water Wars

When people start talking about wars over water, everyone pictures tooth and nail, Mad Max-esqe fighting…but our imaginations might be getting away from us here. Allow me to paint a more realistic picture for you.

There are some practical limitations to water wars. Water isn’t easy to move and redirecting rivers or directional flows is time consuming, expensive, and hard to do. To add another layer of complexity to the mix, most water sources are held by countries of power (you know, water tends to help with things like food production, industrialization, growing populations, and military development). So, when a dry country decides it needs water, there’s often not much it can do.

Sure, there are always exceptions to the rule. Egypt depends on the Nile River, Central Asia relies on those diminishing glaciers, and the Middle East will have some choice words over dam construction. However, the majority of countries that lack water resources, simply cannot conquer or secure water from other nations.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from snowy Colorado today. We’re going to do another one in the ongoing open series of things I do and do not worry about. This is one that I do not for the most part worry about, and that’s water wars. You’ve got to admit it’s a sexy idea. The idea that a country that is dry and desperate for water is going to march on another country to take it.

But a few things to keep in mind. You can’t take the whole hunter with you. Water is very bulky and very dense and very difficult to move and it clings to itself with friction. So pumping that is difficult. So you’re not talking about just conquering a river basin and somehow redirecting it. You’re talking about conquering the river basin and occupying it.

And for most countries, that’s a pretty heavy carry under any circumstances. So that’s number one. The bar is high. Number two, the countries that have water are the world’s major powers and the ones that do not have water are not major powers. Why? Well, they have water because if you have water, you can grow food. If you can grow food, you can industrialize yourself.

If you can industrialize yourself, you can build your own military without having to import a lot of equipment. And if you don’t have water, you don’t get to do any of those things. So there are very, very few places where you’ve got a dry country next to a wet country where there’s even a theoretical possibility of the dry country doing anything.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any exceptions. There’s just very, very few. Let me give you three. And really, that’s it. Number one, Egypt country that’s on the river. It needs the river to survive upstream. Ethiopia has been building some dams. I can see some scenarios where the Egyptians would spend special forces in to damage or destroy the dam.

The problem with that strategy now, though, so the dam has been built, the lake behind, it’s being filled. So if the dam were to go away, so would Egypt. So, you know, number two, Central Asia. The glaciers of Central Asia have been desiccated for about 50 years, ever since the Soviets built a series of water diversion systems in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to grow cotton in the desert because they didn’t want to be depended on American cotton or Egyptian cotton.

You fast forward that 50 years and the glaciers are pretty much gone and the flow and the rivers that I’m going through dry are falling precipitously and the whole area is desiccated. So I can see a scenario where a dry country, Uzbekistan, which has the third largest post-Soviet military marches in and just takes over Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan so that its own people have something to drink.

The third one involves the Middle East, and this is actually an issue of the West countries taking issue with the dry countries. There have been issues in the past in the Jordan Valley where various countries, most notably Lebanon, have built dams on rivers that would impede the flow to the Jordan. The Israelis have a problem with that. So they bombed the dams.

Similarly, you’ve got a wet country, Turkey and a dry country, Iraq and Syria, where the Turks have built lots and lots of lots of dams in southeast Turkey called the Grand Anatolian Project, in order to improve agricultural possibilities for the southeastern part of Turkey and provide an economic ballast to dissuade, say, Kurdish separatism. However, if you happen to be downstream in Baghdad, this is a bit of a problem in your places drying out.

But again, you’ve got a wet country, Turkey, doing things that are messing with the water table in a dry country, Iraq. And there’s not a lot that Iraq can do about it. So there are plenty of things that are worth fighting over in the world. Water is arguably one of them. But the countries that don’t have it don’t have the capacity to go get it.

So I don’t worry about that one.

The Water Crisis in the American Southwest

The American Southwest is primed to be one of the largest beneficiaries of the changes caused by deglobalization – mainly the reshoring of manufacturing. They owe this to years of in-migration bolstering their demographics. They also account for a significant portion of the nation’s foodstuffs. However, everything in the American Southwest depends upon one thing…WATER.

To put it lightly, the water situation in the Southwest is fickle; rivers can go from rushing to bone dry in a matter of a year. Up to this point, the Colorado River Compact has been the saving grace for the Southwest: a treaty outlining how much water from the Colorado River will be allocated to each state in the region.

The issue with the compact is that it operates on a priority system. So states that were urbanized when the treaty was signed have priority over states that developed later on. Fast forward to today, and we have an archaic system that benefits places like California over places like Arizona.

So what happens if the states upstream decide to walk away from the compact and start using the water as they see fit? It would be an ugly few years of political and legal chaos, but if the Southwest wants to be the beneficiary it’s poised to be…they better figure it out quickly.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Vegas. And today we are going to talk about water and drought and all the things that come from that. Specifically here in the American southwest, we have a water problem. Now, for those of you who know your paleontological history. That’s a mouthful. You will know that the Southwest has a history of mass extinction and civilizational breakdown events that have on time descended into cannibalism. The issue is the terrain. It’s an arid area with a lot of elevation, and that means that most of its water comes from orographic precipitation, which is a fancy term that says that when you get moisture moving across a landscape, if it hits an elevation center or a mountain, it will rise. And if the temperature at the higher elevations is cold enough, the water will condense into vapor form clouds and then rain. And most of the rainfall that hits the American southwest has that sort of origin. The problem with orographic precipitation, though, is it’s fickle. And oftentimes you will not get enough cold temperatures at elevation or not sufficiently humid air currents in order to generate the moisture in the first place. So rivers literally come and go and that is caused the collapse of civilisational systems as you get mega droughts from time to time to time. We are in one of those periods now. So that’s probably one.

Problem Two, when the American Southwest realized that they had limited amounts of water. The states back in the 1920s, 1922, I think, set up a legal structure called the Colorado River Compact, in which they agreed to share the water. The problem was that the year that they used to evaluate how much water they had to share was one of the wettest years on record. So we’ve known for decades that in time the volumes that were written out in the treaty just weren’t going to be there. In addition, this is all heavily litigated and legalized, all written down in law. And at the federal level, it’s an issue of senior water rights. So the urban centers that existed at the time of the treaty in 1922 have priority. And anyone who has built infrastructure since then to tap into the waterway network is at a lower priority. So if you were an urban center in 1922, you have senior water rights and everyone else who has added is lower and lower and lower and lower. And so if you were at the very bottom in, say, the seventies when your system was built, you’re at the very, very bottom. The first state mentioned in the compact is the one that had the highest population then and now, and that’s California. But Los Angeles has 15 million people. The entire Southwest only had that many people in 1922. So you can see as part of the problem, the last state to build out its infrastructure to tap the waterway network was Arizona. It only finished the the Central Arizona project in the late sixties and into the seventies. So they’re at the very bottom. And when there was a dispute over water a few years ago, Arizona and California ended up in court. And the Supreme Court ruled very, very clearly that California has severe water rights and Arizona is at the bottom of the stack of junior water rights, which means that Arizona water demand can go to zero before California has to cut at all. And with that ruling in California’s back pocket, California has simply refused to engage in negotiations with the other states of the Colorado River basin. So we even had a deal last year where all of the other states got together and agreed to slash their demand. If, in exchange, California were to make a moderate decline. And California refused. The California position officially is you all go to zero and die and we will just keep having our golf courses.

So the debate now among the other states, especially the upstream states, is about just walking away from the compact completely. Now, this would lead to California suing them in a court case that they would probably lose, but that would take years because it would get tied up in court. And in the meantime, California would go completely dry. And Southern California gets roughly a third of their water from the Colorado River. So massive economic dislocation. Now, aside from the whole human tragedy of this, why does this matter? Well, let me give you three reasons. Number one, the world is deglobalizing and the United States is discovering if it still wants stuff, it needs to build out its own industrial plant. So there is a competition among the states right now about where that stuff will go. Texas is probably going to be the single biggest winner of the American South. Looks really good. But there’s parts of the Southwest that are very, very high value added. And getting semiconductor fabrication facilities in places like Phoenix are a great idea. But it requires water. In addition, we need to reshore especially the electronic supply chain system. And the Southwest is probably the best part of the country for that for labor reasons. In order to do manufacturing of electronics, you need a differentiated workforce with a lot of different price points. That means the person who does the lens for the camera is not the person who does the memory board, is not the person who does the plastic molding, is not the person who does assembly. These are all different skill sets. They all have different price points for the labor. And so you need multiple skill sets, multiple price points, multiple labor forces in relatively close proximity. This is one of the reasons that East Asia has done so well in this space for decades, because you have your technocracy in Korea and Japan and Taiwan, you have your mass assembly in places like Vietnam and China, and then you have your mid-range in places like Malaysia and Thailand. The only place in North America we have that sort of variation is in the US-Mexico border. And for the Southwest that’s a really good selling point if you can keep the water flowing. And another big reason is agriculture. Now, one of the big problems, one of the reasons why the Southwest is in this problem is that they are growing a lot of food in the desert. And, you know, if you look at that on its surface, you’ve got to wonder if that was a very good idea in the first place. And the answer is no, it was not a very good idea in the first place, but it is now part of our food security system. And so places like Yuma, Arizona, which are about as far south in the country as you can get, get all of their water from these water courses that are governed by the compact and of Colorado just walks away. Then in the winter, we’re talking about losing a quarter to a third of most of her fresh vegetables because it’s got the perfect climate for it if you got the water. Now, unlike, say, interior Washington, where you’ve got the Columbia River, which is the continent’s biggest water flow by volume, and you take water from that for, say, the Yakima and the Walla Walla, the Benson systems. You know, it’s not a big deal, but you can’t do that at scale over time in a watershed like we have in the Southwest. And so we’re talking about losing a significant amount of food production that is important, not just locally and regionally, but across the national system.

Now, California don’t get too smug. The Central Valley is facing this exact same problem, and you can’t blame that one on any one upstate. That is your homegrown ecological and agricultural crisis. That’s a problem for another day. And then third, taxes. One of the things that we’ve seen in the last few years is Americans are moving in a way that they haven’t in quite some time. The baby boomers want to move someplace where it’s warmer. The millennials want to move to someplace that has more elbow room where it’s cheaper to expand the cities and therefore they can afford yards. And not a lot of people want to be dependent on mass transport because they’re afraid of diseases. Well, the American Southwest scratches all of those itches. And it has been the fastest growing part of the country from in-migration in the country now for roughly 50 years. And all else being equal, there’s not a lot of reason to expect that to change unless there’s a persistent water crisis.

Now, the good news is there are a lot of things that America can do in order to get by a lot better. You remove a lot of the water intensive agriculture from the region. You make things like golf courses go away. You don’t have fountains in Phoenix, for example, and you just manage your water resources with the best technologies of the 13th century, we can probably have a population increase of 50% without a problem.

But above all, the Colorado Compact has to be renegotiated for a more realistic environment. And since California will not choose to do that willingly, they are going to have to be forced, which means either we do have a crisis first triggered by the upstream states or Congress steps in and abrogates the pact and imposes a replacement. This is going to be an ugly, ugly political issue for the next few years. That is absolutely unavoidable, but is absolutely critical if the United States in general, this region in specific, is going to take advantage of the demographic and geopolitical shifts that are wracking our world right now. This region should be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the changes going on, but they have to be able to get the water situation right.

Alright. That’s it for me. See you guys next time.

Where in the World: Lower Burro, and Water Wars

There are perennial discussions about water being the only resource that truly matters, and many questions that come my way about water wars of the future. 

There’s something to this, after all. We need drinking water to live, we need water to irrigate our crops and much of the world needs several dozen gallons of water a day to live a modern industrial life. Ergo, water is one of the most geopolitical significant commodities in the world.

Yes and no. 

Most of the world’s major cultures developed along, and subsequently retained control over, major internal waterways. Most major national boundaries for successful countries today fully encompass rivers and lakes sufficient to provide for fresh water. 

Which is not to say that water access or disputes do not exist in specific localities. But these tend to be more localized security and political, rather than globally significant geopolitical concerns. 

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