One of the most significant long-term challenges facing Europe and the world in the twenty-first century is the need for adequate energy resources. Maintaining standards of living in industrialized countries and modernizing the developing world requires extremely high levels of energy use, and current supplies are heavily dependent on fossil fuels: oil, coal, and natural gas. Scientists warned that such high levels of usage were unsustainable over the long run. Fossil fuel supplies will eventually run out, especially as the countries of the developing world — including giants such as India and China — increase their own rates of consumption.9

Struggles to control and profit from these shrinking resources often resulted in tense geopolitical conflicts, and military power is increasingly concentrated in oil-producing areas such as the Middle East, which holds about 65 percent of the world’s oil reserves. One scholar labeled conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia “resource wars” because they are fought, in large part, to preserve the West’s access to the region’s energy supplies.10

The global struggle for ample energy has placed Russia, which in 2011 became the world’s number-one oil producer (surpassing Saudi Arabia) and the number-two natural gas producer, in a powerful but strained position. The Russian invasions of Chechnya and Georgia were attempts to maintain political influence in these territories but also to preserve control of the region’s rich energy resources.

Beyond military action, Russian leaders readily use their control over energy to assert political influence. The Russian corporation Gazprom sells Europe 28 percent of its natural gas, and the EU treads softly with Russia to maintain this supply. Russia has engaged in over fifty politically motivated disruptions of natural gas supply in the former Soviet republics, including one in January 2009 when Russia shut off supplies to Ukraine for three weeks, resulting in closed factories and no heat for hundreds of thousands of people.