coe011_jones.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:26] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, where so, so happy to have you back and we've got another fantastic conversation for you to listen in on and be a part of. And today we're going to be talking to Dr. Toby Jones, who is a historian and he is at Rutgers University. Super interesting guy who has done work in the Middle East and on Saudi Arabia in particular. And we're going to get to talk to him about oil and the co-equal relationship between oil and military, might the violence of oil as one of the ways he puts it. Toby Jones is the author of a book that is definitely worth picking up. It's called Desert Kingdom How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. That's in 2010 from Harvard. And then he also more recently has published a book called Running Dry Essays on Energy, Water and Environmental Crisis that came out in 2015 from Rutgers University Press.

Speaker2: [00:01:30] And one question we didn't ask him, and I think he was happy that we didn't ask him. But it's the one that would be obvious to people who are based in Houston is what is Saudi Arabia thinking now this in an oil town like Houston, you would be surprised by how much just day to day chit chat goes on about how Saudi Arabia, or at least the government of Saudi Arabia, is thinking about their oil policy, right? Literally. I was having a conversation at, you know, a kid's birthday party the other day in which the whole conversation was about how long Saudi Arabia was going to keep pumping oil at a loss to itself in order to prevent the United States from becoming a swing producer. I mean, these are the kinds of in-depth technical conversations you can have in a town that's completely populated by oil

Speaker1: [00:02:20] Oil experts like it's like if if the banter in Los Angeles is about the House of Versace here in Houston, it's all about the House of Saud.

Speaker2: [00:02:31] Yeah, and others and other oil related stuff. And do people really care about Versace that much? And I would have said it. It's like more. Just Hollywood talk.

Speaker1: [00:02:41] Oh well, I had to make a parallel between the House of Something and the House of Something Else, and fashion houses have houses.

Speaker2: [00:02:47] Got it. Got it. See, that's the sort of detail that might have escaped me.

Speaker1: [00:02:51] Oh, well, maybe that's because you have different chromosomes than ideal.

Speaker2: [00:02:55] That is possible.

Speaker1: [00:02:56] But anyway, it is really true that actually probably about 70 percent of the Houstonian population is quite tuned in to what's what the Saudi government is thinking about. The other amazing thing about Houston is that you talk to people who have traveled all over the world very cosmopolitan and a lot of ways, but they're not necessarily going to Jamaica or London or kind of the expected destinations. They're going to places like Bahrain and Equatorial Guinea or the far flung reaches of Russia

Speaker2: [00:03:27] Or in an oil platform off the coast of Angola.

Speaker1: [00:03:31] Exactly that sort of thing. Right? Right, right, right. And so it's fascinating. And, you know, in the energy discourse and in material that you read on renewable energy and other forms of energy, you often see this correlation about, you know, someplace being the Saudi Arabia of X. Yeah, right? And yeah, Saudi Arabia is a trope about primarily about energy, right? And it's always referred to. So, you know, you can hear people saying things like, what's Texas? Is the Saudi Arabia of wind? Or, you know, apropos of a recent podcast, you know, the the shores off of Orkney are the Saudi Arabia of marine energy, right? Or the Nevada desert is the Saudi Arabia of solar. I mean, these are the kinds of things you see all the time. But then we think about Houston, and I was thinking that Houston's new byline, you know, our tag for our city, our new motto should be Houston Colon, the Saudi Arabia of petroleum professionals. Yeah, I like that because the entire city is is densely populated with folks who work in the industry. You can't go anywhere really or do anything. It's like one degree of separation as you're, you know, encountering these people,

Speaker2: [00:04:47] Which is both the cool thing about living in Houston from the point of view of humanists and social scientists who work in energy is like, you're constantly surrounded by people in the industry. And it gives you, I think, access to conversations and expertise that you wouldn't have basically anywhere else in, at least in this country. I don't think in this density, I mean, we've learned, I think you and I will speak for you here briefly. I've learned so much about oil, about gas, about energy markets. I mean, things that just you can blissfully remain naive about if you don't live in the Houston area.

Speaker1: [00:05:22] Exactly. Well, yeah, right. And gas to the. It's a great point, because that's the other thing you can hear. That's the other thing that where there's a lot of professional density is the frackers, right? Yeah. So you know, this neighbor who's like a stoner engineer who who creates these horizontal drill bits? Right? I mean, I guess he's kind of a genius in terms of coming up with, you know, the proper angles and talk and whatever else is required of horizontal drill bits. Yeah. But, you know, but a tripper, did you know if you have any wonder about, you know, how we got to fracking? Part of it had to do with the misuse of certain

Speaker2: [00:06:01] Products, probably. I guess so. I mean, that's not the standard story we hear about fracking, but it is a nugget that that deserves to be levered out of the inky depths into into the the sunshine of Houston. Anyway, back to Toby Jones. I think it was great to talk to him because of his unique perspective on bringing together questions of environment and resources with questions of energy in the Middle East. And so in his first book, looking at the relationship between oil and water and how, you know, the politics of water were also what made the modern, modern Saudi Kingdom as much as the politics of oil. And then this recent or I guess, what will be a forthcoming book that he gave a presentation on here at Rice about how the infrastructure of shipping in the Gulf actually and the militarization of that, those shipping lanes really led us into this endless set of conflicts.

Speaker1: [00:07:02] Right. And he doesn't tell the kind of typical historical political economic saga about militarization in the Gulf. Or about the production of oil, necessarily because he's bringing, I think, very smartly so a science and technology studies lens to it. And so one of the interesting arguments that he makes is that essentially the United States has literally filled the Persian Gulf with these materials, right? Like we, you know, we've dumped essentially, you know, navy vessels and and these gigantic freighters, which he points out, actually provide protection for these little navy vessels because they're completely mind proof. That was hilarious. Yeah. And so that kind of the questions like these questions around infrastructure and critical infrastructures and sovereignty and sovereignty that need to be preserved all come up in really interesting ways. And his his work, I think it's not just a it's not a predictable tale of of geo imperialism. And we know that story. That's a true story, too. But this is a different take on.

Speaker2: [00:08:11] It's a different take on it. So without further ado. Toby Jones. Go, Toby.

Speaker1: [00:08:36] Welcome, Toby Jones, we're so glad to have you here at Rice University after a wonderful talk last night and really happy to have you here in the podcast room ready to have a great conversation with us.

Speaker2: [00:08:49] All right. Yes. Let me let me add my welcome, and thanks to welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast Toby. So I was going to I was going to go way back to your first book, Desert Kingdom, which was recommended to us by a dear former colleague, Amy Jaffe, who's now at UC Davis. And you open the book with this amazing moment. 1976 Saudi Arabia, flush with oil money, begins to explore the possibility of importing a 100 million ton block of Antarctic ice to Saudi Arabia to help meet their freshwater demands. And the first thing is, that's such an amazing anecdote. I was immediately on board with this book. I was like, Yes, this is a book I need to read now. But I also wanted to ask you, maybe you could use that sort of amazing, vivid example as a way to talk a little bit about the project of that book and why you think that telling the history of Saudi Arabia specifically and the Middle East more generally through water as well as oil, which is usually how we hear about it, is so important.

Speaker3: [00:09:53] Thank you both for having me in the podcast room. It's great to be talking about cultures of energy, but about about both old and new work. Desert Kingdom is the product of a lot of happy accidents, I think, and a lot of struggles in the archive, as well as a graduate student thinking about how do we how do we tell stories about oil and how do we tell stories about oil that depart from the more conventional kinds of accounts that we're told matter, right? That oil often and energy more broadly in many ways, as it's come to be understood, at least as a as a as an object of social scientific inquiry, it has to do with prices and value of commodities being exchanged. And then what money does after it's turned into something that accumulates in a Treasury somewhere. When I went to Saudi Arabia, my hope was to write a social history of oil and my initial instinct was to follow pipelines around. And it turned out that was not practical for lots of reasons. But what I became curious about then was, you know, if? If there is something to be said about oil as an engine of revenue and those revenues can help shape economic outcomes so oil states become oil dependent. Are there other things that can be said about oil and there are there are relationships between oil and other kinds of environmental resources as well environmental relations that matter. And Saudi Arabia is a kind of classic case in the social scientific literature of a place that has a lot of one thing and very little of a lot of other things.

Speaker3: [00:11:26] And what are the politics of this relationship or one of the questions that occurred to me as I was in the field, as I was in Saudi Arabia, looking through archives and thinking about the kinds of things I wanted to write about. So the story about oil and the special sort of character of Saudi Arabia as being the world's largest producer as having a special relationship with the United States because of its sort of mastery over this one particularly important industrial commodity in the 20th century has dominated the way we've talked about it alongside religion, right? That Saudi Arabia is exceptional because of oil or because of Islam. So I was fine, right? I mean, I thought that this was a not an unusual way to approach it, but maybe it didn't tell us all we needed to know about politics, about violence, about the state, about social relations and all kinds of other things. So when I was in the archive in Riyadh, I literally stumbled across a series of engineering mimeographed engineering schemes sort of designed on the page, as you might imagine, complete with pencil drawings and measurements and all kinds of geologic and agricultural and scientific and engineering commentary on the possibilities of creating irrigation and drainage networks and oases across the kingdom.

Speaker3: [00:12:38] Saudi Arabia is a place with no natural lakes or rivers. It's got very little in the way of water, except for rainfall in the southwestern part of the state. And so the book then I was I was curious about what what both anthropologists and some historians and political theorists have begun to think about techno politics. What are the political stakes of thinking about water that get us away from the kind of basic commentary that, yes, we all need water to survive? Is there is there more to the story? So the book project Desert Kingdom was an attempt to reconcile and, you know, a history of water and its relationship to the ways that we typically think of power flowing from oil. And, you know, I maybe make I don't think it's a a hyperbolic argument. I try to be careful that that oil does things in Saudi Arabia that are critical. But water is in many ways more fundamental to the making of the state. And so to to back up just a little bit, we can't assume in this way, as I argue against maybe Jim Scott's conception of how state see and how they seek to create legibility and perhaps more in a way that's consistent with the work of Timothy Mitchell and some others who argue that it was through the attempt to master water historically and not oil, that the Saudi Arabian state was made. That we don't have an authoritarian state that sort of rules above a prostrate civil society and seeks to control environmental resources as a political instrument.

Speaker3: [00:14:07] Rather, it's the struggle to control water and to figure out how water is meaningful, both to state to political authority and to society that results in the creation of an autocratic regime in the Arabian Peninsula. And it turns out that an American oil company was as central to this process as a group of Saudi geologists and engineers, and in so many ways, what you get is a global story in which oil and water and environmental politics and expertise and state authority all become. They all converge in the making of this place. And in the end, if that's the case, then Saudi Arabia is not a not an especially special place. It's like lots of other modern states that struggle with these same sets of questions. So the book ends up also, I think, attempting to demystify the kind of magical qualities of Saudi Arabia as many, many people who live there, especially American migrant workers. I won't call them expats, but you know, some Americans who work in, they call it the magical kingdom. Well, there's very little that's magical about it. It's it's a kind of familiar story of a state and political elites who struggle not only to control the environment for all kinds of reasons, but as a consequence of that struggle, end up finding the sources of their own political authority being made.

Speaker2: [00:15:20] So that's great. And I think this idea, you know, to take a page from Timothy Mitchell of talking about, you know, hydraulic democracy, maybe alongside guardian democracy. Although again, as you pointed out, maybe democracy is not the best word to describe. Saudi Arabia is really important. I mean, we see that here in the United States with the Flint water crisis. I mean, so I'm just curious whether you feel that the work you've done in Saudi Arabia is something that speaks more broadly outside the region as well to about the especially the importance of when we're. Doing studies of energy, studying other kinds of environmental infrastructures at the same time, like you're saying,

Speaker3: [00:16:03] There are there are. Thanks for the question. I I spent a couple of summers ago, so I'm an interloper in many ways. I'm not trained as an American historian. I'm trained as a Middle East historian in conventional area studies. Although I have a background in science and technology studies the history of science and environmental history. These are their interesting fields, but they don't make one credible beyond the area in which one makes sense of them, right? But once I published Desert Kingdom and was tenured and the risks of becoming a bit more adventurous were bracketed off my family and I spent a lot of time in the American West. A couple of years ago, we spent a summer in Colorado. I had been asked by Rutgers University Press to think about writing a new book in a series featuring Rutgers faculty. And I said I'd write a book on water, you know, 60000 50000 words that reflects on on how we think about the politics of water. And I wanted it to be a global story. And what I ended up doing was writing a book on the relationship between public health, water and fracking in places like Colorado, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And they make a lot of arguments in that text, and there's really three essays there that's that I think addressed themes that are relevant, I argue.

Speaker3: [00:17:16] Colorado is basically like Saudi Arabia in a lot of ways as an oil state that redistributes wealth, but that also manipulates infrastructure for all kinds of reasons. But in much the way in similar ways that expertise and the authority and power that comes with experts helps shape political outcomes in places like Saudi Arabia. The same logic, sir at work in Colorado and Flint, Michigan and elsewhere, political authority historically has aligned with big energy in ways that break it off. What we can know about whether, for example, produced water used in fracking well, is dangerous or not. Who controls claims and narratives about what constitutes a danger is one thing that's interesting to think through. And you know, there's a convergence of power and capital that makes it very difficult for little people to challenge the status quo. And it doesn't help in Colorado that the governor is a former oil geologist as well. So these are things that I've explored outside of of the Middle East. But there are also some peculiar things in the United States. One of the things that was most haunting in the story and the work that I did on the Colorado front range is that a few years ago, there was some Houston area listeners will be familiar with what massive rains and flooding can do.

Speaker3: [00:18:26] You know, every flood is a toxic event. But on the front range in Colorado, where there are 60000 fracking wells that when floods out of the Rocky Mountains come down in massive quantities, they often wash away produced water. They wash. They wash away oil wells. And there's very little reckoning for all of this. And these are things that I wanted to think through in the book Running Dry. And I think in some ways there are questions about toxicity and dangerous water and the relationship of energy to making both these things threats, but also knowable and unknowable that can be pursued outside the U.S. as well. Right. So there's a kind of there's a there are global circuits and networks and with boats and with in which both knowledge and the commodity in the infrastructure in which the commodity is extracted all move. And I think that is a framework. Energy becomes a framework. Sure, we can flatten differences and explore differences at the same time between places like the American West and the Persian Gulf.

Speaker1: [00:19:23] Just thinking of this image of the Rocky Mountains and flooding out, you know, the frack water and how petroleum products get literally mixed into the water, that that true conflation between oil and water here that you saw early on in Saudi Arabia, it'd be really interesting to see to how North Dakota figures as a Saudi state or Texas as well, because you can imagine those having some, some real similarities as well. I wanted to go back to another kind of co-equal or synonymous relationship that you were speaking about in your discussion and your talk last night. And that is how energy and war energy, particularly in the form of oil and war, particularly in the form of war in the Middle East region, are not, in fact, dichotomous categories or processes driven by politics and other sort of economic questions. But in fact, they're entangled with each other and almost become co-equal with each other beginning around the mid-1980s. And ever since then, they've become these kind of synonymous practices. And so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how you see that dual operation between energy and war there mutuality or they're their kind of symbiotic relationship with one another.

Speaker3: [00:20:46] There is a. There's little skepticism or cynicism about energy as an object, what the word, what the word is assumed to mean and compared to how it came into being. When is the moment when energy is a kind of object that, you know, kind of carries with it all of these constituent components? The current work that I'm doing asks a very basic question and what's the relationship between energy and war? You know, as a Middle East historian, it's a pressing problem. It's a it's an urgent political concern. This is an angry work for me. I mean, I sort of deeply frustrated with the war in Iraq, as well as the ways that oil featured as both an explanation for it and that it was ignored as a reason for. And so there are political discourses in the U.S. on the left and the right, which make claims about what oil does and doesn't do. I won't go into detail on those. I'm sure listeners have an idea. You know, oil, oil for war, no blood for oil or the war in Iraq was all about democracy and terrorism. These don't provide a full accounting of the range of what either energy is, how energy mattered in Iraq, or how energy matters to the projection of American power in the Middle East historically. So the book project asks that very basic question.

Speaker3: [00:21:59] And what I argue is that the 1980s is a kind of breaking point or a moment of a culmination of a slightly longer history in which energy becomes a source of anxiety in the late Nixon administration, the late 60s, which corresponds with what a many Americans think of as the moment of peak oil in the U.S. When we run up against the limits of our production, we become a net importer of oil, which happens to proceed a little bit the energy crisis of the early 1970s when OPEC imposes an embargo. Now we can we can scrutinize all of those and say, Well, you know, the embargo didn't really do. There was no crisis that was manufactured. The problems were Nixon's management of rationing systems. But what emerged out of that moment was an anxiety about energy and its availability, and whether or not producers outside of the U.S. would ultimately have a kind of political power, whether they would have America over a virtual barrel, right, whether the U.S. was now dependent on foreign producers of oil and whether true or not. And it's not true. You know, it's not. It's not the case, and it's not the way we should think about it. It nevertheless fed illogic and it fed the emergence of something called energy security, which begins framing oil as a problem that needs to be understood through its availability.

Speaker3: [00:23:16] Where is it available in abundance and where is it scarce and following 68 in the U.S., we believe American oil is scarce and Persian Gulf oil is abundant. So paradoxically, because Americans also become deeply racist about the Arab world and precisely this period and Iran as well. And there are lots of talks. Nixon Energy, you know, kind of introduces the idea of energy independence. The U.S., like putting a man on the Moon could become energy independent by the end of the 1970s. The U.S. nevertheless doubles down on its strategic and military alliances with the oil producers in the Persian Gulf. The rhetoric that emerges out of this is one that claims the U.S. has to preserve access to Middle Eastern oil. So there's a lot going on here, and a lot of it has to do with a kind of market oriented way of thinking about scarcity and supply and fundamentals and all of that stuff. What it leads to in terms of both policy talk and even critical reflection is a way of thinking about oil as an object that exists in the world independently on its own. That has to be protected. And so the dichotomy that's emerged is in it. She used to describe the U.S. Saudi relationship, as well as a whole lot of other things, is that there is a security for oil framework in which oil's flow, its access point, as well as the distribution from there, is protected through a global security paradigm that the Americans enforce.

Speaker3: [00:24:40] And I don't find that to be a particularly useful way of thinking about the relationship between war and oil. Because as I argue in the book and want to make the case in other ways as well, is that what actually happens is that the United States, even though it begins talking in this kind of economic way, market based way of thinking really creates a set of material practices over the course of the 1980s under the pretext that it's getting involved in the Iran-Iraq war to defend Arab oil production. Iran and Iraq had begun fighting one another on the Persian on the waters of the Persian Gulf as early as 1983, targeting one another's infrastructure and oil shipping. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also came under pressure direct attack by Iran a handful of times, and the U.S. use this as a as an opportunity to project its military power into the Gulf. So many ways, this is a standard narrative. Oil is imperiled, and the context of war in the United States rushes in to do exactly what it said it would do, and that is secure the networks of supply and distribution. But what ends up getting made is a new material relationship in which, according to various kinds of practices on the waters of the Gulf and in terms of legal conventions about how the U.S.

Speaker3: [00:25:53] military would behave, that the oil objects, the energy networks get systematically built into the military networks such that as supertankers move alongside U.S. naval vessels. The distinction between them becomes blurred. One protects the other in practice. And yet, theoretically, we think it's the navy protecting the supertankers. But in reality, the supertankers can withstand damage better than the Navy can. And so a lot of these are practices and relationships are inverted, which raises all kinds of questions about the value and the relationship of one commodity oil compared to another commodity, the navy ship. How they move about questions about infrastructure The Navy specifically describes oil and energy security as a logistical problem in the late 70s and 1980s, and this, to me, is fascinating. It's not a market problem, according to them. This, you know, and in this, this carries on the Navy. After the Iran-Iraq war is over, the U.S. is engaged fully as a belligerent by 1987 shooting at Iran, protecting Iraq, building up this militarized energy network. The Navy then develops a new strategic policy, which basically argues for the permanent floating of a non territorial military presence in the Persian Gulf that has been our default naval policy in the region ever since there was the U.S.

Speaker3: [00:27:10] Navy's Fifth Fleet operated in World War Two. It was disbanded after World War Two. It was recommissioned in 1995, and now the U.S. has a permanent permanent military fleet, naval fleet, as well as landed bases. So this blurring of energy and oil, in my view as a kind of is an effort to make a kind of provocative argument that the dichotomy of security for oil is a misleading way of thinking about what actually happens in practice. And that is that when the Navy talks about energy security, it's not only talking about protecting the flow of oil, it's talking about protecting the navy. And it doesn't see a distinction between those two things. So then what is the logic for keeping the navy in the Gulf? Is it tautological that the Navy's in the Gulf because the navy's important and it's imperiled, and so the Navy has to be protected? What does oil have to do with it? Well, oil also gets built into the system, so these these kinds of material relationships and practices are rarely considered or scrutinized. The empirical evidence is not new. I'm not breaking new ground in the archive. I'm simply reading the objects and sort of existing narratives in ways that I think the architects of the system would understand, but in ways that policymakers have never suggested is how we should think about them.

Speaker1: [00:28:23] And part of the way that you're able to do that, that particular analytic objectification is taking into account materials and drawing upon a background that that draws from science and technology studies and takes into account those kinds of material practices. And I think that's really key. I imagine for how you've, you know, developed the archival work and then been able to bring a new analytic to it. I wanted to also kind of signal how, you know, the water that was so intrinsic to the development of Saudi Arabia in this new project becomes more embodied in the seawater of the Persian Gulf and the the seawater itself. This body of water becomes an important site for your analytic work and for your thinking about these processes. So. Waters become part of this political environment, the seascape is mobile and it's in transit, and it allows for this waterborne infrastructure like navy ships and tankers that are kind of mutually protecting each other. And it also provides a way of challenging sovereign borders, borders in the terrestrial sense. And so you have a really interesting case here with thinking between these spaces of land and water. And one of your arguments is that sovereignty gets transformed in this process so that it becomes not. It's not that state boundaries are erased altogether, but that mobile systems of these military ships, these mobile infrastructures matter. They make a big difference and it becomes a question of who can move and who is allowed to move in these certain spaces. So with that opening, I wanted to think about another scholar again who's very interested in science and technology studies.

Speaker1: [00:30:06] Stephane Halmarick, who's at MIT and he's written a paper called Nature Culture Seawater, where he talks about how seawater has this kind of ambiguous place in some of the social science imaginary and particularly between those spaces of nature and culture. So culture is this is the thing that humans do on land and terrestrial domains. And then seawater has been kind of a metaphor for people like anthropologists for a very long time, you know, rather than an analytic. And now in this in our contemporary times, we can sort of see it in more precise and scientific terms. And he actually makes this argument that processes of globalization can actually be called processes of ocean as ocean ization. It looks better on the page than it does in one's mouth, but this is like, you know, currents and flows and circulations. So he talks about seawater is a theory machine and a theory machine. He's pulling from the historian of science Peter Gleason, who describes a series theory machine as an object in the world that stimulates a theoretical formulation. And it seems to me that, you know, the waters of the Gulf are, in fact for you, a theory machine in the same way that, you know, electro coordinated clocks in European railway histories. You know where an important theory machine for thinking about time, about Einstein's thinking about simultaneity, about animal husbandry as a kind of theory machine for Darwin? So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how and if you know the waters of the Gulf or ocean waters in general have been kind of a theory machine for you?

Speaker3: [00:31:48] Thank you. It's such a rich there's a million range. So she got a Bose. The historian of the Indian Ocean talks about 100 horizons in the Indian Ocean, and there are unlimited ways to think through what is a rich invitation. I do think, I mean, I haven't thought of myself as in the terms that the sea is a theory machine. But I think what you've described is, and you know, this is a productive, a productive way to think about what I'm what I'm struggling to to make sense of. And this does matter. I mean, the Gulf does matter and it matters in its relationship. Not only I mean, so there's a so there's a seascape element and I'm going to come back to that. And there are also, you know, I think Stefan would probably argue there's also a technological component to win the sea becomes a theory machine in the case of oil, in the case of energy, interdiction of energy has a long history in which people have anxieties about whether oil can move or whether it can't move. Who who controls mobility? The Rockefellers in Pennsylvania were concerned about oil getting from western Pennsylvania to refining sites, and this became an issue of contentious politics. That also explains why they become vertically integrated and want to, you know, the rise of the supertanker and the late 1950s marks a moment of technological departure in which pipelines are no, they're not rendered irrelevant, but seaborne oil transport becomes increasingly important. By the late 1960s, it's the super supertanker that is carrying more oil, getting around Suez and more and quicker amounts of time to Europe and Asian markets, especially from the Middle East.

Speaker3: [00:33:24] So part of the story here about the sea is as a theory machine has to be connected to the supertanker as a theory machine as well. I mean, and in its own way, being an object that moves not in territorial space, but in this kind of trans territorial space. It has connections to the littoral coast and connections to anchored infrastructure and refineries. But its most important movements are on the very waters that are often kind of obscured or mystified. Have a comrade, Laleh Khalili, who is a political scientist at SOE's, who's working on a global study of capitalism and transportation and transport networks and logistics. And these sort of shipping containers and how they move and how they're connected and what they can tell us about labor. She and I think about this together. Quite a bit. My my my thinking about the sea as a theory machine is to be is to offer a kind of a new way of thinking about entanglements that oil in the ground, the infrastructure on the ground through which oil is often extracted and refined and then sent off to wherever it goes cannot be understood, either in market terms or in political terms without precisely how it moves, not in pipelines, but in supertankers. This is a kind of moment we have to reckon with that. The supertanker creates political breakthroughs by rendering pipelines that cut from Iraq across Syria and Lebanon, which are vulnerable politically if it eliminates those problems.

Speaker3: [00:34:50] Does it create new kinds of issues that need to be thought about? So the ocean in the late 20th century cannot be ancillary to a study of energy or to a history of global capitalism, and how we tell stories about mobility itself becomes increasingly central to planners, to distributors, to policymakers, to the architects of war and how they think about the dilemmas that they face. But there's another reason that the Gulf in particular and oil in particular, I think, are important in this sort of framework of thinking about the sea as opening up new possibilities for theory and interrogating what we have long assumed to be true. And here the argument about waterborne infrastructure being mobile and I talk and the reasons I talk about sovereignty in the case of American military vessels. Well, conventional notions of sovereignty in the 18th and 19th century or that it's rooted along shorelines. And then at a certain point, they extend into the ocean a certain distance. 1982, with the law of the Sea Navigation, then become subject to rules governing sovereignty as well. But there's old British naval principles about British vessels having sovereign rights and being extensions of the British Empire and the British Crown, right? The Malacca Straits. The British create a way of thinking about the Indian Ocean as being literal and piracy and threats of interdiction being outside of these notions and sort of outside of sovereignty. These are things that I end up working with in the Persian Gulf because the United States, when it enters into the Iran-Iraq war in 1987, argues that its own ships carry exactly the same sets of rights that their sovereign extensions of the United States.

Speaker3: [00:36:30] So when the sea comes to be understood as a kind of empty space between combating powers, what the U.S. does is it seeks to make it a concrete space by projecting its own sovereign objects into it. So the sea has to be accounted for as part of not only a political drama, but is a new theoretical. You know, sort of a thing we have to struggle with theoretically and conceptually, because the architects of all of this are thinking of it in terms that are territorial notions of sovereignty don't account for. So the sea is exceptional and what it does and what it makes possible. I'll say this on the question of theory as well. There's something practical here, and there's something beautiful about the sea that's evocative about the very notion that it, because of its environmental and physical qualities, is always in motion. There are several things that become possible. One is it requires us, oftentimes unlike on land, to think in multiple dimensions. You have to think vertically and you have to think under the water, right? If Iran is mining the Gulf, the way the U.S. Navy thinks about the Gulf is not just the seascape, but also all kinds of entanglements below it, some of them technological, others about depth, width. The width of Hormuz, we're often told, is very narrow, which makes it a choke point. Well, it turns out that the Gulf is shallow for the most part.

Speaker3: [00:37:45] So networks of transit passages, passageways are narrow and what happens above and below or critical for naval architects. So filling then the region with sovereign objects makes the sea productive for certain political reasons and political outcomes if you want to limit Iranian mobility. What better way than to fill it with American naval vessels and tell them that you can't come within five nautical miles all the way around it? And you by default, constrain the ability of Iran to challenge your supremacy on the waters? But the other thing and this will be the last thing I say about the sea is is a theory machine. Is that the conventional return to the kind of energy security as kind of being used to describe a certain economic or market logic and the extension of oil as understood stood as a scarce resource, and the pursuit to maintain access in the Persian Gulf is often framed in the language of ensuring the free flow of navigation and the free flow of oil. That's not meant in a literal sense. It's meant that oil basically has to get out of the Gulf and to markets. And what happens in between is described abstractly as flow. But the reality is stuff really does have to flow on the sea, but it has very little to do with markets or with prices. It has to do with how objects are put into relationships with one another. And questions of who gets to move and who. Doesn't get to move, so I see the seascape as a productive place to think theoretically with and against conventional notions of flow as they've been talked about around energy.

Speaker3: [00:39:20] I think sit in a room and say, Yeah. Flow matters, but it doesn't matter in the way you think about it. It matters in the way that water and ships and things in motion flow, rather than the way commodity prices, you know, flow or don't flow. So I see the sea as being useful and necessary for thinking about. And there's one, I guess I'll add one final point. The other part that I think is important is that it actually creates the possibility of a much larger geography. If we want to argue that in the 80s, the U.S. projection of power is actually remaking geography. It also anchors the centers of the manufacturing of naval vessels in Virginia and in California in these networks as well. Because as the Navy comes to understand energy security as a project that it needs to defend because of its own role, it also feeds the impulse to build more and more of those vessels that have to be projected. Right. So the economic and political logic of of building up a navy to protect energy then feeds the creation of centers of production and labor and social relations in places like the United States. So the shipyards on the Virginia coast are as central to the sea and as central to what goes on militarily in the Gulf as anything. I mean, they're deeply connected in this new global supply system

Speaker1: [00:40:36] Of infrastructures, infrastructure authority and insurance,

Speaker3: [00:40:40] And they're building the machines that flow. Sure. Right. So they're they're both connected through circuits of capital, but also through the way that the sea works requires the kind of increasingly adventurous and, you

Speaker1: [00:40:52] Know, big navy. I like this point you made earlier about thinking, thinking the ocean or the sea automatically sort of intuitively brings us to a three dimensional framework for thought. I think that's fascinating and the ability to kind of access the seabed and international seabed and to place mines, for example. That's impossible to do in a terrestrial space. So it does create all these different sort of military questions. But also thinking back to to Halmarick statement about the age of globalization being the age of ocean ization. As you bring up this question or this point about the right to navigation, it makes me realize that this this kind of conceit of the right to navigation takes us much, much. You know, earlier in time, all the way back to colonial era and sort of imperial plans and prospects. And that was the ability to move ships, sailing ships around the world and to transport people and goods and ideologies and religions in that way, right? So this kind of idea of the right to navigation has a really long genealogy when we if we take it all the way back. I wanted to come back to this point. You made also about filling the Persian Gulf with material and filling it with hardware and the kind of security infrastructure this floating flotillas of security infrastructure. And to think a little bit about this idea of critical infrastructure as a kind of security issue, a security question.

Speaker1: [00:42:23] And there was a plan that was passed back in 1996 when Clinton was in office, where he formed a commission on critical infrastructure protection. And it was this commission's report that came out in 1997, critical foundations that established the central premise of infrastructure protection efforts in the United States. And what it described was that the economic prosperity, military strength and political vitality of the United States all depend on the continuous functioning of the nation's critical infrastructures. So this is, you know, sort of late 90s and the the the premise here is that certain of our infrastructures are so vital, so life-giving, so full of of animation and purpose and capacity that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defense and economic security. So that's a quote from from the commission's report. So I wonder if you could reflect a bit on how you see critical infrastructure and these kind of questions of security. We, you know, whether this is genuine or disingenuous or or how it how it kind of operates in the present in terms of thinking about the Middle East and this critical. I mean, the Clintons reports not talking about, you know, these these floating infrastructures that you're talking about. But I wonder if you could sort of put that into conversation here and think about how these might be another form of critical infrastructure or not?

Speaker3: [00:43:54] On the question of earnestness. Right. So I think, you know, this is I think Clinton was probably quite serious in his belief in alarm. And I think it's one thing I want to be careful about on energy security, too. And I don't think anybody I don't think the architects or the advocates. Of anxieties about energy security or infrastructure are telling us things they don't believe. Are they engaged in a kind of maybe a bit of mystification about the, you know, the capital interests that underpin it and who served by making sure infrastructure is critically protected? Probably, right? And this is the way politics works. Sort of. There's always people who give money that then need to profit from an arrangement. So I would, you know, much like the neoconservatives, that they really believed they were going to bring democracy to Iraq. I don't think we have to ignore that. I think we can grant them their belief and consider the consequences. All right. That's on the question of earnestness. It's a fascinating question. I don't know. You know, I haven't thought enough and this is a new a new kind of broader question about infrastructure and infrastructure security that I that I haven't considered closely enough. But I think it's interesting historically that it comes out in the 1990s. These anxieties about what gets talked of in terms of security and securitization has a relatively recent history. I don't think securitization is a long standing generic project that Americans are necessarily concerned about or that that many folks I mean.

Speaker3: [00:45:20] So what are the roots of this kind of security talk? So the Cold War? Is it the post-World War Two order? When is it that security? And correspondingly, when is it that things like political crisis connected to national security become things that become deeply anxious, that have a kind of cultural capital? Because everything now is a matter of security, right? There's food security, there's energy security, there's infrastructure security. What is the work that securitization of all of these fields means? I think that the U.S. talking about repairing and safeguarding bridges or refineries or transit routes in and out of the country is on the surface quite different from what's being built in the Middle East. And yet it's the collapse that in fact, I would imagine that people from both in the region and the Persian Gulf and in the U.S. would believe they're having exactly the same conversation if they talk about infrastructure security. So how do these things also become global? If energy and energy security as a way of thinking about oil, but not only oil and maybe we can come back to energy is a system that doesn't just include oil, especially in the U.S. is wars in the Middle East. If energy security is developed as a as an American response to a kind of anxiety about its own vulnerabilities around its ability to produce oil, energy security becomes a credible form of global universal thinking about oil everywhere. Mexican policymakers, European policymakers, the Ukraine, Japan.

Speaker3: [00:46:47] African diplomats. All right. This is this is a now a kind of interchangeable. It's assumed to have a sort of legibility and universality that belies its particular national origins. So is Clinton's discussion about infrastructure merely a similar kind of innovation that can be applied probably to the Middle East? We could probably talk in similar terms. But I think the logics are very different. I would imagine that what Clinton talks about is, you know, let's make sure the bridges don't collapse as we drive across them. And then that seems like a liberal, reasonable thing to be concerned with in the Gulf. Infrastructure is about preserving military power and making sure that energy continues to be entangled. And that's that's a very different kind of project and that's an imperial project that should be addressed this such the power imbalances are significant. And that's not to say that in communities like New Orleans or Camden, New Jersey or Flint, Michigan, where infrastructure is not securitized in these ways is not subject to power imbalances are race and racial difference or politics. But I think I think we would have to evaluate these separately rather than to assume that they can be collapsed into the same infrastructures onto logically different in different places to use them. It's anthropology. I mean, sort of, you know, been helped along by ethnographers and thinking about kind of the way that the materiality mediates people's experience in these ways. And so I'd be hesitant to say what Clinton articulates is is the same.

Speaker2: [00:48:22] So I want to I want to hold on to the passion you feel for this project. Obviously, you expressed it yesterday in your lecture and here today. I think a lot of people probably share your exhaustion and indignation with 30 years of of a war machine in in in the Middle East. And I'm curious, you know, again, the lessons we learn from history are so important. The possible futures that weren't followed. The alternative trajectories that were adopted. What do you see in your work or what has emerged in your work that gives you hope that this war machine will come to an end, that it can be unraveled, that we can unwind energy and war from one another? And how much do you think that that has to do simply with, you know, the end of fossil fuels as our dominant mode of of of enabling our transportation?

Speaker3: [00:49:18] Well, the ideal outcome would be a full reckoning with, you know, the environmental and climate calamities that have come with our dependence on fossil fuels, right and honest politics that would allow us to think critically about alternatives. Roger Stern, a political scientist who teaches at Kent, was at Princeton a few years ago in the same time I was and he was working on trying to figure out how much it costs to keep all those American machines in the Persian Gulf. And over a 30 year period, he arrived at a figure that it cost about $8 billion between 1976 and 2006. It seems to me that $8 trillion to subsidize a security, a militarized energy regime, basically to subsidize the consumption of fossil fuels and the production of instruments have been turned to something else.

Speaker2: [00:50:03] And these are subsidies that when we talk about the subsidies, given the fossil fuel industry, people aren't even talking about those types of subsidies.

Speaker3: [00:50:09] I'm not even talking about that. When we think about the cost of oil, we think the price we pay for heating oil or the gas, you know, gas at the pump, eight trillion dollars of taxpayer dollars has to be accounted. It's actually probably more than Saudi Arabia earned in revenue from the sale of oil for part for large parts of that period, which is pretty remarkable when you think, by the way, the figure that Roger arrived at does not include the cost of Desert Storm, the Iraq War or the Afghan war. So now add those on top. So it's a pretty remarkable investment. And the answer to the question of how we untangle all of this, this is a political scientist at Penn, Robert Vitale's, and I, I think, are making similar kinds of arguments that we need to scrutinize the political and economic logics that we think are at work. And if we can disentangle those and show that something else is going on. And by the way, those logics are embraced on both the political left and the political right. All kinds of people on the left who are progressive on the climate and on fossil fuels believe in access and scarcity is real things in the world that we can, if we can, if we can do the work of convincing people to not take those claims as transparently self-evident, then the need to project military force becomes less compelling.

Speaker3: [00:51:22] Now, those would withdrawing from the Persian Gulf militarily result in a stable Persian Gulf? I don't know. I couldn't go. I do know this that the projection of American power has not resulted in a stable Persian Gulf, right? So what's the risk and withdrawing? Whether, though, would lead to a turn towards alternatives is much crystal clear to me. My answer to the question is that ultimately these are two kinds of projects that are connected. Ending war for energy and ending energy's place in a war machine is one thing that needs to be done because hundreds of thousands of people die. The other is that energy needs to be rethought and that the resources that are often used to that war machine can be productively put to use in pursuing a non-carbon energy future. Like I said, you know, eight trillion dollars could go could go quite a long way in,

Speaker2: [00:52:15] Admittedly a lot of solar panels.

Speaker3: [00:52:17] I mean, it raises all kinds of questions that we should be skeptical. What is the role of the state? But the state's already doing things, so why not put it to some productive, some productive use? Yeah, I mean, I think the question of. You know, they're they're interesting sort of subtext to all of this as well. The Navy has actually been out front in arguing that climate change is a strategic problem. Right? I mean, this is remarkable. It is probably the most outspoken wing of the military that says we need to plan for climate change as a national security issue. And yet the Navy is, you know, deeply embedded in the extraction and distribution of of fossil fuel energy. I I don't understand, frankly. A lot of what passes for what I find to be a contradictory politics amongst the American electorate that are deeply skeptical about war fighting, I don't think most Americans support war in the Middle East any longer that believe that this is probably a waste of resources according to the way that they think about it, human and otherwise. And yet there's very little in the way of clear political demand that it all be undone. So I don't know how to square that other than to say, you know, out of sight, there's a lot of apathy. A lot of this, you know, apathy about oil. Oil's convenient. It's cheap. It's easy. People acknowledge the dangers that's involved in our reliance on it.

Speaker3: [00:53:45] But, you know, can't be persuaded for reasons of pocketbook politics to do much to to change it. It's expensive to pursue alternatives. Equally interesting to me, and I didn't explore it very much in running dry, the book on fracking is that for some reason, and I think it's actually explained in the 1970s in the U.S., when the environmental movement became a real political force, the environmental movement and this is I'm drawing on the work of American environmental historians and detached oil, even though the Santa Barbara oil spills and a lot of contamination. Exxon Valdez in the 80s were central to how the environmental movement grew up. What environmentalists were initially connected to was preserving pristine nature, not a human nature mediated experience, right? And oil dropped out from a kind of critical reflection. Energy was not central to that politics. It needs to come back in. But in order for it to be successful, there needs to be a real social movement around the environment and around energy and frankly, energy politics. From Dimock Eastern Pennsylvania to North Dakota to New Jersey to Colorado are all very local and provincial political projects. It has yet to congeal in a kind of national movement. And you know, it's it's hard to understand, frankly, given given this given the stakes and that we're all affected by it. While we continue to see environmental and energy problems as being local rather than global or national

Speaker2: [00:55:19] Could just for a final question, maybe that brings us back to where we started again, back to the desert kingdom. As you can imagine in a Houston based podcast, we there's we hear a lot from from our fellow citizens here who work in oil and gas. There's a lot of pop psychology about what's happening in Saudi Arabia right now, which is not actually what I wanted to ask you so much as to set the context for the relevance of it. But really, I think what we're interested in hearing from you is how you think the the Saudi Kingdom or everyday Saudis are thinking about their energy futures, too, because that must be also something that is quite distinct. And often it just seems like a black box over here because it's not what people talk about.

Speaker3: [00:56:07] It's it's a it's a it's a great place, it's a great place to end, you know, there's a lot of us should be very careful in how we talk about, I'm glad you didn't ask me a question about Saudi as a geopolitical actor. Is it trying to harm Russia or Iran? What's what's going on? Because I don't know, because people who do know don't talk, right, so I'm not going to I'm not going to guess what the thinking is. I think that as I wrote in Desert Kingdom, the story of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves often gets translated through material practices and through the distribution of wealth into the consumption of water, the production of agriculture to the creation of public health infrastructures, to the way that Saudis not only can live environmentally live in the world, but also how they negotiate the state. And so energy in that way has always been central, whether it's visible or not to the way people have. You know, these are the kinds of social relations, as well as the kind of political expectations that they have. So what's going on in Saudi in many ways has a historical foundation that I talked about emerging in the 50s and 60s. But there is something different and that is that as Saudi Arabia built kind of modern technological order. Flush with cash, the question of towing icebergs and addressing water needs, it builds massive facilities.

Speaker3: [00:57:22] In some ways, the problem the Saudis have at the end of the 70s is they've got too much money. So what to do with it becomes a real issue without causing inflation and financial crises, so they build expensive systems that then become part of the social contract. You were going to provide free water. Well, free water has to be desalinated in Saudi Arabia. You can't tow icebergs because it'll melt along the way. But it's no less fanciful to build 32 desalination plants that cost the half a trillion dollars each and use that not only to provide drinking water, but to also provide the sustenance to make Saudi Arabia the sixth largest exporter of wheat at the end of the 1980s. Industrial agriculture in Saudi Arabia is absurd. So what that then leads to is a set of expectations right amongst citizens in the state that this is part of the relationship. Well, as the Saudi population grows and as oil prices drop in the 1980s and as they remain unstable and uncertain, the contract comes under pressure. It's expensive to fire desalination plants. You have to consume your own energy, which would capture value on a global market, but does very little. When you subsidize it, you provide it. You use it to turn seawater into fresh water at no cost to your citizens.

Speaker3: [00:58:35] And so what we see in Saudi Arabia is that it consumes much more of its own energy production than it used to. Historically, this wasn't a problem today, it's a huge problem. So how to balance that domestic demand with the ways that Saudi needs to get revenues on a global oil market is a difficult problem for them. It's a bigger problem for Iran and Venezuela, which have larger populations. But Saudi Arabia consumes, like the UAE and others, massive amounts of water. It's hugely. And that's just one example of a place where the energy domestically is a source of deep anxiety. Saudi Arabia has ended the subsidies for wheat agriculture. It now pursues virtual water in Pakistan, Ethiopia, right buying up to buying up agricultural land in order to plant vegetables or things that it can't grow at home because it can no longer produce the water. The 10 ability, I mean, the sustainability of these practices, especially with prices down around $40 a barrel, is unclear, which I think maybe does land us in a place where I can't answer the question. But why then, doesn't Saudi cut production and drive prices back up? And I think the answer is because they can't. They're beholden to this and they're they're struggling to defend a position that's probably not sustainable.

Speaker2: [00:59:48] Toby Jones, thank you so much for coming to rice, for sharing your wealth of wisdom with us and especially for for being with us here on the podcast today. Really appreciate it.

Speaker3: [00:59:57] Thank you both.

Speaker1: [00:59:58] Yeah, thank you.