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The Energy and Security Nexus: A Strategic Dilemma

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March 3-4, 2011
The McKimmon Center
Raleigh, NC, United States
Open to the General Public
Registration Fee: None

Energy figures prominently in the most recent National Security Strategy (2010). The authors of this document see the transformation of the way we use energy as a key to our economic revitalization (and ultimately our safety) as well as a way to mitigate the security problems many expect to follow from climate change. It recognizes the danger of disruption to our energy supplies and the political vulnerability that can accompany dependency. At the same time, the strategy stresses the need to reduce the budget deficit. It sees the promotion of international human rights and food security as a key to international order and names nuclear proliferation as the single greatest threat to the American people. And it insists that the US must maintain its conventional superiority, enhance its ability to defeat asymmetric threats, and preserve its nuclear deterrent capability as long as nuclear weapons remain.

The goal of this conference is to heighten public awareness of the vital connections between energy and security. The energy choices we make will have a profound effect on human, national, and collective security. The strategies pursued by other countries in their search for energy security will help shape the future international order. And our own energy security in turn will be contingent upon our ability to work within this environment and deal with changing security threats. The conference will begin by examining how the search for energy (historically fossil fuels, but now increasingly alternative energy) shapes the security environment at every level. It will go on to consider how the security environment affects our ability to secure energy. And it will conclude by thinking about how we can best resolve the energy and security dilemma.



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Partners: The Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) Energy Consortium, Duke University’s Program in American Grand Strategy, and the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at North Carolina State University and the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute

Links and Contacts

• Host's Website

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