Washington, D.C, Nov. 7, 2011—The United States gets only about 10 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf, but it spends more than $334 billion per year to defend that region. In No War for Oil: U.S. Dependency and the Middle East, Ivan Eland (Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and director of the Center on Peace & Liberty) rebuts eleven popular myths about oil markets and scrutinizes claims about alleged threats to oil supplies abroad.

According to Eland, the notion that America’s energy needs require a vast U.S. military presence in oil-rich countries—an idea shared by all U.S. presidents and their advisors since at least World War II—is wrong, dead wrong. It has led to costly and unnecessary wars with massive losses of human life and has eroded liberty at home.

The free flow of oil to the United States does not require U.S. military protection abroad, Eland argues, because Americans can rely on markets alone to deliver fuel, just as they rely on markets to provide bottled water, Big Macs, iPhones, and SUVs. “In short, going to war for oil is unnecessary, expensive in blood and treasure, and dangerous for U.S. security,” Eland concludes.

“No War for Oil” is a tour de force of history, myth-busting, and sturdy policy analysis. It is at once an excellent overview of the development and quirks of the world oil market, a slaying of eleven monstrous but widely believed falsehoods, and a description of how and why our wars for "energy independence" have had quite the opposite effect. This book could not be more valuable or more timely.
—Michael C. Munger, Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Economics, Duke University

Read No War for Oil and learn why U.S. military protectionism harms the interests of American consumers, taxpayers and all those engaged in military conflicts over oil resources.