The Tragedy of American Science: Trapping Modern Life in Oil and War

We must make hope viable rather than despair believable; only then can we find the road to peace.

— Raymond Williams

Shortly after the raid on Venezuela, on 28 February 2026, US forces struck a primary school in Iran, killing at least 175 people, most of them children. On 13 July, 136 days into the war, Trump formally announced before the US Congress the launch of a second round of military strikes against Iran.

The “misdirected” missile strike on children has drawn widespread attention, but such tragedies are far from unprecedented in US military operations. The more pressing questions are: how much longer will this war last, and where will the next one begin?

People are always happy to treat war as dinner-party talk, debating “geopolitics” and “international relations”, or how oil prices and futures rise and fall with conflict. Yet these “strategists” rarely look directly at the relationship between war and the oil-dependent rhythms of modern life. Because the moment that connection is acknowledged, war ceases to be a brief burst of violence and instead demands that we confront the predatory consumption habits woven into our ostensibly peaceful daily lives — and commit to long-term, tangible change.

I will begin with the work of the American historian of science Clifford D. Connor, The Tragedy of American Science: From the Cold War to the Forever War, before drawing on further scholars’ perspectives and arguments to trace the history of how the United States became trapped in oil, step by step.

Some may believe that the functioning of modern society is inherently oil-dependent and that altering our oil consumption is virtually impossible. Yet this history has instead made me realise that humanity could have harnessed oil through entirely different technological systems. The tragedy of science — which has seeped into every detail of modern life, from what we eat and wear to how we travel and shelter ourselves — is not irreversible. And yet we, living in peace, are prompted to think more carefully about this question only through each successive war.

Two Tragedies of American Science

On 11 March, sources revealed the interim findings of the US military’s investigation into the airstrike on the primary school in Minab, Iran, on 28 February: U.S. Central Command had used outdated data when generating targeting coordinates for Tomahawk cruise missiles, erroneously designating the school as a military base. One account suggests the US military has become overly reliant on AI for automated target recognition and strike decision-making, at the cost of rigorous human verification.

This is not the first time a US missile has struck Iranian children. In the chapter of The Tragedy of American Science dealing with the research, development and production of US military weapons, Connor specifically chronicles and discusses the civilian casualties wrought by high-tech modern armaments such as missiles and drones.

Despite repeated misfires, the fervour for weapons automation has only intensified since the Second World War. In the Vietnam War, drones were still little more than tools for dropping propaganda leaflets; today they have evolved into the very instrument of “video-game warfare” — all an operator needs to do is lock onto a humanoid figure on a computer screen, and a drone takes a life. In other words, however antithetical to humanity a weapon may be, there always seems to be an unending supply of funding, talent and knowledge to bring it into being. Connor notes that from the end of the Vietnam War to 2017, total US government spending on scientific research approached $3 trillion, with defence-related research and development accounting for more than half of all US government R&D expenditure.

Borrowing Connor’s concept, I would argue that American science harbours yet another tragedy — one not in the theatre of war but in the sphere of peaceful everyday life: the excessive dependence of our modern way of living on oil.

America’s Energy Imperialism

From the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq War to the 2014 airstrikes on Syria, and on to the 2026 invasion of Venezuela and the US–Iran war, these regions either possess abundant oil reserves — Venezuela, Iran and Iraq all rank among the world’s top five in crude oil reserves — or are strategically vital locations controlling access to oil resources.

Resource crises ultimately evolve into the question of war and peace, and for those living in the twenty-first century, this is a feeling hard to miss. A critical turning-point was 1998: the year the United States became primarily dependent on imports for its crude oil consumption, and the same year in which concerns about peak oil first emerged. As the French scholar Philippe Sébille-Lopez reveals in The Geopolitics of Oil, after George W. Bush took office in 2001, the priority was not counter-terrorism but securing America’s oil consumption. Although in the wake of 9/11, US military operations have always been framed, on the surface, as efforts to combat terrorism and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the majority have been driven by an “energy imperialism” motive — using military force to control global oil supply, whether directly or indirectly.

Although the United States has increased domestic crude output in recent years through the “shale revolution”, the oil extracted is predominantly light, low-sulphur “light crude”. The refineries and equipment America built in its earlier era were designed and configured to process heavy crude from Latin America; they simply cannot handle light crude. As a result, the US still has to import crude oil from other countries.

To fully articulate the relationship between war and energy imperialism would, I fear, require writing an entirely new book. The reason I still feel that The Tragedy of American Science overlooks the question of oil is that, in order to emphasise the tragic impact of war on American science, the author adopts an explanation that exaggerates the autonomy of war — an interpretive framework known as the “permanent war economy”, which holds that the US economic system cannot function without war, and that only relentless, large-scale military spending and arms investment can drive economic growth.

But critics have long pointed out that the military-industrial complex’s siphoning of capital and resources, and its privileged position in profit margins, simultaneously squeeze the room for civilian manufacturing to grow, leading to economic contraction. In other words, there is no purely positive correlation between war and economic prosperity.

This “permanent war economy” framework tends to cast war and the military-industrial complex behind it as a wholly self-operating force, separate from ordinary people’s daily lives — indeed, from politics altogether. But from the perspective of oil, the link between war and our oil-dependent way of life in peacetime is glaringly obvious. And there is, after all, so very much humanity could still do on this front.

In an age when war and peace are so tightly coupled, rejecting war means rejecting far more than war alone.

The History of America’s Oil Addiction

Although many countries are harnessing new energy technologies to transition their energy systems, global oil consumption rose from 90 million barrels per day to 100 million barrels per day between 2014 and 2024. In 2024 alone, the United States consumed an average of 19 million barrels per day — 18.7% of the world’s total — while its population accounts for just 4.2% of the global total, giving a per capita annual consumption of 20.4 barrels. Back in 1930, each American consumed an annual average of just 8.4 barrels of oil*. What happened in between?

* Editor’s note: The per capita oil consumption figures are the author’s own estimates, derived from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s energy consumption data spanning the past 250 years, US population figures and heat-energy unit conversions.

Humans do not consume oil directly; this black liquid does not inherently possess use-value. It is our mastery of scientific knowledge in physics, chemistry and other fields that enables us, through fractionation and cracking at refineries, followed by specialised further processing, to produce petrol, diesel, fertilisers (especially nitrogenous fertiliser), plastics and other petroleum-derived products. These products, in turn, feed — directly or indirectly — into the manufacture and processing of yet others, generating the thermal energy that powers cars, cruise ships and agricultural tractors, fuelling cold-chain systems and the notoriously energy-intensive ultra-processed food industry, boosting output in industrialised agriculture, manufacturing all manner of everyday plastic goods … and so weaving a modern world built on oil.

Behind this complex chain of petroleum commodities lies a broader transformation in the way of life itself. The American scholar Matthew T. Huber, in his book Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, offers a detailed account of how oil became embedded in the American economy and culture: From the 1930s onward, the United States gradually consolidated a strategy for easing capitalism’s crises — one that constructed for its people a lifestyle of mobility, convenience, freedom and privacy across the key domains of social reproduction: food, clothing, housing and transport.

Huber argues that the American way of life appears intensely individualistic, yet behind that individualism stands a vast technological system, and oil is the most essential material underpinning it. So rather than simply blaming Americans for their addiction to oil, what matters more is understanding how they became trapped within the oil system.

Take petrol, which accounts for 43.21% of total US oil consumption: could an American simply do without it? During the oil crises of the 1970s, Huber recounts how a housewife in the suburbs of Long Island lamented the petrol shortage: ‘We can’t walk to the food shop, the bank or the doctor’s — forget about any pleasant cycle! If it’s nine kilometres round-trip to the nearest supermarket … how am I supposed to feed my family?’ Clearly, the arrangement of suburbanised spaces — workplaces, detached houses, motorways, supermarkets and private cars — had predetermined their dependence on petrol.

From the 1930s onward, too, Americans grew ever more reliant on petroleum-based agriculture — diesel tractors, fertilisers and pesticides — to obtain cheap food. In 1900, American households spent just 44% of total consumption on food; by 1960, that figure had fallen to 27%. Some have therefore called petroleum agriculture nothing less than “turning oil into food, using the land”. Between 1930 and 1970, America’s combined input of agricultural fertilisers and pesticides surged by a staggering 1,338%.

In truth, it is not just the production stage that depends on fossil fuels: processing, packaging, transport, storage and cooking — every link in the industrialised food chain relies heavily on them. According to a report published by the International Expert Group on Sustainable Food Systems (IPSE-FOOD), as much as 40% of all petrochemical products now flow into the food and agriculture system.

The proliferation of plastics, too, is inextricably linked to the post-war American lifestyle of mobility and throwaway consumer culture — a connection that numerous studies have already demonstrated.

  What Comes After the Bicycle?

Humans ought to regard oil as a scarce resource and use it in a more rational manner. Yet the examples above make clear that how we use oil is by no means a purely moral question. It is a particular lifestyle and social order that collectively determine which oil-related products are encouraged into production, in what quantities, and to satisfy what desires and needs.

Huber recounts a letter one writer sent to Nixon during the oil crisis of the 1970s, which perhaps reveals why Americans found themselves powerless to escape oil consumption:

“We are among the tens of thousands who have no public transport to their workplaces and can depend only on our own cars. I cover seventy miles every day driving to and from work, yet not a single bus will take me there. I must drive, and very soon I shall be unable to afford the fuel or the costs that come with it. This is simply not fair!”

In the end, all that was left for the writer was an anxiety about making ends meet. Yet in the same period, American society also harboured a dangerous hostility towards Arab nations. One country singer wrote: “If they won’t lower the oil price, then we’ll cut off their food supply.”

The coexistence of these two emotions within a single society is profoundly dangerous, for an oil-dependent way of life can all too easily form a perilous coupling with energy imperialism.

In my view, the people of modern society have acquired, through science, the power to reshape the world; yet in the concrete development of technological products and the design of technological systems, calculations of capital and the machinations of politics have been embedded, whether wittingly or not. When these technological systems in turn colonise people’s lives, remould their desires and constrain their actions, the very aspiration for a good life forms a perverse, reactionary linkage with war. And science is then harnessed to intensify war’s destructive force. This, truly, is where the tragedy of modern society lies.

This lifestyle still spreads to late-developing nations as a model and exemplar. If humanity does not wish to fight a war of certain mutual destruction over a resource destined to run dry, then the question that truly demands asking may be as concrete as that writer’s complaint: why cannot there be more buses? Perhaps we might press a little further: why can the food supply chain not be shortened, to prevent excessive energy consumption and plastic packaging? Why can agricultural practices that do not depend on pesticides and chemical fertilisers not be encouraged?

Such questions have not gone unasked. As early as the 1970s, the North American political economist Dallas Smythe, after a visit to China, penned an essay titled “What Comes After the Bicycle?” — hoping that China, beyond the bicycle, would develop public goods and collective consumption rather than the capitalist individualism represented by the automobile.

Yet it has proved that achieving this is no easy matter; it turns on the value judgements we make about different ways of life: advanced or backward, wealthy or poor, free or repressed, and so on. But today, among these value judgements, we may need to add one more pair: war or peace, survival or destruction. Faced with the US–Iran war and the many war crises yet to come, we need to recalibrate our judgements about the good life and invest a more sustainable way of living with the positive significance of building peace.

In the end, perhaps we shall find a more rational way to use this precious, non-renewable resource that is oil.

– This is Foodthink’s 824th original article –

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Ming Lin

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