The Tragedy of American Science: Locking Modern Life into Oil and War

To make hope practicable, rather than despair credible—only then can we walk the road towards 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 missiles’ “collateral damage” to children has drawn widespread attention, but this is hardly the first time such a tragedy has occurred in US military operations. What matters more is: how long will this war last, and where will the next one break out?

People love to treat war as mere conversation fodder, debating “geopolitics” and “international relations”, or how oil prices and futures rise and fall with the latest conflict. Yet these “strategists” rarely look directly at the connection between war and our oil-dependent modern lives. For once that link is confronted, war ceases to be a brief episode of violence and instead demands that we examine the predatory consumption habits embedded in what appears to be peaceful daily life, and that we make lasting, practical changes.

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

Some might argue that the running of modern society is inherently oil-dependent, and that changing our consumption patterns is next to impossible. Yet this history has, if anything, made me realise that human beings could have channelled oil through entirely different technological systems. This scientific tragedy, which has seeped into every detail of our everyday lives—food, clothing, shelter, transport—is not beyond reversal. And yet, for those of us living in peace, it takes war, again and again, to force us to think about this question more carefully.

The Two Tragedies of American Science

On 11 March, sources revealed interim findings from the US military’s investigation into the 28 February airstrike on a primary school in Minab, Iran: US Central Command had used outdated data when creating strike coordinates for Tomahawk cruise missiles, mistakenly designating the primary school as a military base. One line of thinking suggests that the US military relied too heavily on AI for automated target recognition and strike decisions, at the expense of the rigour of human review.

This is not the first time US missiles have struck children in Iran. In the chapter of The Tragedy of American Science devoted to the research, development and production of US military weapons, Connor documents and discusses in particular the civilian casualties caused by high-tech modern weaponry such as missiles and drones.

Despite numerous misfires, the frenzy over weapons automation has only intensified since the Second World War. As far back as the Vietnam War, drones were merely tools for dropping leaflets; they have now evolved into instruments of “video-game warfare” — as long as the operator aims at a human-shaped icon on a computer screen, a drone can take a life. In other words, no matter how far a weapon deviates from humanity, there always seems to be a steady supply of funding, talent and knowledge to make it happen — Connor notes that from the end of the Vietnam War to 2017, the US government’s total expenditure on scientific research approached $3 trillion, with defence-related research and development accounting for more than half of the government’s overall R&D spending.

Borrowing Connor’s concept, I would argue that American science harbours another tragedy — one that unfolds not in the realm of war but in the realm of peaceful everyday life: the modern way of living that is excessively dependent on oil.

America’s Energy Imperialism

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

Resource crises ultimately become questions of war and peace, and for those living in the twenty-first century, this connection is unmistakable. A key turning point was 1998: that year, the United States relied on imports as its primary source of crude oil for the first time, and concerns about peak oil began to surface in the same year. As the French scholar Philippe Sébille-Lopez reveals in The Geopolitics of Oil, the top priority after George W. Bush took office in 2001 was not counter-terrorism but securing US oil consumption. Although, following 9/11, US military operations have always been ostensibly justified by counter-terrorism and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, most have been driven by an “energy imperialism” motive — the use of military means to directly or indirectly control global oil supply.

Although the United States has boosted domestic crude oil production in recent years through the “shale revolution”, what it extracts is primarily “light oil” — light, low-sulphur crude. The refineries and equipment built in America’s early days were specifically configured to process heavy crude oil from Latin America and simply cannot take in light oil, meaning the country still has to import crude oil from other nations.

To fully untangle the relationship between war and energy imperialism would probably require writing an entirely new book. Yet I still feel that The Tragedy of American Science overlooks the question of oil — because the author, in order to underscore the tragic impact of war on American science, adopts an interpretation that inflates war’s autonomy. This interpretive framework is known as the “permanent war economy”, which holds that the US economy cannot function without war, and that only sustained, massive war spending and armament investment can drive economic growth.

But critics have long pointed out that the military-industrial complex siphons off capital and resources, and the privileges it enjoys in terms of profit margins simultaneously squeeze the space for civilian manufacturing to develop, causing the broader economy to contract. In other words, no purely positive correlation exists between war and economic prosperity.

This “permanent war economy” narrative tends to cast war — and the military-industrial complex behind it — as a wholly self-contained force, unrelated to ordinary people’s daily lives, even unrelated to the everyday realm of politics. Yet from the perspective of oil, the connection between war and our oil-dependent way of life in a supposedly peaceful society could not be more obvious. And in this regard, there is still so very much that humanity could do.

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

The History of America’s Oil Addiction

Although many countries are pursuing energy transitions using new-energy technologies, global oil consumption rose from 90 million barrels per day to 100 million barrels per day between 2014 and 2024. In 2024, US average daily oil consumption reached 19 million barrels — 18.7% of the global total — while America’s population accounts for only 4.2% of the world’s. On that basis, annual oil consumption per capita works out at 20.4 barrels. Yet in 1930, each American consumed just 8.4 barrels per year on average*. What happened in between?

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

Human beings do not consume oil directly — this black liquid possesses no inherent use-value. It is our mastery of scientific knowledge in physics, chemistry and other disciplines that enables us, through fractional distillation, cracking and subsequent specialised processing at refineries, to derive petroleum products such as petrol, diesel, fertilisers (particularly nitrogen fertiliser) and plastics. These products, in turn, are used — directly or indirectly — in the production and processing of other goods: generating heat energy to power cars, cruise ships and farm tractors; fuelling the cold chain and the extraordinarily energy-intensive ultra-processed food industry; boosting output in industrialised agriculture; and manufacturing all manner of everyday plastic items … together forming a modern world built on oil.

Behind this complex chain of petroleum commodities lies a transformation of the way people live. In Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, the American scholar Matthew T. Huber traces in detail the historical process by which oil became embedded in the American economy and culture: From the 1930s onward, the United States gradually established a strategy for easing capitalism’s crises — constructing for ordinary people, across the major domains of social reproduction such as food, clothing, shelter and transport, a way of life defined by mobility, convenience, freedom and privacy.

Huber argues that the American way of life may appear intensely personal, yet behind that individualism lies a vast technological system, of which oil is the most essential building material. Rather than simply blaming Americans for being addicted to oil, what matters more is understanding how they became trapped within an oil-based system.

Take petrol, which accounts for 43.21% of total US oil consumption — can a single American easily break free from oil? During the 1970s oil crisis, Huber cites a housewife living in a suburb of Long Island who complained about the petrol shortage: “We can’t walk to the grocery, the bank or the doctor’s — forget about any pleasant bicycle ride! If it’s 9 km round trip to the nearest supermarket … how am I supposed to feed my family?” Plainly, the arrangement of suburban spaces — workplaces, detached houses, highways, supermarkets, private cars — has predetermined their dependence on petrol.

It was also from the 1930s that ordinary Americans grew ever more reliant on petroleum agriculture — diesel tractors, fertilisers and pesticides — to secure cheap food. In 1900, food accounted for just 44% of Americans’ total spending; by 1960, that share had fallen to 27%. Petroleum agriculture has therefore been called “using the land to turn oil into food”: between 1930 and 1970, US agricultural inputs of fertilisers and pesticides rose by a staggering 1,338%.

In fact, it is not only at the production stage: every link in the industrialised food system — processing, packaging, transport, storage, cooking — depends heavily on fossil fuels. According to a report by IPES-Food (the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems), as much as 40% of petrochemical products worldwide now end up in the food and agriculture system.

The proliferation of plastic products is also closely linked to the mobile post-war American lifestyle and a throwaway consumer culture — something many studies have confirmed.

  What Comes After the Bicycle?

Humanity ought to treat oil as a scarce resource and use it more rationally. But the examples above make it clear that how we use oil is not purely a moral question. It is particular ways of life and social orders that together determine what kinds of oil-related products are encouraged into production, in what quantities, and in service of what desires and needs.

Huber recalls a letter a writer sent to Nixon during the 1970s oil crisis, which perhaps illustrates why Americans have been unable to escape their dependence on oil:

“Tens of thousands of us have no public transport to our workplaces and have no choice but to rely on our own cars. I drive seventy miles a day to and from work, and no bus goes anywhere near it. I must drive, and before long I will be unable to afford the fuel or the running costs. This is simply not fair!”

In the end, all that remained for this writer was an anxiety about just getting by. And in that same period, dangerous hostility towards Arab nations was already festering in American society. One country singer wrote: “If they won’t lower oil prices, we’ll cut off their food supply.”

For two such sentiments to coexist within a single society is deeply dangerous. An oil-dependent way of life is entirely capable of forming a perilous coupling with energy imperialism.

In my view, humanity in modern society has harnessed the power to reshape the world through science, yet in the development of specific technologies and the design of technological systems, the calculations of capital and political expediency have been embedded — whether deliberately or by default. When those technological systems turn back and colonise people’s lives, reshape their desires, and constrain their actions, the very wish for a good life ends up in a reactionary coupling with war. And science, in turn, is harnessed to amplify war’s destructive force. This is the true tragedy of modern society.

This way of life continues to spread to late-developing nations as a model and exemplar. If humanity does not wish to wage a war of mutual annihilation over a resource destined to run dry, then the questions that truly need asking may be as concrete as that writer’s complaint: why can’t there be more buses? Perhaps we might push further — why can’t food supply chains be shortened to curb excessive energy consumption and plastic packaging? Why can’t farming methods that do not depend on pesticides and chemical fertilisers be encouraged?

It is not as though no one has raised similar questions before. As early as the 1970s, the North American political economist Dallas Smythe, after visiting China, wrote an essay titled “What Comes After the Bicycle?” He hoped that after the bicycle, China would develop public goods and collective consumption rather than the capitalist, individualist consumption exemplified by the automobile.

Yet it has proved no easy feat. It hinges on the value judgements we make about different ways of life: advanced or backward, rich or poor, free or repressed, and so on. But now, we may need to add another axis to these judgements: war or peace, survival or destruction. Faced with the US–Iran war and the various conflicts looming ahead, we need to recalibrate our value judgements about the good life and invest a more sustainable way of living with the active meaning of building peace.

In the end, we may yet find a more rational way to use oil, that precious non-renewable resource.

– This is Foodthink’s 824th original article –

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Ming Lin

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