Panic Meets Facts

Panic Meets Facts ENERGY AND SECURITY: Towards a New Foreign Policy Strategy Edited by Jan H. Kalicki and David L. Goldwyn 604 pp.; Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005

One of the great challenges in compiling a book of independent essays is to ensure that the different authors

have some consistency in basic worldview. It is one thing for a book on Shakespeare to include two essays that, say, disagree on whether the Bard wrote Hamlet. It is quite another thing if half of the book's essays argue that Shakespeare never wrote the play while the rest describe how his life in Avon contributed to the tale of the melancholy Dane. Such a book would be at war with itself.

That description aptly fits Jan Kalicki and David Goldwyn's Energy and Security. It starts and ends with clarion calls for reorienting U.S. foreign policy to emphasize energy. In between are chapters reviewing world energy conditions that provide little evidence of an energy crisis-let alone the need for some grand energy-security policy. The middle chapters describe modest problems requiring, at most, limited public policy responses. They stop well short of validating the alarmist contentions of danger. This failure tacitly proves that, contrary to frequent assertions by many politicians, the "energy security crisis" does not exist.