Viewing The Important Interplay Of Foreign Policy, Energy Markets

PITTSBURGH—Meghan O’Sullivan doesn’t mind admitting to a room full of oil and gas executives that she’s been having an identity crisis. But she’s also quick to point out that many of those very same executives are enduring a similar conflict.

O’Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and the Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, has spent the last 25 years working with U.S. foreign policy leaders. During the last 12 years, she has added the duties of working with energy leaders.

“The overlap between the energy world and the foreign policy world is surprisingly small,” the former special assistant to President George W. Bush and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan told an audience of about 1,000 attendees during a special address at the recent Marcellus-Utica Midstream Conference.

“I’ve asked myself: Why do so few people wear a foreign policy lens and an energy market lens when they’re trying to understand the situations in the world today,” O’Sullivan, author of the recently published, “Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power,” said. “It’s a natural tendency for every single one of us to put weight on the things we understand and to discount the things we don’t.”