Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power

Windfall: How the New

Energy Abundance Upends

Global Politics and

Strengthens America's Power 

By Meghan L. O’Sullivan

Released Tuesday, September 12, 2017

In this bold, new book, Harvard professor and former Washington policymaker Meghan L. O’Sullivan offers us a compelling, alternative explanation for why world events are unfolding as they are. Based on travel to over two dozen countries and hundreds of interviews, Windfall vividly portrays how energy is – and has been – a much more important driver of foreign affairs than so many other factors given much more attention.  This book provides its readers a fascinating and forceful new lens through which to view both the past and the future.

O’Sullivan offers readers astute analysis and entertaining anecdotes.  Drawing on her experience as a former policymaker, she also sounds an urgent call to Washington to embrace a fresh mindset, one which sees America’s energy situation as an asset, not a vulnerability.  She provides a wide-ranging set of ideas to policymakers in the United States and elsewhere about how to capitalize on, or adapt to, the new energy realities.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She is also the Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project, which explores the complex interaction between energy markets and international politics. Between 2004 and 2007, she was special assistant to the President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan for the last two years of her tenure. She lives in Cambridge, MA.