In exhaustive detail, based on close scrutiny of publicly available but seldom publicized Departments of Defense, State and Energy documents, Klare provides a superb primer of the landscape of potential global conflict over the next few decades, and America's likely role in it. Mainstream media pundits present current U.S. foreign policy - in piecemeal fashion - as a series of scattered, seemingly ad hoc responses to individual, isolated "hot spots." Klare argues that there is a thematic thread running through U.S. strategy, whether in the Caspian Sea, China or Columbia. It is focused on guaranteeing U.S.-based multinational corporations steady, uninterrupted access to the dwindling supply of non-renewable resources. With the end of the cold war and the growth of worldwide energy-intensive consumer markets, the ideological blocs and conflicts (between U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism) that defined, and gave a certain perverse stability to foreign policy from the 1940s through the early 90s, have given way to new "geo-econocentric" struggles.