This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 1st, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's commonly believed that oil plays a uniquely important role in geopolitics in American national security,

but that understanding could be fatally flawed.

Eugene Goles is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin.

His recent work focuses on how the fracking revolution is changing

global security, his conclusion, not much.

Many, many people intuitively believe there's a strong link between oil and gas and national security.

So this is in the public consciousness, you know, people worry, they protest about no blood

for oil, but they don't protest about no blood for other products,

you know, coffee, bananas, shoes, whatever you like.

And that permeates the elite, foreign policy,

elite consciousness too, that people believe

that there's a special effect of oil and international politics

that it leads to diplomatic choices that countries make.

And so as the shale revolution has changed the pattern of oil and gas production around the world

and oil and gas trade around the world, we were wondering whether that would change

national security and diplomacy, particularly for the United States since we've been the center of the shale

Revolution.

All right, so what did you find?

We found that people exaggerate the importance of oil and gas in international relations and diplomacy

and national security.

So it turns out that countries make their choices about who their friends are and what they want to do

...