COLUMN LEFT : Power Comes From Effort, Not Wellheads : The days when raw materials meant economic wealth are over. Wars over oil should be, too.

Michael Porter did not set out to write a book about the causes of war, but reading his new book, “The Competitive Advantage of Nations,” during the summer of Operation Desert Shield, you can’t help but conclude that our future as a world-class economic power rests on never having to go to war over oil again.

In Porter’s provocative explanation of how and why nations establish competitive advantages in the world, he turns classic theories of competitive advantage--ones that emphasize land, labor, natural resources and capital--upside down. He points out that the most successful trading nations--Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Italy and Korea--have been countries with limited natural resources that must import most raw materials.

In essence, his is an “eat your peas” theory of economic advantage, in which true gains in productivity and wealth stem not simply from advantages but from the ways in which creative, well-led industries deal with disadvantages.

“Pressure instead of abundance or a comfortable environment,” writes Porters, “underpins true competitive advantage. . . . Local abundance of basic factors lulls firms into complacency and deters the application of advanced technology.” His book is a vast compendium of examples in which natural disadvantages forced industries to innovate in ways that turned them into leaders in the world marketplace.

Porter’s new paradigm explains so much about the economics of the advanced industrial world, where wealth is found not in natural resources but in human ingenuity, that the possibility of going to war over oil seems a throwback to a more primitive era in history.

Unlike Porter, Stephen Van Evera, a professor of international relations at MIT, did set out to study the causes of war. And indeed he finds that states have often fought wars over natural resources: land for agriculture, minerals and, of course, oil. While these wars are not obsolete, they are less common today than they used to be because, according to Van Evera, “Advanced economies have substitutes for raw materials. They also add value to raw materials and, as a result, the key to national wealth is no longer control of national resources but the ability to transform them.”

If we had let Saddam Hussein run amok and run up the price of oil through control of his own supplies and blackmail or outright control of the Saudis, we would have suffered a recession, but we would quickly have found it economical to curb our appetite for fossil fuels and develop all those alternative energy sources that Jimmy Carter argued for 10 years ago.

Of all the countries in the world, the United States, with its own oil reserves and its high technology, would probably suffer the least. But, economically speaking, a bad cold in the U.S. economy could turn into bronchitis in the other advanced economies of the world (which have little or none of their own oil) and into terminal pneumonia in the struggling economies of Eastern Europe and the Third World. Hence, the widespread international support for our presence in the Saudi desert.

The real test of our national resolve will come when the crisis in the desert is over. Will we, as we did in 1980, fall back into the seductive arms of cheap oil? The national will to avoid this will be harder to come by than the national will to mobilize the military in the first place.

As Porter says, the process of sustaining advantage is “intensely uncomfortable” for firms and those who work in them--which is why businesses pressure governments to do things that make life easy. And, as Porter so ably illustrates, the easy life is not much of an incentive to innovate.

The American government must create the conditions necessary for progress, namely, high energy prices--which we will not let Saddam Hussein create for us.

This does not mean that the government should get into the energy business. But the government does have one very powerful way to influence the market--taxes. If we start with a gasoline tax and extend it to other products, non-fossil-fuel energy sources will become economical. Before the Persian Gulf crisis, there were ample environmental reasons to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. Now we can add to that the desire to avoid having to go to war over oil ever again.

We’re in a lot better shape than we were when Jimmy Carter had to confront the first major oil crisis. The real test of our resolve will not be anything as simple as the will to keep American men and women in the Saudi desert; instead it will be whether we can meet the economic challenges in such a way that we never have to go to the Saudi desert again.