Traditionally, the United States’ energy security has been understood as a national security issue. Specially, the shortage of energy resources has been seen as an existential threat that requires emergency measures in a process of securitization. Nevertheless, this investigation suggests that this topic has been mostly politicized at the beginning of the XXI century. Possibly, this securitization process was only raised with the Iraq invasion in 2003, to the extent that such intervention might be inspired by the necessity of overthrowing the regime that had prevented the US access to the Iraq’s oil resources. In this regard, this research analyzes the energy security policies of the governments of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama in order to understand the extent to which these policies were linked to both of these governments’ national security agendas.
