Add energy insecurity to US-China
tensions By Elizabeth Wishnick
In the past year energy has emerged as a
new arena of competition in US-China relations.
Startled by the bid last June by the China
National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) to buy the
California company Unocal, US policymakers have
become further alarmed by what they view as a
pattern of aggressive Chinese oil diplomacy to the
detriment of US interests. This is reflected in a
number of recent official reports.
The
Defense Department's 2006 annual report on Chinese
military power, released last week, asserts that
China's military modernization goes well beyond
the force necessary for a conflict over Taiwan and
represents instead a long-term quest for global
power-projection capabilities.
According
to the report, such a buildup would directly support
China's energy policy by
developing a force capable of securing vital
maritime shipping lanes and enabling Beijing to
leverage access to energy supplies with arms
sales. In its Quadrennial Defense Review,
published in February, and the first such report
since September 11, 2001, the Pentagon highlighted
China as the country with "the greatest potential
to compete with the United States".
The
National Security Strategy, released in March,
pointedly criticized China for its efforts to
"lock up worldwide energy supplies". This followed
similar comments last September by Deputy
Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who challenged
China to reject mercantilist efforts to secure
energy resources and embrace open markets like a
"responsible stakeholder".
Such criticism
shows signs of mercantilism itself - since
mercantilism refers to a zero-sum approach to
trade and is equated with national power.
According to this logic, any successful Chinese
energy acquisition would automatically harm US
interests.
China is now the second-largest
consumer of oil after the United States, though
Americans still consume more than three times as
much oil as the Chinese. According to US Energy
Information Agency projections, in the next decade
Chinese imports will rise to a little more than 10
million barrels per day, about half of current US
consumption.
It is true that China's
energy diplomacy has led it to embrace opponents
of the US, such as Iran and Venezuela, and pay new
attention to US allies such as Saudi Arabia.
However, energy interests are not necessarily the
main driving forces behind Chinese foreign policy.
As a rule, the Chinese government opposes any
sanctions, viewing them as interference in
domestic affairs. They would have been unlikely to
support US efforts to impose them on Iran or Sudan
in the United Nations Security Council regardless
of energy ties with these countries.
Moreover, the United States engages in
many of the same activities that make China a
target of criticism. Despite the US
administration's rhetoric about the
democratization in the Middle East, this policy is
conveniently overlooked when dealing with major
oil producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
Kazakhstan.
More important, what the
Pentagon views as a global power grab could also
be interpreted as China's increasing awareness of
its acute vulnerability to interruption of energy
supplies and corresponding effort to achieve
greater diversification. The September 11 attacks
brought US military forces to China's borders as
US bases were established in Central Asia and
Afghanistan. Then the US invasion of Iraq left
open the possibility of a long-term US military
presence - and greater instability - in the region
that China depends on for about half of its
imported oil.
At the heart of criticism in
the United States of China's energy diplomacy is
the growing alarm in political circles and among
ordinary citizens about rising energy prices.
Actually, the US response has not been that
different from the Chinese approach: expand
supplies and halt plans to add to strategic oil
reserves.
President George W Bush's recent
rhetoric about the current energy crisis in the
United States rings hollow given his
administration's opposition to signing the 1997
Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change, which binds signatories to accept
5% reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions below
their 1990 levels by 2012. The Bush administration
opposes the Kyoto Protocol because developing
states, such as China and India, are exempt from
emission limits, which US officials believe would
place US industries at a disadvantage.
One
might ask if opposition to limits on
carbon-dioxide emissions is the sign of a
"responsible stakeholder". The United States is
currently the largest emitter of carbon dioxide,
while China comes in a distant second, despite
having one-fifth of the world's population and
relying heavily on coal for energy.
But
energy conservation is an area where the United
States and China could achieve cooperation and, in
so doing, reduce their competition over energy
supplies. The Bush administration took a small
step in this direction with its Asia-Pacific
Partnership on Clean Development.
Launched
at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) meeting in Vientiane last July as a
"complement, not an alternative" to the Kyoto
Protocol, the partnership brings together the US,
Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea to
encourage the development of cleaner energy
technologies.
At a ministerial meeting of
the new partnership in Australia in January, US
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that the
Bush administration had requested $52 million in
the fiscal-2007 budget to support its activities.
As long as Americans continue to feel
entitled to inexpensive gasoline and continue to
be outraged by prices of 80 cents per liter, which
any European would consider a bargain, energy
insecurity is likely to skew US foreign policy
goals to the detriment of its relationships with
key powers like China, as well as its other
foreign-policy priorities such as human rights.
China, too, risks going down this road, as
the demands of a booming economy, subsidized
energy costs, and rising private automobile use
promote unsustainable demand. Although in the
short term energy insecurity has introduced a new
source of tension in US-China relations, shared
vulnerabilities require greater cooperation in the
long run.
Elizabeth Wishnick is
an assistant professor of political science at
Montclair State University, New Jersey, and a
research associate at the Weatherhead East Asian
Institute, Columbia University.
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