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4 China plays its own energy
game By M K Bhadrakumar
An influential Chinese scholar and
strategic expert who is an adviser to the Chinese
Communist Party and the Foreign Ministry took the
audience by surprise at an international
conference on energy security in New Delhi last
week by cautioning the world community against
condemning the United States for the anarchic
conditions in Iraq.
He said what was
needed was that all responsible countries
cooperate with the US in stabilizing the Iraq
situation rather than
indulging in vacuous
rhetoric. Even as he spoke, the Chinese Foreign
Ministry was hosting high-level Israeli and
Palestinian delegates for a "Track II" seminar in
Beijing on how to "reignite the peace process" in
the troubled Middle East.
A joint
Israeli-Palestinian statement issued after the
seminar said, "We ask China to take practical
steps to increase its influence in the region,
such as joining the Middle East quartet of the
United States, the European Union, Russia and the
United Nations, in order to make its interest in
stability and peace in the world bear upon the
future of our region."
Israel's former
minister of justice, Yossi Beilin, who attended
the seminar, said China was a country no one in
the world could neglect, and "that's part of the
reason we [Israel] support China to join the
quartet". Beilin described China as "a friend of
peace in the Middle East".
The Chinese
scholar's counsel to be kind toward the United
States' self-inflicted wounds in Iraq, and
Beijing's equidistance between the Israelis and
the Palestinians, is consistent with with the
clear-cut stance China took at the United Nations
Security Council in New York last month in
aligning with the US, France and Britain in
steering the controversial resolution on the
setting up of the international tribunal to
investigate the murder of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri - a move that brought
Hezbollah out to the barricades in Beirut.
The common thread running through all
these delicate diplomatic maneuverings is China's
manifest keenness to give primacy to peace and
stability in the Middle East's political order, no
matter the moral injustice of the status quo or
the ideology of national liberation. In essence,
it boils down to China's energy-security concerns.
The events of the past few weeks have
surely given a dramatic edge to the geopolitics of
energy security. They form a fitting finale to a
tumultuous year, which was ushered in with a bang
after Moscow's decision to shift to market prices
for its energy supplies to the former Soviet
republics. This triggered tensions in Russia's
energy ties with Ukraine on New Year's Day, which
in turn drew severe condemnation of the Kremlin by
Washington, and ultimately prompted the European
powers to prevail on Kiev to negotiate with Moscow
for a realistic settlement.
The tensions
accruing from the Russia-Ukraine spat cast a
shadow all through the year on the deliberations
of virtually all major international forums,
including the Group of Eight summit, the European
Union-Russia summit and the meetings of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the
Commonwealth of Independent States and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The events of the past three to four weeks
underline how these tensions that somehow remained
in the subsoil for most of the year may have begun
welling to the surface, threatening an overflow in
the year ahead, with profound consequences for
global energy security.
To begin with,
energy-related military contingencies are being
talked about seriously for the first time as a
template. Moscow deployed its first regiment of
Topol-M mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs) on active duty in the Ivanovo region in
central Russia this month. Moscow announced last
week that its strategic missile forces were set to
start re-equipping the ICBMs with multiple
re-entry vehicles. While on a visit to the Ivanovo
region on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin
called the deployment a "significant step forward
in improving our defense capabilities".
"Maintaining a strategic balance will mean
that our strategic deterrent forces should be able
to guarantee the neutralization of any potential
aggressor, no matter what modern weapon systems he
possesses," Putin said.
The deployment of
the state-of-the-art mobile Topol-M ballistic
missile, with a liftoff weight of 47.2 tonnes, a
range of more than 10,000 kilometers and
capability of carrying a 1,200-kilogram warhead,
which is immune to electromagnetic impulses and is
credited with the ability to breach any existing
anti-ballistic-missile shield, has been viewed by
at least one prominent Russian defense commentator
as "largely motivated by tougher competition
between the great powers for unimpeded access to
raw materials", including energy resources.
However, it will be long remembered as the
last act on the world stage of the outgoing
chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Richard Lugar, to have torn asunder the
veil of innuendos. He made it clear that when it
comes to the creation of wealth, access to cheap
energy sources is vital, and for securing
unimpeded access, all means are fair - including
military means.
This is of course not
altogether new US thinking. A half-century ago, at
the birth of the Cold War, George Kennan, too, had
