Page 2 of 4 China plays its own energy
game By M K Bhadrakumar
spoken of the oilfields in Arabia as "our
resources", and had asserted the unquestionable
right and prerogative of the US to control these
resources by any political, diplomatic and
military means. [1]
As the world moves
further away from ideological divides, and if it
becomes truly possible to analyze the origins of
the Cold War, only then may we aspire to know to
what extent the so-called Iron
Curtain was a deliberate
polemical digression, or how central oil was to
the orchestration of East-West tensions.
Lugar's speech on November 27 in Riga,
Latvia, was important as it was made in the nature
of a keynote address at an event sponsored on the
sidelines of the NATO summit by the German
Marshall Fund of the United States. In the
presence of NATO leaders, he urged that the
Atlantic alliance should be used as an instrument
for exerting pressure on energy-producing
countries to prevent them from using energy as a
geopolitical weapon.
Lugar identified
energy scarcity and "manipulation" as the most
likely source of armed conflict in the decades
ahead and he called on NATO to prepare for
preemptive roles aimed at ensuring collective
energy security. He listed US expectations:
energy-producing countries should reliably supply
their resources in market conditions to "those who
need them"; evacuation and transportation routes
to the market must be kept secure; energy cartels
threatening to limit supplies or manipulate
markets shouldn't be allowed to be formed; and
energy-rich countries should permit unhindered
foreign energy investments.
Lugar made it
clear that he was principally targeting Russian
energy policies, though he also flagged that large
industrializing countries such as China and India
were heavily adding to global demand, and that
within decades there might not be adequate
accessible sources of oil and gas to sustain the
continued economic growth of the industrialized
West.
In a startling proposal, Lugar
concluded that NATO should review its alliance
obligations, taking into account the issues of
energy security. Obliquely referring to
Polish-German acrimony over Germany's North Sea
Gas Pipeline project with Russia and to the trend
of European countries according national
priorities to energy security rather than to a
unified European stance, Lugar warned that NATO
faced the risk of "disintegration" unless it was
allowed to take the lead in tackling the divisive
issues of energy security.
Lugar argued
that NATO's Article 5 (treating an armed attack
against any member country as an attack against
all) should be invoked in contingencies such as a
cutoff in energy supplies and threat perceptions
of the use of energy as a weapon, and for
developing and securing alternatives to existing
pipeline routes.
It is immaterial that
NATO didn't formally adopt Lugar's
recommendations. The summit was doubtless
preoccupied with the Afghan problem. But no one
present contradicted the vastly experienced and
influential US senator, either. Furthermore, Lugar
was only expanding on a recent confidential NATO
study whose report warned that Russia might be
seeking to build a gas cartel including Algeria,
Libya, Qatar, Iran and the Central Asian states.
(Early last month, the International Energy Agency
warned of "the possibility of major gas-exporting
countries coordinating their investment and
production plans in order to avoid surplus
capacity and to keep gas prices up".)
Energy roads lead to China It
is of course possible to see what Lugar said as a
US bid to use NATO as a mechanism to prevent
Europe from drifting away. Europe's reluctance to
play a global role in energy security remains a
matter of frustration for Washington. But the US
has met greater success in recent weeks with the
principal-energy consuming nations of Asia -
China, Japan, South Korea and India. It is a
singular success of US energy diplomacy that
Washington was able to get Beijing not only to
sign in but to host the first-ever conference of
Asian energy-consuming countries on Saturday.
The ministerial-level meet was hosted by
China immediately after the first session of the
strategic economic dialogue between China and the
US in Beijing. If political symbolism was needed,
Beijing was signaling that it was perfectly
willing to work with the US as a responsible power
eager to contribute to global energy security.
China evidently relishes the huge
attention that Washington has been paying lately
in building up a strategic economic dialogue with
Beijing. Indeed, US Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson, who co-chaired the US-China dialogue in
Beijing, hailed it as a platform for the countries
to cope with strategic issues in their economic
relationship. The delegation accompanying Paulson
included as many as 10 cabinet secretaries, as
well as the chairman of the US Federal Reserve
Bank and the US trade representative. A Xinhua
dispatch boasted, "The world is watching: nearly
half the Bush administration is in Beijing."
A Chinese Foreign Ministry statement
announcing Saturday's energy summit emphasized
that the meet aimed at promoting "dialogue and
partnership" among the five participants in energy
security, and that China hoped to "intensify
dialogue and cooperation among the world's major
energy consumers". Apart from energy consumption,
use of renewable and alternative energy sources
and environmental concerns, a ministry spokesman
said, "We hope the meeting can help related
countries to promote
