Engaging Today's Global Citizens

Ask the Expert: Energy Security in Asia

We presented a question on energy Security in Asia to Michael Schiffer, a program officer at the Stanley Foundation who works on Asian issues including regional security and energy challenges.

Will the growing demand for fuel in Asia impact regional tensions in Northeast Asia?

—Colin Peterson, Des Moines, Iowa

Not surprisingly, energy consumption trends correlate closely not only with economic growth but with political power as well. Today the United States consumes 23 percent of the energy produced in the world. China consumes 11 percent but, with an economy that has been growing at 9 percent a year for the past decade, is expected to match US energy demand within 20 years. Japan, at a little more than 5 percent of the globe's total, is the fourth greatest energy consumer in the world.

For the United States, Japan, and China, growing competition over finite natural resources such as oil, coal, and natural gas add stress to already complex relationships, forcing all three to manage the balance of power in the Pacific Rim all the more carefully. Japan, for example, consumes five times as much energy as it produces, and relies on oil for almost half its primary energy supplies. With its heavy dependence on Middle Eastern suppliers, energy security is a key issue for Japanese foreign policy and grand strategy. China has been a net oil importer since 1993, and has accounted for some 40 percent of the growth in the world's crude oil demand since 2000. Likewise, with oil imports accounting for nearly a quarter of the US deficit even while dependence on foreign oil has increased, energy security has become an increasingly important issue on the US political agenda as well.

With energy resource competition bringing to a head a particularly toxic combination of political and diplomatic jockeying, history, unsettled territorial disputes, and national interests—played out between states with the ability to acquire and amass significant military capabilities—the failure to create legitimate and equitable structures to mediate disputes, ameliorate divergences, and take into account legitimate interests could well lead to a destabilizing security dilemma for the region. For example: to what degree will a China-Japan rivalry play out in the competition for natural resources, and will this China-Japan rivalry serve as a proxy for China-US competition? A key question here is whether existing institutions will prove competent to the challenge or if new institutions are needed.

The potential for competition, moreover, is not limited to East Asia. All three countries are looking to diversify suppliers and lessen dependence on the Middle East and Persian Gulf Africa—which, with about 8 percent of the world's known oil reserves, has increasingly become a setting for intense energy competition.

Friction in energy competition is also generated by mounting political tensions and diplomatic competition between the United States, China, and Japan given the authoritarian nature of many energy suppliers, and the US global role in securing the sea lanes through which most of the world's energy supplies flow.

Looking more optimistically, energy and natural resources need not be purely a source of friction between the powers of East Asia, but could become areas of cooperation and reconciliation. Mutual interests in the area of energy—such as increasing supply and reducing cost—could prove an impetus for cooperation as US, Japanese, and Chinese economic and security interests are increasingly interrelated.