Natural Resource Diplomacy and Energy Security in East Asia: Prospects for Cooperation and Conflict.

Many scholars and policymakers alike argue that securing scarce energy resources is the single most important challenge facing a country’s national security today (Klare, 2004; 2002). In the United States, much of the energy security dialogue focuses on the scarcity of oil (see Deffeyes, 2001; Goodstein, 2004; Mitchell, 2001), and specifically the threat posed by China’s recent efforts to buy up energy reserves around the world (Ebel, 2005). Yet this narrow (and one-sided) security focus misses the larger development and environmental issues that are linked to a country’s energy security policy. This project proposes to rectify this problem by completing a multi-state analysis of the emerging competition over a variety of energy and natural resources in East Asia in order to understand prospects for cooperation and competition in natural resource diplomacy. This work builds upon first-hand evidence collected in interviews with U.S. government personnel and field work in East Asia which indicate that there is a need to put energy security into its broader regional, economic, and environmental contexts. This work extends the research featured in my recent book focusing on the U.S.-China bilateral relationship, Making China Policy: From Nixon to G.W. Bush (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005), by taking a new turn principally to address the foreign energy policy orientations of multiple states within East Asia in comparative perspective. This study proposes to make two major contributions from previous scholarly studies. First, it moves beyond the narrow U.S.-China competition rubric in the energy security debate to take a broader comparative and substantive approach which evaluates the politics over the development of energy and natural resources in Asia. Second, by focusing on the nexus between national security policy, development strategies, and economic policymaking, this study looks beyond traditional national security issues and bridges the “high” (or national security focus) versus “low” (or economic policy focus) divide to wholistically evaluate the domestic and international consequences of a country’s energy policy. The working premise of this study is that energy security and competition for natural resources more broadly need not be cast in deterministic terms that anticipate conflict among states. In fact, focusing on the formulation of the national energy strategies of various states and thus how the energy security policy debate is framed and proceeds in each context (i.e., the internal policymaking processes) provides a way to contextualize the energy security policies of multiple states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]