Gas and Geopolitics in Northeast Asia

The enormous potential of East Asia's energy market has been an American preoccupation almost from the time Secretary of State John Hay proclaimed the Open Door policy in 1900. It even became the theme for an improbably successful novel, Oil for the Lamps of China, by Alice Tisdale Hobart, a bestseller in the United States during the early 1930s. Drawing on her own experiences as the wife of a Standard Oil executive in China, Hobart turned the clash of corporate and Confucian cultures into a drama so compelling that it inspired two Hollywood movies and won her a loyal audience for a dozen other novels, travel books, and a memoir, most of them set in the Far East. Seventy years later, a real-life Asian drama is unfolding about gas and geopolitics that is likely to be unfamiliar even to devotees of financial journalism. This time, Russia, not the United States, is cast in the lead role. With the emergence of Russia as a major oil and gas exporter, China, Japan, and the two Koreas have turned to nearby Russian sources of petroleum in Siberia and Sakhalin Island.