Center for a New American Security

For those who did not tune in last week, this is a new feature to highlight the top tweets of the week to hit my Twitter feed (@wmrogers). The list is completely subjective, of course, but I hope it is helpful to readers interested in following natural security news a little bit closer.

The American Enterprise Institute @AEI: “Global warming doesn’t rank at or near the top of issues people want the president and Congress to address ow.ly/an01c.”

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published a compilation of polls on the environment and energy, highlighting public opinion on a range of issues, from nuclear energy, the Keystone XL pipeline to global climate change. The findings are instructive, but I don’t necessarily agree with the analysis that AEI makes about some of the issues. For example, the report notes that “Global warming doesn’t rank at or near the top of issues people want the president and Congress to address. In January 2012, 25 percent said global warming should be a top priority, ranking at the bottom in terms of top priorities.” But read another way, a quarter of Americans find that global climate change should be the top priority for U.S. policymakers. Given the litany of challenges the country faces, isn’t it still substantial that 25 percent of Americans want action taken to address climate change and consider it a top priority? Regardless, the report is worth a read and you can make up your own mind about what it all means.

MIT Professor M. Taylor Fravel @fravel: “India says oil, gas cooperation with Vietnam in the East Sea will continuej.mp/J7TcoC.”

Professor Fravel tweets that India will continue to cooperate with Vietnam to exploit energy resources in Vietnam’s East Sea (also known as the South China Sea), despite objections from China. This has been a huge source of tension recently between India and China. China objects to “outsiders” getting engaged in the South China Sea dispute – an area that China claims is its territorial sea.  (To learn more, read this post I wrote in September on India’s South China Sea gambit.)

One of the challenges with writing a paper like “The Role of Natural Resources in the South China Sea,” one of six chapters that appears in our new report, Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South China Sea, is to make it accessible to a broad audience (i.e., those intimately familiar with resource issues in the region and those who know nothing about those issues at all). To do that I chose to avoid narrow recommendations that would have distracted the reader from the broader message I hoped to convey: that despite the complexity of resource challenges in the region (and potential for conflict), the United States can encourage policies that help promote peaceful competition over resources in the South China Sea, and thereby promote regional stability.

But for those interested, I’d like to share some ideas for how U.S. policymakers can encourage cooperation around several of the issues that I explore in the paper, beginning with energy. As I argue in the paper, the United States needs to focus beyond energy and give attention to fisheries, minerals and climate change, which are important resource issues that affect geopolitical behavior in the Asia-Pacific region. But I thought it would be good to start with energy, given that that’s where a lot of attention has been and is likely to be in the near future (for better or worse). Here’s what I would propose:

First, the United States should propose that APEC measure the hydrocarbon resources in the South China Sea in order to develop more realistic estimates.

Countries in the region are growing increasingly suspicious of unilateral efforts to survey oil and natural gas in contested territorial waters, in part because they may signal that the surveying country intends to develop those resources on its own – including in contested waters. For example, in May 2011, China severed the cables of an oil and natural gas survey vessel in Vietnam’s territorial waters. A similar incident in June 2011 involved a Chinese fishing boat ramming a Vietnamese survey ship. (Visit our Flashpoints feature for more information about these and other incidents.)

In January, CNAS will release its study on the South China Sea, including a chapter on how natural resources affect the behavior of states in the region. There has been a lot of attention paid to natural resources and whether or not competition over access to oil, natural gas, fisheries and minerals could lead to conflict in the region. Too often the issues are over-simplified though, and there is either an implicit or explicit assumption that it’s competition over natural resources that could lead to overt conflict. But natural resources have a more nuanced role in international relations, particularly in the South China Sea, and understanding this role can actually enable states to manage their resource issues and avoid instability and conflict.

Competition over natural resources is rarely, if ever, the sole precipitator of conflict. [There is a vast literature on this topic, and though I won’t develop a literature review here, there are some notable sources worth exploring, including the work by our friends at Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and their New Security Beat blog.] Instead, tensions related to competition over natural resources have the potential to exacerbate existing diplomatic or political grievances between states, which can contribute to instability or conflict.  But there are ways to relieve tensions over natural resources. Indeed, where competition over natural resources appears to lead to instability or conflict, it is more often than not a proxy for other challenges states are facing, particularly with governance or other related trends.

China is just one of the many East and Southeast Asian states that continues to pursue nuclear power in the wake of the March 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station. But China, like most other states with nuclear reactors or aspirations, has not been blithe about the Fukushima crisis. According to The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, “China was one of the world's fastest-growing nuclear markets before the March disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power facility.” That changed in March when “China's State Council, China's cabinet, ordered a suspension of approvals for new nuclear plants and began a nationwide nuclear-safety review as public fear over nuclear power widened after the Fukushima Daiichi incident.”

To help China improve its safety standards and develop other expertise, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S.-based Exelon Corps – which provides support services to the nuclear industry – will partner with China’s state-owned China National Nuclear Corps (CNNC), a move, the Journal says, that suggests that “China's secretive state-owned nuclear companies are determined to learn Western safety practices and other expertise in the aftermath of Japan's nuclear incident in March.”

Tomorrow, CNAS will formally launch Hard Choices: Responsible Defense in an Age of Austerity, at an event at the Newseum beginning at 8:30 AM. If you’re in downtown Washington, I strongly recommend stopping by. Along with the authors LTG David Barno, USA (Ret.), Dr. Nora Bensahel and Travis Sharp, Thomas Donnelly (of AEI) and Gordon Adams (of the Stimson Center) will discuss the critical question facing policymakers on Capitol Hill today: How can the United States responsibly and effectively maximize its security in this era of growing fiscal austerity?

Hard Choices does yeoman’s work in highlighting the implications of tough budget cuts on America's military capabilities and is a must-read for anyone who truly wants to understand the debate that is playing out on the Hill and across the river at the Pentagon. The report outlines four scenarios for defense budget reductions, with each scenario reflecting more defense cuts, and analyzes the strategic implications for the U.S. military under each example.

For me, one of the hallmarks of the report is the emphasis on the need to rethink U.S. defense strategy as it currently stands and the careful articulation of where U.S. priorities should be. “The United States has pursued a remarkably consistent military strategy over the past 65 years, although different American leaders have adopted varying approaches to national security,” the report states.

As you know, Christine Parthemore is traveling in East Asia where she is conducting research for our South China Sea project. She’s in Vietnam today, and she has put together the Natural Security News for us this morning…Vietnam Edition:

All from Viet Nam News:

• While the government has hoped to get private businesses to invest in reforestation, one top story explained that it has been ineffective.
• In raw materials news, the government will now require that steel producers increase their reserves as a hedge against future supply and price problems – a move not popular with the producers thus far.
• Vietnam’s Ministry of Industry and Trade is invoking the time-proven method of holding energy contests, this one for energy efficiency.
• Officials are warning that some waterways have become so polluted and saline that alternative sources of drinking water should be sought.
• Finally, though resources are not mentioned directly in the front page article on East Sea talks in Jakarta wrapping up, we all know they played a role; this article signals affirmation for a multilateral approach to the region’s maritime issues and other key facets of ASEAN cooperation.

Christine is in Asia this week to conduct research for the South China Sea project the Natural Security team is working on with some of our CNAS colleagues. One place she’ll be visiting during her time abroad is the Lower Mekong River Basin (LMRB), an area shared by Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. The LMRB was recently in the news when Laos’s plan to build a hydropower dam sparked tensions with its neighbors. Having researched this for our South China Sea project, it’s worth discussing some of what we’ve learned.

First, what makes the river so important? The river serves as a lifeline for the region’s 60 million people in two ways: agricultural production (primarily rice) and fisheries. Together these two industries employ 85 percent of the population and feed nearly everyone. While it is well known how important rice is in the daily diets for people from these countries, perhaps less known is how important fish is as well. In Cambodia, for instance, fish accounts for 80 percent of the nation’s total animal protein consumption. It’s therefore no trivial matter that the lower Mekong River, the world’s largest inland fish source, accounts for 20 percent of the world’s freshwater fish.

The river’s importance and the shared threat China’s economic growth may pose to the river have led Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand to, in general, adopt a cooperative approach in developing the region’s water resources. In 1957, these states established the Mekong Committee, which existed until 1995 when it was supplemented and expanded by the Mekong River Commission. These regional organizations have provide a forum to resolve any controversies that arise, the most recent example being Laos’s decision to delay the construction of a new dam project.

We have spent some time this week assessing the challenges in the South China Sea, and you’ll be seeing a lot more from us on this issue over the next year. But I wanted to wrap up the week by reiterating a point that Christine made yesterday in her post: there has been an increasing emphasis on integrating resource-related cooperation into relationships with our allies and emerging partners. As challenges such as the South China Sea continue to unfold, one place to watch in particular will be Vietnam.

Vietnam is clearly emerging as a strategic partner in the region, made clear by the boosting of military cooperation between the U.S. military and the Vietnam People’s Army. Just last month, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr. spoke with members of the Vietnamese military after visiting a military academy near Dalat, Vietnam (pictured here), the first time in 30 years that a sitting Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army visited Vietnam.

Navigating the challenges in the South China Sea, as well as other regional issues, is going to be better served by stronger partnerships, both military and diplomatic, with states such as Vietnam that have mutual interest in cooperation over resources and territorial challenges in the South China Sea, as well as helping to build the capacity to adapt to the looming implications of global climate change. We’ll continue to watch how Natural Security cooperation fits into the broader strategic partnerships the U.S. government is forming throughout the region.

Photo: Courtesy of D. Myles Cullen and the U.S. Army.