ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the Middle East/North Africa (MENA)-East Asia (EA) relations that have started to attract the widespread attention of analysts can only be properly understood within the context of US hegemony. It also shows that United States (US) hegemony can only be properly appreciated within the context of the world's growing inter-regionalism. In Asia, rising Japan in the 1980s and rising China in the 2000s posed economic challenges to the USA but the sustainability of their challenges depended on free access to MENA energy supplies under US hegemony. The 1990-1991 Gulf war was the watershed event that sensitized Japanese policy-makers, who did not at first take a clear stand with the USA against Iraq, of their need to bandwagon with the USA. As China's rise proceeds, it and the USA each seek to manipulate their mutual economic interdependence while balancing each other in EA.
