ABSTRACT
The break-up of the Soviet Union, the spread of radical Islam, and the rise of oil prices have led several authors to refer to a ‘new great game’ of great power competition in Asia (for example Arvanitopoulos, 1998; Rashid, 2001: Part 3; Klare, 2004). Whether the source of invading hordes or the site of Mackinder’s (1950) ‘geographical pivot of history’, the Asian heartland has always exercised a powerful hold over popular conceptions of power and vulnerability. But leaving aside these dramatic images, there are two intriguing geopolitical trends occurring on the Asian continent, and energy security plays a central role in both. The first trend is that Asia’s sub-regions are increasingly being integrated with each other through flows of commerce and lines of conflict in ways not seen for centuries. It will become less and less viable to think of Asia as a continent of separate subregions, whose links with the outside world are stronger than relations with other Asian sub-regions. A corollary to this is that Asia’s commerce and conflicts have begun to engage outside powers with much greater urgency. The second trend is that despite this growing interdependence and the spread of the insistent logic of the market across Asia, strategic competition is growing among Asia’s emerging great powers and with the United States.
