President Obama’s recent visit to Asia sparked a renewed flurry of headlines about the “pivot to Asia” that supposedly would mark the president’s second term. Underlying shifts in the global economy are moving the focus of U.S. attention from Europe to Asia, the recent crisis in Ukraine notwithstanding. Yet talk of a “pivot” is misplaced and even simplistic; key U.S. relationships with strategic and commercial partners will undoubtedly evolve but in a globalized world cannot be addressed in isolation from one another. The convergence of U.S. ties and Asian ties with the Middle East is a case in point that highlights how regions and issues are interconnected as never before.
Far from signalling a shift “away” from the Middle East in policymaking importance, the region is in fact the pivot around which the broader rebalancing of U.S. policy is taking place. This is injecting new considerations into the formulation of U.S. foreign and security policy while also changing the manner of U.S. engagement with issues and partners across the Middle East. While core U.S. interests in the region remain firmly in place, the emergence of new international players with strong energy and commercial interests in the Middle East is introducing greater complexity into the conduct of U.S. policy toward the area. This will require officials in Washington to flexibly adapt their regional approaches to policymaking.
Both geographically and by virtue of the Gulf states’ hydrocarbon reserves and capital accumulation, the Middle East has been, and will remain, central to the global economy even with the rise of tight oil and shale gas in the Western hemisphere. In a global era characterized by accelerating interconnections within and across regions, the Gulf states have emerged as the center of gravity within both a Middle East in transition and an international economy still recovering from the global financial crisis. Issues such as energy dependence and security of access to resources are expanding the networks of external partners with a direct stake in the region’s stability and security.
Significantly, these include the developed and emerging Asian economies that are leading the broader rebalancing of geoeconomic power. Indeed, whereas the U.S. has steadily reduced its reliance on Middle East energy over the past decade and a half, Pacific Asia has grown steadily more dependent on imported energy over the same period. China and India have joined Japan and South Korea as voracious consumers of Gulf oil and gas that now goes east in far larger quantities than west. A report by the French think tank IFRI found that in 2010, Gulf states’ exports to Japan, South Korea, China and India were more than three times larger than to the U.S. and European Union, and the figure is set to grow over the decade.
Crucially, the recipient states with some of the highest dependencies on Gulf energy are those that are commonly projected as forming the focus of any U.S. “pivot.” The U.S. has a powerful set of overlapping interests with Asian partners when engaging with the Middle East. With Asian economies all looking to the Gulf as a stable and long-term supplier of oil and gas, a nexus of shared U.S.-Middle East-Asian interest is coalescing around the security of supply through international sea lanes and regional chokepoints in addition to the maintenance of regional stability more generally. These are substantive ties that can bind U.S., Middle Eastern and Asian interests and soothe the surface tensions that recently have marred U.S.-Gulf relations, particularly with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
There is some irony when officials in the Gulf express concern about the prospect of the U.S. diverting attention to Asia, for they are doing exactly the same. As the geopolitics of the Middle East evolve in tandem with the deeper structural changes to the global economy, gaps may emerge between U.S.-oriented political and security relationships and the shift in international trading and geostrategic interests. Yet, in a world of energy interdependence, officials should resist the temptation to view regional or international relations as a zero-sum game and acknowledge instead the set of common interests that can better align policy formulation in the U.S., Gulf and Asian capitals.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Ph.D., is the Baker Institute fellow for Kuwait. His research examines the changing position of Persian Gulf states in the global order, as well as the emergence of longer-term, nonmilitary challenges to regional security. He is also a visiting fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and an associate fellow at Chatham House in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter at @Dr_Ulrichsen.
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