China's energy needs drive it to settle globalization's Gap

I ran across this story from the Financial Times (Subscription required, but Ethioblog has posted the entire article here for our convenience). According to the article, China has just won permission from the Somali government to search for oil in the country.

As I noted in an earlier post this year, China supported our intervention in Somalia, arguing that the US had a legal basis to intervene in the form of a request by the internationally recognized TFG. I also argued that while China's support demonstrated that we had complementary interests in the region, it also showed the great interest China placed on finding alternate energy sources. This due to a 1991 report which suggested that there may be large deposits of oil and natural gas under Somali territory.

As Tom Barnett has argued having China in Africa is good thing, because it furthers our own strategic interests. As he puts it,

China's investment presence inside the Gap limits our liability there. The Chinese "unilaterally" engage in SysAdmin just like we unilaterally engage in Leviathan work. Each side limits the other's liability. We just don't recognize yet the symbiotic nature of this relationship.

One interesting aspect to note here with regard to China's new oil exploration deal is something Tom wrote about during the course of his New Map Game in June 2005. In that post, Tom noted this:

1) the Chinese see the SysAdmin role as a potential market-conquering function for themselves: U.S. sets the table with Leviathan and Chinese SysAdmin effort eats the meal;

This is exactly what seems to be taking place in Somalia. The US and Ethiopia went into Somalia, took out the ICU, hunted down the few al Qaeda elements believed to be in hiding there, and China gets the first oil exploration deal.

Still as noted in the first quote, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since it does begin the process of reconnecting Somalia to the globalized economy, and provides the government with additional revenue to begin the reconstruction of that devastated country. How successful China will be, will likely be limited by events on the ground in Somalia as well. So far, the Somalia Peace Conference is not getting up to a good start, and was postponed soon after starting this Sunday. It is slated to resume on Thursday. Given that many of the Islamists driven from power, have found refuge in Eritrea, the signs that the conflict will end any time soon, do not seem good. However, looking at China's business dealings in Sudan, it is safe to say that if there is oil in Somalia, they will be there for the long run. In essence, China is settling globalization's frontier, the problem for us now is, how can we use this to our advantage.

As the FT article notes, this deal will have its share of problems, not only did ConocoPhillips, Amoco, now part of BP; and Chevron hold most of the exploration concessions in 1980's Somalia but in the past two years, the interim government has awarded competing concessions to other players. That means, that if Somalia stabilizes enough to allow them to come back, they will likley challenge China's exploration rights. Still, since China is unlikely to wait for the security situation to improve and will start to exercise its rights soon, that may be a moot point.