February 28, 2006
Its Neck is Laid Between the Sword and the Block
The title comes from a longer Kahlil Gibran quote, which appropriately enough also contains, "Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress."
I noticed a very interesting piece from Monday's Washington Post today:
The United States is ready to help Malaysia boost security in the vital Malacca Strait once it concludes a pact on joint air patrols with other littoral states, a U.S. defense commander said on Monday.
And I was pointed to this article from the Associated Press, back in October of 2005 last semester:
In November 2003 Hu [Jintao] told a major economic conference the country had to adopt a revised strategy to deal with the possibility that foreign countries might try to control the Straits of Malacca, the funnel for 80% of Chinese oil imports, mostly from the Persian Gulf and West Africa .The official Xinhua News Agency reported that Hu said the strategy was necessary because "some big countries attempted to control the
transportation channel at Malacca."[...]
"The dependence of China on Middle Eastern crude is very high and will continue to be so," he said. "This means the security of the Malacca Strait is going to be a very high Chinese priority."
Some commentators maintain that China is already moving to secure its Middle Eastern supply chain, developing a "string of pearls" of bases and alliances between the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca, just to the south of its major oil ports.
Major elements in the chain, they say, include a new naval base in the Pakistani port of Gwadar , an electronics listening site on a Burmese island near Malacca's western approach, and substantial investment in upgrading the operational readiness of the Chinese navy.
Nearly all the oil imports for China, Korea, and Japan flow through the Malacca Straits. Since none of those countries have any oil of their own, you can remove "imports" from that sentence without changing the truth value one bit.
Quite a valuable strip of water, that. The country that controls that channel could pretty much dictate terms to the entire East Asian region.
Posted by ben at February 28, 2006 07:12 PM