Asia’s 21st Century ‘Pax ASEAN-Ameri-China’

A Pan-Asian Gas Pipeline is merely the beginning.

Down the track (2035 or so, possibly earlier), high capacity power lines could be laid parallel to a Pan-Asian Gas Pipeline. That would open the way for development of offshore wind, wave and ocean thermal energy development when the gas starts to run dry.

ASEAN's ASCOPE's already developed a plan along these lines as well. It's called the Trans-ASEAN electricity grid. It's another big ASEAN project gathering dust.

A Pan-Asian Gas Pipeline modeled on the Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline and later paralleled by a Trans-ASEAN Electricity Grid would create an interconnected Asian energy market serving two billion people.

It would be the biggest market the world has ever known. The catalytic upward effects on regional and global economic growth are impossible to overstate.

Among other things, it would finally bring online the roughly 100 million people in Asia who still lack electricity. A more worthwhile goal is hard to imagine.

With transparent markets arbitrating energy resource access, development and delivery decisions in the South China Sea, regional navy assets now deployed for water cannon fights and protective flotillas can be shifted to providing security for infrastructure and access for trade.

In their spare time, cooperating navies could shift efforts to reducing illegal fishing, drug trafficking and people smuggling. They could also provide humanitarian aid for natural disasters like earthquakes and typhoons common to Asia.

Major military bases fringe the South China Sea. These are located on China's Hainan Island, at Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay, on Indonesia's Natuna Island, at Subic Bay on the Philippine Island of Luzon and on Taiwan's south coast port of Tsoying.

These bases are ideally situated for providing cooperative, multilateral security for energy development, fisheries patrol, smuggling enforcement and humanitarian aid. And this is just the kind of confidence-building, cooperation-enhancing tasks they need.

Moves along these lines are underway.

The US Navy recently took part in Chinese organized maneuvers off China's Hainan Island. China's Navy recently participated in the US organized RIMPAC maneuvers off the US state of Hawaii. US, Chinese, and Australian troops recently undertook joint maneuvers in North Australia.