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

This dovetails with China's Six Priorities for relations with the United States. China's invited the US to become involved in both the AIIB and SIlk Road projects. China and US both stress their respective political commitments to improving military ties.

The world is now a pivot point in history. Twenty-five years after the fall of Communism and roughly 36 years after China's opening to the world, we're all capitalists now. The 'the world's business is business.'

It's time to start acting that way. Contrary to what the generals and military contractors claim, there's more money and geopolitical benefit in positive-sum peace than negative-sum war. That is, at least for the common man.

America's post war Marshall Plan and the 1957 creation of the European Union's precursor (the Coal and Steel Community) offer worthwhile analogies here. China's AIIB already is being referred to as a kind of regional post World War II Marshall Plan.

But a better analogy for Grenatec's proposed South China Sea Joint Development Areas connected to a Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure is the 1951 creation of the Franco/German-led European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).

The aim of that agreement was to entwine two vital post war French and German industries so deeply that a new war between the two became unthinkably impractical. The result has been more than a half century of peace, rising incomes, expanding membership, and vasty broadened trade in Western Europe.

The parallel between the 1951 creation of the ECSC and the potential presented by a multilateral Pan-Asian Gas Pipeline connecting Joint Development Areas in the South China Sea is uncanny. It tethers everyone in Asia to a common-watering hole that rewards cooperation.