“Classic free riders”

Following the announcement of peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis on an ambitious nine month timetable Daniel Altman examines how Asia and Europe is increasingly involved in the outcome of the talks and the entire Middle East itself.

He writes that “Monthly imports of crude oil and other petroleum products from the Persian Gulf peaked at 96.7 million barrels in April 2001. This year, they’ve been hovering around 50 million to 60 million barrels. Natural gas imports from the Middle East are also much smaller today than they were in 2000, but they’ve always been dwarfed by pipeline imports from Canada. Even American imports of liquefied natural gas — a major export for Qatar and Yemen — come primarily from Trinidad and Tobago. And overall, imports of natural gas have been falling since 2007. Petroleum imports from the Middle East aren’t as important as they used to be for the European Union, either. In 2001, about 25 percent of the EU’s imports came from the Middle East. Last year, the share was just 15 percent; Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union supply far more of Europe’s oil. So where is all the Middle East’s oil going? Countries in East Asia depend on it. China, for example, got about half its crude from the Middle East in 2011″.

Of course China is now the world’s largest importer of oil after the United States. Others have written that US energy independence may not automatically mean an America that should turn its back on the world.

Altman makes the point that “As a whole, the European Union received about 4.4 percent of its merchandise imports from Gulf countries in 2012. Adding Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey brought the total to 8.3 percent. Both of these shares have been increasing in recent years. Meanwhile, China’s total trade with the Middle East has been growing steadily, too; imports from the region tripled between 2007 and 2011″.

He ends the article, “So where are the Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese? They may be active behind the scenes, but in public they look like classic free riders. Perhaps they see little to gain by involving themselves in conflicts whose economic consequences have been largely contained. They may also, as a general rule, have less of an interventionist attitude than the United States. Still, in economic terms their people arguably have more at stake in the Middle East than Americans do, and the gap between those interests is likely to increase. If Washington’s latest effort to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together fails, it may be a long time before an American president takes the initiative in the Middle East again. War and frustration have taken their toll, and the economic imperative is far from clear. To fill the vacuum, China, Japan, and the European Union could form a new coalition of partners for peace. It may seem like a stretch to imagine these three heavyweights working together on Egypt, Syria, or Jerusalem. But can they afford not to?”