At the Moscow summit in late May, U.S. President George Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement on Russian-American economic cooperation. They committed themselves to cooperation in the field of energy "aimed at strengthening global energy security and stabilization of energy supplies" through "new projects" in "oil and gas development, transport, port development and manufacturing technology."
Such cooperation must be realized in Russia's Siberia and Far East regions that are rich in energy resources. This raises the hope that the Bush administration has come to an important conclusion: Russian-American cooperation in the Russian East should be expanded rapidly to help contain China's influence in the Russian East and end U.S. and Western reliance on Persian Gulf oil.
First steps
The new U.S. focus on Russian Asia was underscored when ExxonMobil announced during the summit a $140 million contract with Russia's Amur Shipbuilding Plant to refurbish an oil drilling platform to be used off Russia's Sakhalin Island in the northwest Pacific. ExxonMobil has already invested several billion dollars in the Sakahlin-1 oil and gas extraction project. Amur and Sakhalin are located in Russia's desolate and impoverished Far East.
Hidden Dragon
The Far East and the neighboring eastern Siberia are underpopulated, lacking in infrastructure and are subject to creeping colonization by Chinese immigrants and business interests. Fears of an eventual Chinese takeover of Russia's East, militarily or otherwise, are rife in Russia and should be the same in the United States.
The weakness of Russia's vast and multinational federation, lacking in financial resources and thus the capacity to buy off its various nationalists and control the country's hemispheric-scale territory, means the danger of Russia's disintegration remains real.
Russia's eastern regions do not need to secede or be annexed by China for Beijing to acquire priority access to their natural resources. The hegemony of Chinese business and investments in the region - getting there first - could lock the United States out.
As the Chinese economy ex-pands and Sino-Russian cooperation deepens, there is a risk of Moscow becoming economically dependent on Beijing - a dependence that Russia's arms industries already feel. In short, the stage is gradually being set for China's possible expropriation of this region's vast energy sources.
Russia's declining sovereignty over its East comes just as a still-authoritarian China is poised to emerge as the main challenger to American supremacy in the 21st century. For this reason alone, the United States must engage a strategy of buttressing Russia's sovereignty over its East and its vast natural resources to prevent them from coming under Beijing's domination.
A Russian alternative
The instability in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf states' apparent indifference toward - if not support for - U.S. adversaries in the war on terrorism add another imperative for such a policy. It has become clear that U.S. reliance on oil supplies from these unsavory, uncooperative and, in the mid- to long-term, unviable regimes and the price dictates of OPEC is a serious Achilles' heel that must be addressed.
The new Russian-American rapprochement since Sept. 11 belatedly brought to the surface in Washington the idea of diluting OPEC's control over oil prices and attenuating our relations with shady Gulf sheikdoms by leveraging our growing ties to Russia and the other energy-rich post-Soviet states.
With Russia, the United States should then help exploit the region's energy resources for mutual security and economic benefits. This will support a third U.S. national-security imperative: stabilizing Russia and integrating it into the West.
Strategic planning
The Moscow summit's joint statement on energy strongly suggests that the United States has finally understood. The Bush administration apparently has concluded correctly that Russian-American cooperation in Russia's East should rapidly expand in order to achieve these three vital geostrategic security goals. The joint statement on a "New Russian-American Energy Dialogue" accompanying the statement on overall economic cooperation detailed the goals of such cooperation including, among others: the promotion of price stability for energy by ensuring supply; greater global access to Russian fuel and energy by developing and modernizing Russian ports, transport infrastructure, and refining and manufacturing plants; and most interestingly from the geostrategic perspective, assistance for investment to develop and modernize the fuel and energy sectors, in particular, for expanding oil and gas extraction in eastern Siberia and the Far East.
On the Russian side, there is a growing sense of realism that its economic future depends in great part on attracting a good deal more foreign direct investment into the energy sector in Russian Asia.
There is also a growing sense that Russia needs to integrate its energy and transport infrastructures with those of the Asia-Pacific region. It is not clear that the Russian elite includes the United States among its future key partners in the region.
The noted Sakhalin-1 project is but an inkling of the kind of enterprise needed in Russia's East in order to achieve American and Russian goals. Energy policy must be a tool of American foreign policy.
The Bush administration immediately must begin developing options for stimulating U.S. companies to invest in developing the Russian East's capacity to extract and deliver energy resources efficiently to U.S. markets across the Pacific. It should pressure the Russian government to liberalize the production-sharing regime in return for these and other investments.
Cross-Pacific routes
Investments in energy and transport in Russian Asia could also be pursued; for example building pipelines to Russian Far East ports, such as Nakhodka and Vladivostok, and connecting them later to export pipelines. This would allow first sea, and later rail, oil transport across the Pacific and Bering Strait.
The United States should support the formation of an international consortium, which would include Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea and perhaps others, to build by 2025 an electric high-speed rail tunnel across the 55-mile-wide Bering Strait (less than twice the distance of the British-French "Chunnel"). If Russian Asia's energy and transportation infrastructure can be developed for transport, trade and tourism by such time, then by mid-century Russia and her partners will be benefiting enormously from this transport and trade tie.
After Sept. 11, Russia and the United States have begun to see more clearly that their main threats come from the east and the south. Common threats mean the two countries now have vital common interests. Those interests should form the basis for growing cooperation from military affairs to energy policy and from Siberia to California and beyond.
Dr. Gordon M. Hahn is The Russia Journal's political analyst and a visiting research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.