China's Oil Gambit

While our approach in the U.S. to solving our long term oil problems has been largely military, the Chinese have decided to use the Wall Street approach: a top Chinese state owned enterprise has made a bid for Unocal (which includes assets in Asia and Alaska). Chinese oil firms have also expanded their operations globally and signed a long list of agreements with foreign firms and governments, particularly in the less industrialized world (and Russia), where the U.S.A. has not been so feared and disliked since the Viet Nam War period. As the U.S. invasion of Iraq and close ties to Saudi Arabia have made abundantly clear, the struggle for oil is one of the pivotal (if not the pivotal) struggle of the opening of this millenia. China's leadership recognizes this but has decided to take an economic, rather than a military, approach to the contest for access to our planet's key source of human generated energy.