JAPAN AND THE CASPIAN OIL

Abstract

In recent years Tokyo has shown a considerable interest in the Caspian oil reserves. This is partly due to a prolonged rise in world energy prices, leading to a growth of return on energy production and encouraging investments, including Japanese, in energy production and transportation. Also, in 2003 the Japanese economy has shown definite signs of recovery from its prolonged recession, with a renewed interest in the new energy sources, in order to ensure a stable growth for the Japanese economy in the 21st century. On the political front, the Japanese ruling elite is convinced that the role of the Caspian states in the country’s foreign policy will grow, as indicated in the “Eurasian diplomacy” concept voiced by Prime Minister Hashimoto in 1997.
 Japan is alarmed by continued instability in the Middle East. Fifty-five percent of the country’s energy resources are accounted for by the imports from the Middle East, whereas 85 percent of oil used in Japan is of Middle Eastern origin,1 mainly from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar and Kuwait. Following the events of 9/11, the subsequent complications in the relations between the West and the oil monarchies of the Gulf; the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which received a mixed reaction in the Arab world; the claims that America (the senior partner of Japan on the world scene) lays to Iran’s nuclear program, and the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict—prompted Tokyo to seek new energy imports, particularly oil.
 It seems that, on the whole, Tokyo’s interest in the Caspian oil is prompted by an interest dis-played by the Western countries and transnational corporations. Caspian energy resources development is viewed as the most reliable way of including the region in free market and preventing political and economic upheavals, which the West would like to avoid. Energy export revenues should be used to develop the economy of the Caspian states, to ease the transition to a market economy and sustainable economic growth. With regard to international relations, oil revenues should encourage the ruling elit-es of the Caspian states to provide political stability. In other words, their desire to keep the revenues and their fear to lose them, should help prevent religious and ethnic strife and separatist movements, as plentiful in the Caspian as energy reserves. One of the goals here is to limit Islamic radicalism, in particular, to prevent Iran from solving the Caspian issues, which is seen as one of the pressure points for the Muslim world.
 Tokyo is aware that while developing oil and gas reserves in the Caspian, the U.S. is playing “the Caspian Gambit,” to build on Brzezinski’s “grand chess board” image. This in turn will affect the Caspian countries-Russia relations, while the balance of power in Central Asia and the Caucasus is drifting away from Moscow toward the West. At the same time, it seems that Tokyo’s interest in the Caspian is less political than that of the U.S. and Great Britain, whose influence in the region has grown since the