Tony Blair Pivots to Asia.

'Tony Blair will fly into Beijing next month to take part in high-profile Chinese commemorations of the end of the second world war....Since leaving office in 2007 Blair has nurtured his ties with Beijing, making repeated trips to China to meet with senior Communist party leaders..his memoir, A Journey, was published here in 2011.' 

'The relationship between government and governed in China is changing, and for the better'-Tony Blair.

Blair Champions Stability Through Resource Development.

Blair is bound to want to stay on the side of China because he is still convinced he is, if not actually Prime Minister, still in office with a duty to serve himself and so both Britain and the world. Though an 'idealist' when it suited him, Blair has also liked to pose as a sage 'realist', a reason he admires Henry Kissinger.

Blair is both in contact with the Foreign Office gets to rake off the fees that come from advocating energy projects in Kashgar in Western China. These are known as "strategic cooperation deals". He also drums up investment interest in Xinjiang's mining industries.

None of this is surprising as it fits in entirely with Blair and the FO's reasons for advocating military involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq: energy geopolitics. Blair 'believes' that a world in which resources are used to connect undeveloped regions to the rest of the world is a way to bring peace, even through war.

Blair's essential outlook is that economic growth and getting control over natural resources for the greater good of regional and global development can be done even under dictatorships so long as they serve the interests of greater good or great and good powers and help enhance "stability".

Blair and Hamas : Partners for Peace.

This is why Blair did an excellent job as Peace Envoy in the Middle East in advocating Israel extend its control over Gaza Marine gas and through supporting the coup in Egypt. With Israel in a position to use Gaza's gas for the benefit of Jordan and Egypt, it is promoting stability.

The reason is Hamas has no other option but to deal with Israel or watch its gas wealth seized and used for Israel and it's partner's benefit until such time as it runs out leaving the regional powers, including the Fatah controlled PA in the West Bank as well as Gaza wholly dependent Israel's larger gas reserves.

To that end, Hamas has entered into secret talks with Blair with a view to getting other powers to underwrite a peace agreement between Hamas and Israel. For Blair, this would be clear evidence that wars to control resources and push insurgent groups into a corner can reap the rewards of peace.

Blair Pivots East: New China, New Cultural Revolution. 

Likewise Blair no doubt believes that by playing a role in helping Xinjiang develop he is simply continuing his grand designs while in office to get the oil of Iraq working for the global economy as a consequence of removing an evil dictator, Saddam Hussein, who was "not exactly a force for stability either".

That is true enough as ISIS spread into Syria after the civil war started in 2011, the year when Obama pivoted East towards China in his foreign policy. With Chinese Uighurs joining ISIS and crossing back into Western China, Blair was insistent that the global Islamist threat has also even 'reached as far Xinjiang'.

Blair needs his continued mission because it allows him to rationalise problems in Iraq as merely one part of his 'ongoing' global career as a revered statesman. Xinjiang is, after all, itself threatened by a Uighur insurgency so developing its mineral potential is one way to ensure increased wealth to all living there. 

China was engaged in a 'war on terror' after September 11 2001 in Xinjiang. So Blair is keen to align with China's programme of modernising the western lands and the city of Kashgar. Blair himself, after all, still regards himself as a radical moderniser and lauded what he called China's New Cultural Revolution.

'Think of trying to meld China's 56 native ethnic groupings into one cohesive state. Think of the disaster, not just to the Chinese, but to ourselves, if it fractured. Understand also how dramatic and daunting the challenge of China's development is. Imagine we were analyzing the consequences of a threat to China's stability and cohesion. And then be glad we are not'.

Supporting China's New Silk route strategy in the west appeals to Blair's desire to be part of history-in- the-making and so he has started reading lots of books on China in an attempt to emulate Kissinger who also wrote a book on it. While Blair may not write one himself, part two of his Journey is being written.