Energy may be one of the most contentious issues in the world and there are many discourses, narratives, explanations and arguments about the use of energy, including its role in inter-regional exchanges between the Middle East and North-East Asia. Increasingly, trade and energy exchanges are spoken together and this appears to be the case in recent works by Kemp, Simpfendorfer and Davidson. Narratives and discourses that highlight the inter-connectedness of non-energy trade and energy exchanges as an interrelated item in the inter-regional exchange between the Middle East and North-East Asia appear to be favorable to maintaining this inter-regional exchange. The bundling of energy and goods in trade and exchanges between the two regions acts as a form of interdependence through a spaghetti effect whereby greater intermingling promotes greater interdependence, analogous to spaghetti criss-crossing each other.

There are a number of centrifugal forces to mitigate the sustainability of energy trade inter-regionally between North-East Asia and the Middle East. Centrifugal forces may include increasing energy needs of the Middle East diminishing the potentialities of future energy export trade, for example the fast-growing Gulf states, their natural gas needs and their growing interdependence in forming regional energy systems. Regionalism is complicated and mitigated by growing inter-regionalism.

But because the two regions themselves are not institutionally regionalized and integrated politically as blocs, the inter-regionalism between the two regions remain organic, ad hoc and loose.