The U.S. government, seeking to promote Japanese development for geopolitical
reasons as a bulwark against communism in Asia, worked with the Japanese steel mills and the Japanese state to devise a model to guarantee long term secure access to metallurgical coal and iron ore from Australia.The new model relied on long term contracts, at first forced upon them by Australia and the U.S., rather than using the wholly-owned foreign direct investment model utilized by U.S. and European steel firms to gain access to foreign raw materials sources. This new model accommodated the resource nationalism of host nations such as Australia,while in the process restructuring worldwide flows of metallurgical coal from mainly domestic movement to transoceanic trade flows (Bunker and Ciccantell 1995, 2003b).