Asia will either be the scene of the biggest commodities bull market in history or an investment fraught with geopolitical risk, brokers were told Tuesday.

The scenarios came at the final day of the Investment Dealers Association’s annual conference in Mont Tremblant, Que.

In the bullish camp, Don Coxe, chairman and chief strategist for Harris Investment Management, who argued that the emerging middle class in China and India will help to create the biggest bull market in commodities in history. The geopolitical doom and gloom case was made by Martin Walker, UPI’s editor and public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the senior fellow for the World Policy Institute at the New School.

Coxe said that the idea that we are in for a secular bear market is wrong. Rather, technology stocks are in the third leg of what he called a triple waterfall crash. In this environment, sectors that are exact opposites do well — in other words, commodities such as metals and energy. In addition, there are powerful demand forces driving the resource markets, as the billions of people in China and India move out of poverty and into the middle class. Their consumer desires will drive demand for these resources.

However, he cautioned against buying Chinese stocks, warning that their only distinction is that they are the only stocks with worse accounting quality than Nasdaq stocks. But, he says, the biggest commodity bull of all-time will run because these countries represent the biggest economic liberation of people of all-time.

While the commodities are the easy call, Coxe said the hard part will be finding the other things to invest in as inflation comes back, interest rates rise and geopolitical risks increase. To that end, he recommends strong dividend-paying and growing stocks, such as the Canadian banks. Add the banks with some other strong dividend-paying stocks and resources and you’ll have the makings of a portfolio that will do better in the years ahead than it has ever done in the past, he said. “Good times are ahead.”

Walker painted a distinctly gloomy global scenario, one that includes threats to global peace and security, many of them focused on Asia, and its large Muslim population.

At the top of his list was the ongoing health of Pakistan’s leader, Pervez Musharraf. He has already faced two assassination attempts during the past year, one by members of his own intelligence service. And, if he’s killed or ousted, Islamic militants would likely take control of the country and its nuclear weapons.

Similarly, Walker is worried about the fact that India’s nukes are aimed at China, and that North Korea has already gone nuclear, with Iran expected to be not far behind. If Iran gets the bomb, he warned that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others may not be far behind.

Against this burgeoning Islamic nuclear threat, Walker said that Israel has acquired stealth submarines which are patrolling the Indian ocean, prepared to strike with nuclear missiles of their own if these weapons fall into the hands of militants.

His other major concerns involved the construction of a large Russian pipeline through either China or Japan, and the harm that the war in Iraq has done to both US and British credibility around the world, at home, and between the US and the rest of Europe.

If there’s one reason to for hope — and Walker could come up with only one — it’s that the investment industry and the interests of commerce are having a powerful influence over foreign policies in the U.S. and U.K., which are now pulling back from the use of force and toward greater diplomacy and world cooperation.