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May 27, 2021 - Epoch Times
11:50
Inside Communist China's Plans to Dominate the Middle East—Michael Doran | American Thought Leaders
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When I started to think about what the Middle East looked like from Beijing, the place suddenly looked very different, and the dynamics that were going on in the region took on a very different characteristic.
I would liken it to the first time I saw a map of the world that wasn't from a Mercator projection.
It makes you think, put things together in a different way.
Most of the experts, I think actually all of them, as far as I could tell, were saying that The United States and China had the same interests in the Middle East and that China was very comfortable with the American order.
In fact, it was a free rider on the American order because all China wanted to do was extract resources from the Middle East.
It didn't want to become part of the political conflicts, the really divisive political conflicts.
It wanted to do business with everyone.
On all sides of every conflict.
And so it was staying out of the security questions.
And we started to see the Middle East as an extension of the contest with the United States for global primacy, but more directly an extension of the East Asian theater.
The Chinese want to push out beyond the first island chain.
They feel sort of hemmed in.
As you know well by all of their adversaries in East Asia.
All of their adversaries, every last one of them, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, they're all dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
China is dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
China's supply lines are highly vulnerable.
The Chinese are dependent on oil that either comes from the Middle East or comes through the Middle East.
So their supply lines are exposed, but so are their enemies.
So if China is thinking in terms of the possibility of war, In East Asia or with India, they're automatically going to think about their own energy resources and the resources of their adversaries.
And then add another fact that they're in a global contest with the United States.
They're in a contest in East Asia with the United States.
As the dominant power in the Middle East, the Chinese are vulnerable to the United States.
They can't like that.
It has to bother them.
And they're in a contest with the United States otherwise, so they have to want to supplant the United States and the Middle East.
On the other hand, the conventional wisdom about there being overlapping interests between the United States and China and the Middle East is not entirely wrong.
The Chinese do benefit from the American order.
They do want calm.
They do want a steady supply of oil and so forth.
So there's a kind of contradiction at work in their policy.
On the one hand, they want to supplant America.
On the other hand, they're benefiting from it.
And so the goal of their policy is to manage that contradiction.
And that's the context in which I understand the Chinese-Iranian relationship.
There were a few things in reading this article which I recommend to people.
It's a really good long-form deep read that covers all sorts of areas.
You describe as part of the Belt and Road Initiative that there is this specific corridor that runs from the Port of Gwadar, which is of course in Pakistan, close to the Close to the Iranian border, relatively, just outside the Persian Gulf, right up into Xinjiang.
This was a new piece of information.
You described that as a crown jewel, I believe, of the Belt and Road Plan.
Explain this to me a bit.
So one of the things that the Chinese want to do is they went from that port in Gwadar.
They want to go.
Pakistan is their ally.
And they're turning Pakistan into an economic corridor.
In fact, that is the jewel in the crown of the Belt and Road Initiative is the China-Pakistan economic corridor.
And they want to bring not just energy resources, but also just goods.
From the port in Gwadar and then run them up to China through Pakistan.
And that will significantly shorten their supply lines, particularly their energy supply lines, and will also harden them so that they're not as vulnerable to attack.
In other words, you don't have to take oil all the way through the Straits of Malacca and then all the way up to the To the China coast, you can just run it up through Central Asia.
The problem is that the Uighurs are sitting right at the entry point from Pakistan into China, and you don't want a restive minority at such a strategic juncture where you're bringing in all of those resources.
Or so is the sort of mentality of the Chinese Communist Party.
Right.
Fascinating.
So you get genocide.
Right.
People are aware of the genocide, but they're not connecting it to this push that the Chinese are making to the Middle East.
The Middle East is the second most important region to China after East Asia.
You've described You know, basically the status quo that the U.S. has created in the Middle East as a kind of security system, right?
And you're saying that China actually is looking to have a different security system ultimately.
So can you expand on that, please?
They want to supplant America eventually.
They want to become the dominant power in the Middle East.
But they're not in any rush to do that, because the disparity in power is such that if they were to rush it, then it would make the attainment of the goal harder, possibly, because America might begin to fight back.
So what they're doing, I think, is part of their strategy.
I call it laying down capabilities.
They're doing it in the most innocuous way possible.
One way, for example, is peacekeeping in Africa.
So that it's not in the Middle East, it's in Africa, it's peacekeeping.
But what they're doing is they're developing an expeditionary military capability.
They built a port in Djibouti.
Now that should have been...
A huge wake-up call for the United States.
And it wasn't, because when they built the port in Djibouti, it was regarded by the American Navy as a beneficial thing, because the goal of American policy traditionally has been to turn China into a responsible stakeholder.
And so the Chinese came in as part of an international effort to suppress Somali piracy.
So this was seen as a good thing for the global commons.
The military was aware that these capabilities could eventually be turned against us.
They saw the initial intentions as a positive thing.
The Chinese are turning the port in Djibouti into, or they're upgrading the port so that it can handle an aircraft carrier.
So clearly they're thinking about projecting power.
By the way, the base in Djibouti is the first base outside of China that they've ever built, which also tells you something about More or less, I think they had a base in North Korea once or something.
But in recent times, this is the only base they've had outside of their traditional area of interest along the China coast.
So it tells you something about their intentions.
That base also got coded in the American mindset As an African base, because it's in Djibouti.
But Djibouti is 20 miles from Yemen.
And it guards the Bab al-Manda, the straits that guard the approaches to the Suez Canal from the Indian Ocean.
And the Chinese are also building what they call, or what has been called, their String of Pearls.
Those are ports all along the Indian Ocean leading up to the Suez Canal.
The last one in the String of Pearls being the port of Sudan, just across from Saudi Arabia.
The port in Djibouti is now clearly a military base.
The port in Gwadar in Pakistan is going to be a military base.
It's not yet, but it starts out being commercial and then one day we're going to wake up and there's going to be a Chinese naval presence there.
And that's within a relatively short distance from the Strait of Hormuz.
So you have the Strait of Hormuz, which the Chinese are laying down capability near it, and they've laid down capability right on the Bab al-Mandeb.
So they're positioning themselves to be able to threaten the two major choke points for energy in the region.
And they're also developing a strategic relationship with Iran.
Their public messaging, their public diplomacy is win-win, China, happy panda, we're only interested in commerce, we have no strategic interests in the region, no military interests, but they have a military relationship with Iran.
Not just with Iran, also a growing military relationship with Russia.
They're running naval exercises, joint naval exercises, with the Russians and the Iranians together in the Persian Gulf.
And they're doing it at the moment of highest tension between the United States and Iran.
That's clearly sending a signal to everyone that they are beginning to challenge us, quietly.
But what they do is they put the Iranians and the Russians forward.
The Iranians are openly challenging the American security system in the region.
The Chinese are quietly supporting them behind the scenes, using them as a stalking horse, never announcing that they're using Iran and that they're joining with Iran to undermine the American order.
But that's the effect that their actions are having.
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