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Weekend Reads
China’s growing influence is reshaping the Middle East, putting the United States’ interests in a geopolitically crucial region at risk.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) joined other policymakers and experts to discuss how Beijing is expanding its strategic footprint through infrastructure, technology, and energy diplomacy—and how Washington can fight back. Read the transcript of the senator’s remarks or watch the full conference here.
On behalf of Hudson Institute, we share our condolences with the family, friends, and colleagues of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim. Read our full statement.
Key Insights
1. China funds Iran’s terrorist regime while Iran fuels China’s military buildup.
“There are those who acknowledge that China is a threat but say, ‘We must narrow our focus to the regional threat it poses in East Asia.’ I find that argument completely unpersuasive. One reason I find it unpersuasive is because of exactly what we’re here to talk about, China’s role in the Middle East. . . . Iran and China signed a 25-year strategic partnership plan with a commitment from China to invest $400 billion in projects in Iran over that period. Four out of every five barrels of oil that Iran exports go to China, enabled by a ghost fleet that was roughly 70 ships at the beginning of the Biden administration, and that grew to over 400 ships by the end of the Biden administration. The oil metaphorically and literally fueled China’s economic and military buildup over the last four years.”
— Senator Ted Cruz
2. If the Gulf shifts toward Beijing, China will have secured a new source of capital at a crucial point in its quest to decouple from the US economy.
“On the point of capital, China periodically needs to be bailed out because it has a system that simply doesn't work. It misallocates capital—and that’s a feature, not a bug, of a top-down system—and typically it’s been the United States that has come to bail out Beijing. Now they're realizing that President Trump may be willing to do that, right? He's a transactional guy. He got wrapped up in three years of negotiations [in his first term] to sign a phase-one trade deal which China then ripped up and ignored. And they’re going to try to do that again. But meanwhile, they also see these huge pools of capital in the [Gulf Cooperation Council], in Saudi [Arabia] and say, Well why not us, right? We need to be bailed out. Europe can provide some of that capital, but the Gulf certainly can as well.”
— Mary Kissel, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
3. The Gulf will be key to maintaining America’s advantage in artificial intelligence and other critical technologies.
“China is learning a lot from the Russians. The Iranians are supplying the Russians and learning from them. The China-Iran relationship is much stronger than meets the eye in terms of the software of the relationship. We’re always looking for the hardware—the actual passing on of arms and so forth—not the scientific exchanges, the talent exchanges, and so forth. So I think that the potential leakage of Gulf AI infrastructure and know-how to China—that then finds its way back to Iran in this kind of operational learning system that they’ve created among China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran—is also something that we have to take very, very seriously when we think about diffusing our own AI.”
— Dan Blumenthal, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Go Deeper
Michael Doran and Bernard Haykel discussed why Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia are vital partners in America’s competition with the China-led axis of authoritarian powers.
Following his arrest, the terrorist who murdered Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim shouted, “Free Palestine.” This is the rallying cry of a terrorist operation that is funded by foreign governments and designed to sow chaos, fear, and violence in America’s streets, writes Liel Leibovitz.
In a new policy brief, Zineb Riboua explains that, to counter China, the US needs to reestablish itself as the principal outside power shaping the future of the Gulf.
