Adversaries, Allies Turn to China for Global Leadership

Beijing’s support for former rival Moscow in Ukraine, and its roles in brokering friendly deals between Saudi Arabia and Iran, offer ominous evidence of rapidly waning confidence in America as the preeminent force in global policy leadership and influence.

China’s President Xi met with Russia’s President Putin just weeks ahead of the Ukraine war after which they jointly declared “no limits of friendship.”

Last Friday, Beijing brokered a relationship between hostile Saudi and Iranian rivals who will reopen embassies in each other’s country that had been closed in 2016.

As part of the agreement, Iran has pledged to halt attacks against Saudi Arabia, including from Houthi rebels it backs in the Yemen civil war, in exchange for helping them escape economic sanctions against oil exports.

Another Persian Gulf rival of Iran, the United Arab Emirates, reopened its embassy in Iran last year and has been pursuing trade and open lines of communication with Tehran.

Notably here, Saudi Arabia and UAE had both snubbed their collective noses at President Biden’s desperate pleadings to produce more oil to reduce gasoline prices ahead of the 2022 elections.

As reported in The National, a UAE newspaper, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman had wisely warned Biden during those mid-July meetings, "Adopting unrealistic policies to reduce emissions by excluding main sources of energy will lead in coming years to unprecedented inflation and an increase in energy prices and rising unemployment and a worsening of serious social and security problems."

China, already Saudi Arabia’s top trading partner and oil purchaser, also has strong military and geopolitical reasons to push for Middle East dominance.

For example, China has aided the Saudis in the development of ballistic missiles, construction of a facility to fabricate uranium yellowcake — an early step along the path to developing a civil nuclear energy program or nuclear arms capability. And the two countries have discussed building a naval base on the Red Sea, one of the world’s most strategic waterways.

China, the world’s top energy importer, has a fast-expanding role in providing Middle East investment funding and infrastructure development.

Chinese construction and technology companies like Huawei Technologies Co. have secured large contracts in Saudi Arabia to build entirely new smart cities, upgrade the kingdom’s telecommunications infrastructure, and establish an artificial intelligence industry.

Reciprocally, Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, has publicly defended China’s policies in its western region of Xinjiang, giving cover to Beijing’s crackdown on the Uyghur Muslim minority, and supported Communist China’s position on Taiwan.

China is brokering trade deals between the Saudi’s and Iran at a time when Tehran is rapidly advancing its nuclear weapons capabilities entirely unabated by the failed Obama-Biden administration Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or “Iran Nuclear Deal.”

The JCPOA which was cancelled by Trump and resurrected by Biden had been unpopular with the Saudis and other U.S. Mideast allies, but most particularly with Israel.

One of Iran's obvious goals is to blow up the Abraham Accords negotiated by the Trump administration between Israel and several Arab states which afford the best opportunity for Jewish-Arab peace in decades as a potential united front against Iran's designs for regional dominance.

A major global concern in all this is that Israel — the isolated country from these realignments that is at greatest risk — may take preemptive strikes against Iranian production facilities which now reportedly have enough highly enriched uranium to build “several” nuclear weapons.

In 2012, then-Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously held up a placard of a cartoon-style bomb with a burning wick and a red line drawn through it urging the world not to allow this to happen.

Netanyahu’s recent return to his country’s leadership indicates that Israel cannot — will not — accept such a threat.

Meanwhile, adding to the complexity of these newly knit adversarial odd couple alliances, Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine with armed drones.

Evidenced by such Biden administration weaknesses as it’s disastrously ill-planned 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, self-inflicted abandonment of energy independence and persistent pursuit of a certain-to-fail Iran nuclear deal fiasco, there’s little wonder why China is wasting no time or opportunity to replace America as the world’s leading economic and military power.

Adding insult to provocation, they sailed a big spy balloon across the entire country before the White House mustered sufficient courage to risk offending Beijing and shoot it down.

After that balloon incident, the U.S. postponed a diplomatic visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, presumably where he would have held meetings concerning tensions over the escalating China threats to Taiwan.

Yes — those discussions regarding a possible Word War III were delayed over a trial balloon that left top U.S. diplomats huddled and hunkered in political bunkers.

And as adversaries and allies carefully watch for that evidence of global leadership, it’s not looking good for America.