Hidden Dragon: China quietly becomes a Major Player in the Middle East

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http://www.juancole.com/2015/02/quietly-becomes-middle.html

Hidden Dragon: China quietly becomes a Major Player in the Middle East
By contributors | Feb. 17, 2015
By Neil Thompson

The era of Western neo-colonial dominance in the Middle East may finally be drawing to a bloody close. The Western monopoly ended almost unnoticed in 2013 when China replaced the European Union as the region’s foremost trading partner, pushing the US into third place, with India breathing at America’s heels in fourth. The region was carved up between the victorious European powers in the aftermath of World War I after a long period of economic and social penetration in the 19th century. The United States replaced the European empires as hegemon after World War II, but otherwise little changed; the overriding concern of the Western powers remained securing energy supplies (a major reason for the original British-Saudi alliance signed in 1915).

The oil-rich Gulf states continue to set their economic focus on the United States and Europe well into the twenty-first century. Western states support autocratic Middle Eastern governments when these have backed their oil interests and intervened in the region’s wars whenever it looked as if these interests were threatened.

The creation of a post-Cold War global marketplace under the American ageis helped broaden China’s economic horizons as it has bootstrapped its way up the global economic ladder. As the post-Iraq collapse of the Middle East’s fragile states has undermined any American comprehensive regional strategy, US policy increasingly seems to be done ‘on the hoof’. This has given China space to increase its political penetration of the Middle East to match its increasing economic clout.

Now China is an advanced economy it has the same need for energy supplies as other developed countries. Her Middle East strategy has already departed from its tradition of global non-intervention, starting in 2010 when it dispatched ships to patrol the Somali coast and the Gulf of Aden. More recently it sent a shipment of arms to the Government of South Sudan in June 2014 as the civil war continued there. China had previously heavily invested in the northern Sudanese ‘Arab’ Islamist regime, but has moved quickly to make new friends in the south as the trend of state disintegration in the greater Middle East gains ground.

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China also started construction of their Nicaragua Canal in December 2014.