While Obama Pivots Eastward, Chinese Look Westward to Gulf Power Vacuum

If President Obama is loudly proclaiming his pivot to Asia, the Chinese without fanfare are moving into the political-military vacuums that the United States is creating in the Middle East. If Obama plays basketball and pivots only in one direction, the Chinese play soccer and move into open spaces throughout the geopolitical playing field.

The Chinese enjoy a political-diplomatic advantage over the United States in the greater Middle East because they are not encumbered with a democracy-promotion agenda. The Chinese are uniquely positioned to maintain diplomatic, economic and security ties to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, even while both are engaged in sectarian proxy warfare in the region. The Americans pay little heed that the Chinese and the Saudis have quietly developed their security ties—which date back to the 1980s, when Beijing sold Riyadh intermediate-range ballistic missiles unbeknownst to Washington. The Saudis no doubt want to modernize those missile forces as Iran increases its ballistic missile capabilities. Similarly, Chinese firms have been doing business with an array of Iranian companies associated with Iran’s suspected weapons of mass destruction programs.

The Chinese are slowly, but steadily, taking up security-related activities in the Middle East. They have dispatched peacekeeping forces to Lebanon and have made unprecedented naval port visits in the Persian Gulf, for example. The Chinese are modernizing and building-up their naval forces, which the Obama administration narrowly sees in terms of the political-military competition in Asia. But the Chinese undoubtedly want “blue water” naval power projection to reach from Asia into the Middle East to secure sea-lanes of communication. The Chinese are heavily reliant on Iranian and Arab Gulf oil to fuel their growing industrial base, as well as their military power. The Chinese are very vulnerable to American naval supremacy, which today could readily sever China’s sea links to the Gulf. But the Chinese naval build-up in the years ahead will make that an increasingly more difficult strategic proposition.

Middle Eastern and Asian Perils Ahead

The Obama administration shows little sense of the history or American grand strategy. The United States has been strategically wedded to Asia since World War II as evidenced by the enormous sacrifices made in war and the longstanding military posture in the region. Asia’s rivalries and competitions for power have merely been simmering while those in the Middle East have been white hot. No matter how much President Obama wants to be rid of security challenges in the Middle East, they are going to keep festering, and even worsen, without American political, diplomatic, and military engagement.

Asia with its long, bitter, and nasty history of armed conflict in the past century, however, could return to its old ways in short order notwithstanding the Obama administration’s “milk and honey” visions of Asia’s economic promise. Asian economic prosperity and the allure of future business opportunities mask the storm clouds gathering. China’s military modernization coupled with growing political-military assertiveness over disputed islands, declarations of air defense zones, and surging nationalism have alarmed America’s Asian allies. Meanwhile, the behavior of North Korea is increasingly erratic and unpredictable. Even though the country is impoverished and its armed forces probably akin to Potemkin villages, North Korea still could wreak havoc against South Korea should a future crisis slip over the edge into war.

In a world of galloping globalization, the regions of the world cannot be hermetically sealed. Security challenges in the Middle East will seep into the security environment in Asia and vice versa. The strategic reality is such that if war between major powers should come again to Asia in the years ahead, it spillover into the strategic landscape of the Middle East. The Chinese would need to fuel their war machine with the oil from Iran and the Arab Gulf states. In short, despite the Obama administration’s illusions, what happens in the Middle East won’t stay there. Nor will the looming security challenges in Asia stay there. Tragically, both are likely to bleed into one another.

Richard L. Russell teaches for the Security Studies PhD program in the Department of Political Science at the University of Central Florida.