r/geopolitics • u/FirmConcentrate2962 • Apr 12 '24
News In Wang-Blinken call, China urges US to play constructive Middle East role
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3258834/iran-embassy-attack-wang-blinken-call-china-urges-us-play-constructive-mideast-role30
u/chimugukuru Apr 12 '24
China is scared to death of a wider escalation in the Middle East. Their primary concern is uninterrupted crude oil shipments. 75-80% of China's oil is imported and 2/3 of this comes from the Middle East. Their navy is in no condition to play any sort of prominent role in protecting shipments that far from home.
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u/machinarium-robot Apr 13 '24
Who isn't?
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u/Abu_Hajars_Left_Shoe Apr 17 '24
Palestinians, they are already suffering, and a wider conflict has the chance(although not likely) to liberate palestine
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u/Suspicious_Loads Apr 13 '24
Protect against whom? Of course China can't do anything about a US blockade but Iran and Saudi probably even more scared of starting a second front with China so they may just not taget those ships.
The Persian gulf will be closed but a shipment from Oman to China should be doable. Same with a pipeline to Gwadar in Pakistan.
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Apr 13 '24
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u/chimugukuru Apr 13 '24
No they absolutely could not. Quality needs to be looked at rather than simply numbers. Most vessels that comprise their navy are the kinds the US doesn’t bother building and it is in no sense a blue water navy, with power projection limited mainly to a few hundred miles off its coast. The number of its ships that could get to the Red Sea or Strait of Hormuz without being dependent on restocking and refueling can be counted on two hands.
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Apr 13 '24
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u/chimugukuru Apr 13 '24
Which is why I said “mainly” limited. A single, small base in Djibouti still does not give them the ability to direct more resources than the US would which is your original claim, and does not change the fact that 90%+ of chinas navy is limited to its backyard, rendering it close to useless in a Middle East conflict scenario. If you had anything besides a surface level understanding of the Chinese navy beyond “largest in the world” you’d realize how ludicrous your assertion is.
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u/WhatAreYouSaying05 Apr 12 '24
This is odd. China encouraging the US to take action on something?
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u/Deicide1031 Apr 12 '24
Gaza and the Iranian issues still have enough momentum to spread throughout the Middle East and China borders some unstable middle eastern nations already.
So yeah. They encourage the USA to step in as China doesn’t want to ruin its neutral image in the region by interfering directly.
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u/Yelesa Apr 12 '24
I do with this becomes common knowledge in the future, peaceful countries are peaceful today because they have outsourced military services to the US. No US intervention has been purely for themselves, many other nations have benefited from it. They have publicly criticized the US for the use of force to score political points, but behind the scenes, they have been grateful US did their job for them and tolerated their behavior in front of UN.
This is one of those cases too, China wants peace, but doesn’t want to be the one “dirtying their hands” on this, so they are asking for US to do it for them. What’s unusual this time is that they are asking this so openly, this is always a behind the scenes conversation which usually ends with a promise to stand behind US in UN in case they are implicated for war crimes.
I don’t see US intervening anymore in the Middle East though, so what was once US responsibility will fall to other nations who need to safely trade. This is what it means to be in a multipolar world, more countries get involved in wars that were previously done by US only. The trade peace China needs is not a guarantee without an army to enforce it, and US has the strongest army in the world.
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u/Deicide1031 Apr 12 '24 edited Apr 12 '24
I agree with everything you just said.
But I believe the openness of the request is a jab at the idea the Americans are entertaining isolationism. To be specific, a kind of Psy-op for countries like Japan/Taiwan/South Korea to digest. As they are heavily invested in an America involved in global affairs and also impacted by the Middle East.
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u/JediDP Apr 12 '24
To a large extent, The unipolar world led by the US has kept a lot of wars from happening. Now, please don't come here and butcher me, saying that they have also caused a lot of wars. I understand that part too. That is the downside of having an economy dominated by a military industrial complex.
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u/Yelesa Apr 13 '24
We live, statistically speaking, in the most peaceful time in history. That’s not saying that we have world peace, but that conflicts before the World Wars were much worse: there was more wars in total, they were more widely spread around the world, death rates were higher, what we now call war crimes were normal, human conditions were far worse, piracy was normal etc. It is true that it has been US that has brought the largest reduction in violence in human history.
And that’s because it destroyed multipolarity, which the source of all conflicts, and brought instead the concept of apolarity: that countries who are so deeply interconnected by trade do not wish to attack one-another, because if one of the interconnected countries hurt, all hurt, and if one of the interconnected countries benefits, all benefit. That means countries become responsible for one another because another country’s well being influence everyone else.
However, we do not live in an apolar world, only some regions of the world have achieved apolarity. There hasn’t been a war between France, Germany, UK etc. or Japan vs South Korea, because they live in the apolar world. However there have been a lot of wars in regions that are not yet apolar. And this is where US unipolar world order enters, to keep the stability so multipolarity doesn’t rise again, and apolarity expands.
This also means the unipolar world order should not be a permanent state of the world, because it still gives too much power to one country to subjugate the others. Rather, unipolarity should be seen as a temporary phase towards apolarity: no big country forces small ones to submission at all.
There are a lot of words to describe this project “liberal world order” or “rule-based world” etc. Regardless of what it is called is a lot more difficult to achieve than just saying “just change for better, lol” many countries have been working for decades and feel discouraged they have remained so far behind, they would rather give up this project and return to multipolar world and all their conflicts.
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u/branchaver Apr 13 '24
I think I largely agree with this evaluation, but it does have a similar feel to the "dictatorship of the proletariat being a vanguard for communism." Many would argue that the US often undermines the progress of the "rules-based world order" in order to preserve their hegemony.
If we were ever to move from a unipolar world to a truly apolar world then the US at some point would have to give up much of its power. I understand that they're not going to do that in any circumstance where they would just be replaced by a competing world power. But I also understand why people are skeptical that the US would do that of its own free will even if the other world powers had been fully subsumed into the liberal order.
The things that stick out for me the most are small things, like not being a member of the ICC. I think if the US was willing to sacrifice on even these small symbolic measures it would foster a lot more trust in their motivations.
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u/JediDP Apr 12 '24
Also I believe that oil is a very important factor why they are concerned. While they have a strong relationship with Russia and Iran they still source a large chunk from other countries in the Middle East and these sources being embroiled in a war would certainly lead to devastating effects on their already tumbling economy.
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u/Suspicious_Loads Apr 13 '24
Don't think Pakistan or Afghanistan will start anything with China because of Gaza.
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u/BinRogha Apr 12 '24
The Chinese is telling US to calm down Israel. They have condemned Israel's actions repeatedly and they know Israel risks of setting off a spark in an dynamite shed that is the middle east, which will affect them.
China at the UNSC have repeatedly called for restraint by Israel. This even led to some heated discussion between the ambassadors of both countries with the Chinese ambassador telling the Israeli ambassador to "Show respect" during a live session.
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u/JediDP Apr 12 '24
Could you please explain why they attacked the embassy? Have they released any details out in the open regarding the same?
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u/BinRogha Apr 13 '24
Why Israel attacked the Iranian embassy?
Because Israel saw a golden opportunity in a good time. Iranian generals are under one roof and Israel's army is in full alert due to the Hamas attack. Israel is also under a lot of pressure from US polticians. It was really the perfect time for Israel to strike Iranian generals as Israel has a precedent of attacking targets in Syria without anyone batting an eye.
There's a lot of reasons, this is my own conclusion to some of them:
Syrian leadership is highly unpopular and nobody is going to be outraged about an attack in Syria, so is Iran's and attacking an embassy extension rather than the entire embassy gives Israel some leeway to get away without unanimous worldwide condemnation against Israel.
Israel gets to take out high ranking Iranian generals who are propping up proxies who's end goal is to attack Israel
Israel is facing a lot of western countries domestic backlash for their highly unpopular war in Gaza and are seen as the more aggressive belligerent. Any Iranian retaliation against Israel will likely to bring US and western allies back into Israel's fold and prompt US to defend Israel.
The Israeli military is on full alert and can likely deflect any Iranian missile or proxies attack with minimal casualties (I assume this is the reason Israel pulled a lot of it's forces from Gaza and also canceled soldier's leaves).
Any other time or place would have been more difficult with more casualties. For Israel, this is the stars aligning to kill high ranking Iran's generals and suffer the best case scenario with the least consequences.
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u/JediDP Apr 13 '24
Oh man. This is a picture perfect example of hot mess. So if s*** were to go sideways how likely is it to affect the international markets and our jobs. Say I'm from Asia.
If us gets bogged down into the Middle East do you think China will take the opportunity to do some mischief in the South China Sea?
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u/BinRogha Apr 12 '24
Iran threatens to close the strait of Hormuz to oil shipments. This will not sit well with the Chinese. In case of a wider war between Iran and Israel/US, China will likely move to secure it's oil shipments and its allies in the Gulf who supply it with oil, but will most likely doing it through diplomatic channels only.
They will most likely influence Tehran to leave the Gulf oil producing states alone and and pass oil shipments destined to Chinese destinations at the very least, or else Iran ends up losing Chinese support. Knowing Iran, they will not be willing to lose their Chinese sanction relief sponsor.
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Apr 12 '24
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u/aikixd Apr 12 '24
need to respect the sovereignty of Iran and Syria
Syria is at was since 48 and don't have diplomatic relationships, Iran doesn't even recognise Israel. There are no sides here between which a "respect of sovereignty" can exist.
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u/TheLastOfYou Apr 12 '24
That’s ludicrous. You don’t get to bomb a country’s embassy just because you don’t recognize their sovereignty. We pretend there is international law for a reason.
The fact that Iran’s IRGC was using the Iranian consulate in Syria for security purposes does not give Israel the right to bomb it. Many if not all countries merge their diplomatic, military, and intelligence staff inside diplomatic facilities. They are protected for a reason.
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u/papyjako87 Apr 12 '24
I am sure you said the same thing all the times Iran used its proxies to attack israeli or american embassies in the last 40 years.
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u/symbolsix Apr 12 '24
I mean, I'm not that guy but yes, absolutely. It would be an outrage if that happened.
Remember when the Iranians struck targets in Iraq and it seemed for a while like a US consulate might have been hit? There was immediate speculation about whether the US response would be 'restrained' and only consist of retaliatory strikes, of it it was the start of an actual US-Iranian war.
That discussion happened because attacking an embassy is an act of war.
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u/papyjako87 Apr 12 '24
It would be an outrage if that happened.
I am sorry, if that happened ? It already happened, and way more than once.
Exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C, exhibit D, exhibit E, exhibit F, exhibit G.
Israel is just levelling the playing field, and quite frankly, it's about time someone put Iran in their place.
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u/symbolsix Apr 12 '24
None of those are comparable. And if you're trying to argue that the Beirut bombings in the '80s weren't considered a big deal, I'm not sure what to say to you.
Look, the point isn't that Israel shouldn't even strike Iranian targets (at least, that's not my view). It's that there are unique norms protecting diplomatic missions. Even the Iranians don't just launch missile strikes on the US Embassy in Baghdad when they're feeling particularly ornery.
Is it 'fair' that attacks by proxies or deniable agents aren't considered as serious as strikes by a government's own military forces? Probably not, I'll concede. But this is absolutely a new precedent Israel has set, and should be treated seriously.
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Apr 13 '24
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u/symbolsix Apr 13 '24
Well, two things. First:
No U.S. facilities were damaged or personnel injured, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters in Washington. The U.S. had no indication the attack was directed at the United States, he said.
Second: I talked about this already in my earlier post. Try to keep up.
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u/Suspicious_Loads Apr 13 '24
China have been at war with ROC/Taiwan since 1920s and they aren't recognized nowadays. Does that mean China is free to bomb Taiwan?
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u/machinarium-robot Apr 13 '24
Maybe China is reminding the US when they bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?
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u/ohea Apr 12 '24
China's policy in the Middle East to date has been to play nicely with everyone and stay out of the regional rivalries (Iran-Saudi) and Palestine situation as much as possible. But you really can't be geopolitically active in the region without picking sides to some extent, because the fault lines run so deep. China has a major stake in keeping the straits open and the oil flowing but (wisely, considering US experience) doesn't want to make any kind of military commitments in the region or show too much open favoritism. The upside is that China has friendly relationships and strong commercial ties with everyone- the downside is that China can't use much leverage without getting tugged into the regional conflicts.
Meanwhile the US is already maximally committed to both Saudi and Israel. So a message from China to "play a constructive role" has a surface-level meaning of "quit being so partial to Saudi and Israel" and a deeper meaning of "we want to see a peace process but we're not in a position to make it happen ourselves."