China Morning Missive
“A Single Flower does not Make a Spring”
There seems to be a rather weak theory going around that America has deployed some grand plan to systematically cut China off from key strategic partners. While there are certainly more than a few dots which can be connected to reach such a conclusion, it remains an errant conclusion and, if anything, only goes to demonstrate just how poorly China’s 30 years of foreign policy strategies are understood throughout the Beltway.
To begin, the theory being promulgated is an act of pure projection. How American policy has been conducted over the past 30 years must, obviously, be the very same course of action under consideration by the leadership in Beijing. Not even close and it is rather obvious, at least to me, that few have read BGen Samuel Griffith’s book on Sun Tzu.
To the Americans, the world is built upon alliances and a Judeo-Christian ethos that delineates between good actors and bad actors. It is all a very black and white mindset and extremely rigid. It is also an approach which is highly antithetical to how Beijing operates. What continues to evade much of Washington, the Beltway consensus and the entire Thing Tank Senior Fellow ecosystem is a foreign policy construct which has been built around a web of counterparties, not formal alliances. Counterparties which are centered on commercial interests and, critically, are meant to achieve the specific strategic aim of optionality through the redundancies of critical inputs.
In the case of the Middle East, even the most tertiary assessment will find that China isn’t even close to being hemmed in strategically by a single relationship. In fact, and as a quick aside, the entire “Axis of Autocracies” is incongruent not only with China’s actual ambitions but also in terms of how Beijing has pursued foreign policy. The taxonomy applied is, well, just another reflection of an America hardwired to a 20th Century mindset. For the sake of argument though, if it is true that the underlying aim of the Trump administration is to leverage actions in one theater to destabilize China in the East Asia theater all that will be achieved is the equivalent of pushing on a string.
The glaring omission of this theory is any consideration of China’s current expansive set of relationships across the Gulf region both in terms of scope and scale.
Here are but a few examples. To start, there’s Qatar which is reported to be the second largest supplier of LNG (3million tons/year) to China. There’s Kuwait which was the first country in the region to sign on, formally, to China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2014. Even Iraq. Here the two countries have a deep commercial relationship, including a 20-year “oil-for-construction” agreement. China imports as much oil from Iraq as it does from Russia. Finally, there’s Saudi Arabia, by far the single most significant relationship China has built in the region and a partnership that is far broader and deeper than that of any other Gulf nation.
Here is the critical point to be made; what is highlighted above is a foreign policy that has been executed upon globally from Eastern Europe to South East Asia and all points between. Be it the Port of Piraeus in Greece or the linkage to the Belgrade-Budapest rail line. The massive energy investments in Indonesia or, not to be forgotten, the 950km newly operational rail line in Algeria. China has built redundancies across the globe and isn’t anywhere near at risk if it were to lose a single bilateral relationship.
Ah, but what of China’s ability to protect those interests? The Beltway commentariat is also stressing that Beijing doesn’t have the necessary hard power (military assets) to fortify any of those relationships. This is most certainly true, but only to a point. The real question to be asked is how far can America extend its reach in seeking to counter/contain China? For me, the answer is found in history and with the British Empire. For all the galivanting around the globe during the latter half of the 19th Century, all the Gunboat diplomacy, it ultimately became impossible for the Empire to be in all places at all times. The same would hold for America today albeit with a key difference. China isn’t just a geopolitical rival; it is a deep pocketed rival and one which has built bilateral relationships that are commercial centric. It is also a position built over the course of three decades. There’s a degree of entrenchment that has yet to be properly appreciated in Washington.
God speed!
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/02/china-playing-long-game-over-iran
