 a lecture talk on China and the Gulf. We rarely hear on this topic and we have an authority here. So this is part of the SOAS East Institute weekly seminars, lectures, book launches that we've started this year obviously on this platform given the COVID situation but we are delighted and just to introduce myself briefly before I introduce our guest I'm Dina Matar, I'm a member of SOAS and the SOAS Middle East Institute and I'm also the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies which sits within the SMEI and so I'm quickly going to introduce Professor Jonathan Fulton who is going to give us the talk. He is currently in the United Arab Emirates where presumably it's around 10 o'clock or 9 o'clock in the evening so he's quite late for him so thank you so much for making the extra effort to be here with us. Jonathan is assistant professor of politics at the University of Zaire University in the United Arab Emirates in Abu Dhabi. He is in the humanities and political science department of college I think it's called that. He's a senior non resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and he has written widely in various publications on the relations between the Gulf region and China but maybe more broadly he can tell us more about his interest in China as well and he is the publisher of two books they came out successively one in 2019 and was just recently in 2020. The one in 2019 is called China's Relations for the Gulf Monarchies and 2020 regions in the Belt and Road Initiative. So the format of this talk will be I think 40 minutes discussion to lecture whichever way but you know you might go Jonathan you might want to take some more time so we are giving you the space to do that we have all together one and a half hours and then basically what we request of our attendees is to put the questions there's a question and answer button on your screen on the zoom screen just put your questions there and I will collect them and they come in and also I'm sure that Jonathan will pay attention to them and we also have questions that might come from the Facebook of people attending their Facebook and they will be collected and then we will put them in the chat and then we'll answer all your questions. Without further ado we would like to welcome you to so us really the virtual so us at the moment but we're all doing things virtually and we're really really looking forward to hearing what you have to say thank you for coming. Thanks Dina thank you very much thanks for hosting this event I've been wanting to get to so us for a long time so it's a pity it's it's via my my home office but hopefully things will change someday inshallah and I can can get there in person it's really great to see a lot of familiar faces in the participant list here this is I guess the cool way we get to visit with each other these days and thanks for coming because I know everybody's got a lot of entertainment options today obviously we can all be I've been watching Twitter non-stop I can't take my eyes off it I've said a bunch of different alerts on my phone so I can find out what crazy things are going to happen to our friends in the U.S. today yeah very interesting stuff so yeah as Dina said I am I research China Gulf relations I'm based in Abu Dhabi in the UAE I've been here since 2006 and before I came here I spent about 10 years in East Asia where I studied Chinese and in Taiwan for a few years and I lived in Korea where I was teaching as well and I found when I moved here mostly what my interest was was just learning more about a region that really hadn't really featured very much in my my awareness of global politics except like everybody my age knowing that the Middle East is a pretty important place but I hadn't traveled here I didn't know much about it so like many people who come to the Gulf I thought I was coming for a three-year contract and I learned something about the place and then move on and now 14 years later I seem to be stuck but it's been lucky for me the time I've been here because it's been a very very interesting vantage point to watch the expansion of China's presence across Eurasia in the Indian Ocean region I started working on my PhD I think it was 2011-2012 something like that and I knew that I wanted to focus on China Gulf relations and I remember talking to some folks here in Abu Dhabi and just saying look this I'm going to write about this and I remember an economist who works here in Abu Dhabi saying there's no way you're going to get 100,000 words on this topic man there's there's just not enough there and by the time I wrapped it up late 2016 we'd seen the the story had changed quite a bit and a big part of that of course was that China's Belt and Road Initiative had led to a much bigger set of interests that went across the region this is something I've been tracking quite a bit is how the Belt and Road Initiative is shaping China's foreign policy how it's shaping its economic relations the the normative components as the some of the other features of this you know you can look at it as a series of infrastructure projects and trade and investment but this stuff isn't politically neutral it comes with with normative components as well and in the Middle East a lot of countries are very interested in how China might be able to help them deal with some of these political and developmental issues as a as a counterpoint to the way that western countries have done it so it's a very interesting set of relations as Dina said I'm a political scientist I'm an IR guy and I don't want to go too heavy into the theory but typically when I look at any countries relations with the with the Gulf countries I think a useful starting point is to look at Barry Buzan's work on regional security complexes and the reason for this is because a lot of the narratives that we're seeing right now coming out mostly out of the US a lot of the narratives are about this great power competition between China and the US and that seems to dominate the thinking of how a lot of folks perceive political events and around the world but especially in the Middle East you know a great example of this is the Abraham Accords which if you read just the New York Times and the Washington Post this was just the result of the US diplomacy but talking to folks in the region it seems that a lot of the motivation was working with regional actors who maybe share similar views of what the Middle East they would like the Middle East to look like and and if the US was able to facilitate this in some way then great but it really kind of strips the local actors of agency by saying yeah this is a triumph of of American diplomacy because I really I think this is something that any number of publications over recent years will tell you these countries have been lining up much more closely for the past several years and this wasn't really surprised anybody and how this relates to regional security complex is that most countries in a competitive region like the Gulf in particular or the Middle East in general are motivated more by their own neighbors when they're thinking about security issues or foreign policy issues they're not thinking about the systemic issues like you know US China competition or the Belt and Road versus the free and open into a pacific they're thinking about each other first and foremost so you know in the UAE when decision makers are looking at their foreign policy calculus they're not thinking about China US competition they're thinking about Iran or they're thinking about Qatar or they're thinking about Turkey and if China and the US feature it's mostly kind of in this omni balancing approach where how can I use the involvement of these external powers to get what I need either to protect my own regime or to protect my regional interests and I think that's important because to come back to China a lot of folks look at this region look at the Gulf and think how is it possible that China can kind of sit on the fence so successfully for so long a more traditional view is that an extra regional power that has these kind of leadership ambitions would follow a more traditional role like the US has and kind of act like a traditional power maybe an active balancer trying to set the regional framework by saying we're going to work with certain countries and against other countries in order to preserve status quo that we find preferable so we haven't seen China do that and it's kind of got a lot of people be fuddled when it's trying to go and start acting like the US when is it going to pick aside and I think that's a very interesting question but I also think it's kind of a misguided one because I think China doesn't really see it in the same way that the US does the US has a lot more history they've got a lot more baggage in the Gulf than China does and I think that there are also certain expectations of how China how the US has to behave and China's not a regional leader it doesn't have ambitions to be a regional leader it seems quite satisfied to be at that second tier level of extra regional powers and that provides them with certain opportunities and one of them is they're not expected to use their leverage in certain ways they don't have to make these hard alignment decisions or kind of support a status quo they seem pretty satisfied to kind of confront the region as they found it whereas the US has kind of traditionally tried to reshape it or to deal with it I guess to form it in the way that that supports their interests a little more covertly so this has been pretty interesting I mean typically extra regional powers whether they're you see different approaches if you're looking at countries that are US partners or allies like Japan or Korea or India or the UK or or EU typically except for certain situations like the the invasion of Iraq you would find that they they typically will bandwagon you know with the US on most issues of Gulf security because they get most of what they need by you know following US leadership China has not bandwagoned they're they're not just following the US and they have reasons for this I think the US obviously would prefer this you've seen when when President Obama derided China as a free rider in 2015 I believe and said you know China should be making provisions but really what he was saying is China should follow our leadership to support a status quo that we prefer and I think Chinese leaders have maybe a different vision of what the Gulf should look like especially with regards to Iran which I guess is is what I'm coming coming to and kind of roundabout way is the China-Iran relationship is is important to understanding its its presence in the Gulf but I really do think that it's really gets gets overblown or overhyped in a lot of the analysis of what China's doing here and so in my talk here tonight I'll offer some some of my thoughts about why this China-Iran relationship isn't as important as we think although we still do have to consider it as a pretty important pillar of its of its Gulf presence. Before we can get into China and what it's doing here we have to kind of address the the baseline of everything that's happening here and the baseline is that there's a lot of insecurity about US intentions in the region and this is often portrayed as a response to the personal preferences of a particular leader you know Obama wants this or Trump wants that or Bush wants something else. I think that a better way of looking at this is to see it as not that Obama wants to pull out or Trump wants to pull out I think it's more of a structural feature of an asymmetrical alignment or an asymmetrical relationship. This alliance security dilemma that that Snyder wrote so eloquently about many years ago really resonates in the Gulf and it's not a new thing. I was working on a paper recently and I was reading a book that was published right after Desert Storm so the point at which the US had finally kind of cemented its its regional presence as an as an active balancer signed all these defense cooperation agreements with all of the Gulf monarchies except Saudi and one of the things that kept coming up in this book that was published at that time was how Gulf leaders were very concerned about America's ongoing commitment to Gulf security so this isn't you know a new thing. Gulf leaders have always worried this fear of abandonment has been a fundamental feature of the US Gulf or GCC relationship really from the beginning now it's gotten more it's gotten more prevalent in recent years we've seen this you know after the the invasion of Iraq and the disastrous occupation and all the awful stuff that came of this we saw US under Obama pursue a different regional policy and for Gulf leaders this looked like an exit policy when he talked about the the rebalance or the pivot to Asia this seemed like you don't pivot you know you you you pivot away from something this seemed like you you want to get out of the Gulf and this is true because because Obama officials were saying we're going to redirect our resources diplomatic security financial technological whatever towards East Asia which is where most of our economic future probably lies so of course Gulf leaders saw this and they took a face value oh this thing we've always worried about it's a real thing and then you saw the the Obama administration's response to the Arab uprising specifically to Hosni Mubarak's regime and how he was kind of quickly abandoned and of course a lot of leaders throughout the region said man if that's been your most important regional ally basically since the Shah and you could cast him aside that easily you know we've got to make provisions for for you know this happening to us too and the JCPOA is another example where where the US was negotiating with Iran and keeping the the GCC countries out of it so you know there was a lot of concern here during the Obama years that that the US commitment to the region was was waning and then we saw when Trump came in and of course he made this this this big gesture with this trip to Riyadh as his first overseas trip and everybody kind of said oh they're back on track that was actually the banner headline in the Gulf news in Dubai the day of Trump's visit was the US policy in the region back on track but since then there's been a lot of a lot of concern as well whether it's the US trying to implement this Middle East strategic alliance MISA which really is it just seems to everybody here as you're trying to get local actors to take a bigger role in security so you can minimize your role or when the president would say you know I'm pulling out of Afghanistan I'm pulling out of Syria we're leaving Iraq all of these things kind of feed into this concern so I think it's wrong to say this is because of a particular president or an individual I think it's just an ongoing concern and I think it's it's getting stronger and I think it's affecting the foreign policy calculus of three different sets of actors allies and partners of the US realize that this has always been an interest-based alignment it's not always an alliance but partnership alignment whatever it is and we've seen American interests change over the years and we're seeing that Gulf actors are are recalibrating the foreign policy to to make provisions for this whether it's the UAE adopting this more muscular regional foreign policy or Saudi in the UAE going into Yemen or whether it's the UAE and Bahrain normalizing relations with with Israel we're seeing Gulf actors realizing that this interest-based rather than a values-based alignment is probably not as as permanent as folks would like this changes foreign policy calculus of the Iranians you know because when when the Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA there wasn't really an alternative strategy the strategy was let's leave the JCPOA and then maximum pressure but what does that mean as a policy you know let's just try to create this stress that's going to lead people to call for regime change for Iran what that what that has meant is their response has been of course to get more aggressive to think what can we get away with what is the red line for us and what we've seen in the Gulf over the past couple of years was they can get away with quite a lot whether it's you know mining tankers in the Gulf of Oman or whether it's blowing up drones or whether it's attacking Saudi Aramco in each of these cases the US response was nothing it was only when an American contractor was killed that Soleimani was killed so I think everybody here looked at thought yeah the you know Iran is pushing the boundaries of what it can get away with the value of deterrence maybe isn't what it used to be and you know Iran has been acting much more aggressively but again to get back to the point of the talk at the third level it affects the foreign policy of extra regional powers because again with a lot of these countries that have been able to bandwagon under US preponderance or I'm not crazy about the idea of US hegemony but certainly US military preponderance this this has worked for a lot of countries the UK France the EU you know most Asian countries have been able to bandwagon with US policy and meet most of their regional needs but then you have to think well in a world of America first where American alliances are being stressed maybe they also have to make considerations for a different type of regional presence and of all of the countries that I think this features most substantively it's China you know and there's a lot of reasons for this we've seen you know countries like India increasing its presence here it's got very important economic interests in the Gulf it's got pretty dense ties it's got cultural and familial and you know any number of historical ties here at a much deeper level than most other Asian countries but it doesn't really seem to have an overarching strategy for securing its interests here whereas China with this Belt and Road Initiative seems to have not just a vision of Indian Ocean region Eurasian connectivity but very importantly it's a positive vision of this connectivity for Gulf actors what everybody's been hearing in the Middle East you know for my entire lifetime has been the Middle East is a problem that we have to solve you know if you listen to anybody in London or Washington or Ottawa or Paris or whatever it's pretty rare that you hear somebody speak of the Middle East in positive terms when Gulf leaders here at China talk about the Middle East it's silk road connectivity and you know the the voyages of Zhang He and you know these these these ancient ties that go back over generations and in a positive role that that the Middle East will play in creating this this Belt and Road Initiative the signature foreign policy of China so so it is it does seem to have kind of a positive strategy for how it sees the Middle East featuring in its and it's I don't know if I'd say grand strategy but it's in its foreign policy across multiple regions and of the Middle East you have to differentiate because across different regions or different across different countries of course there are different policies North Africa and the Levant the economic relationship you see with China is kind of what you would expect China sells a lot of stuff and it doesn't buy much stuff they invest but not heavily it's not really it's an important economic actor for a lot of these countries but those countries don't really mean much to China you know economically whereas the Gulf that's very different and it's not just about energy although energy is a big part of that but you'll see that the GCC countries and Iraq and Iran the balance of trade is is different here you know typically most of those countries sell a lot more stuff to China than they buy from China the the exceptions have been the UAE interestingly and that's mostly because of the UAE's re-export economy and it's more excuse me I guess more mature post-rentier model that they've been trying to develop here and Bahrain is the other exception that's just because Bahrain doesn't have much to sell but in most cases you know the economic relations are much more sophisticated and deeply entrenched and it's not just based on trade but also you see a lot of contracting these Gulf vision programs vision 2030 or or new Kuwait 2035 or whatever lines up very closely with with the Belt and Road initiatives ambitions these five cooperation policies of trade and infrastructure development and investment and people to people ties and policy coordination lines up very neatly with what a lot of the Gulf countries are trying to do so the Gulf is the most important economic region for China in the Middle East and it's the also most important geo geostrategic one again this is an important consideration a lot of the time when people talk about China's relations with Iran and they say you know there's this land bridge that connects China and Iran which makes Iran very important for the Belt and Road one of the things that we don't consider is to get from western China into Iran you have to pass through some sparsely populated not very economically important Central Asian countries where China's economic ties are pretty minimal and where to build this cross regional or inter regional connectivity you build railroads or highways which are a lot more expensive to ship stuff and a lot less efficient so this the Belt and Road it's got these two components there's the overland Silk Road economic belt and then there's the maritime Silk Road initiative which is all these these ports and industrial parks in free trade zones across the Indian Ocean region and that is where the Arabian Peninsula fits you know when the Belt and Road was announced way back in 2013 and all these maps started to appear this is when when the Gulf countries were kind of preoccupied with the Arab uprisings nobody really cared about the Belt and Road but so so the the result was a lot of analysts looked at it and thought the Belt and Road doesn't feature on the Arabian Peninsula what we've seen is under this maritime Silk Road framework that China's been investing a lot into ports in Abu Dhabi and in Dubai and in Guadaran Pakistan and then Dokumen Oman and Jizan and Saudi this military base in Djibouti and ports and industrial parks in Egypt when you look at it they've created through these commercial investments not strategic investments not military bases but but very important commercial investments it's kind of a horseshoe that goes from the Gulf region in Abu Dhabi along the Arabian Sea up the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean so cooperating with these countries on the Arabian Peninsula offers China quite a bit geostrategically as well and that's something we have to consider when we can when we think about China's presence in the Middle East is that it's the countries that it it stands to gain the most from economically and strategically are Iranian rivals or Iranian enemies and so you have to think that whatever Beijing is going to do it's it's not going to want to alienate those relationships for whatever marginal benefits that it would get from working with a revisionist country like Iran which is completely isolated within the region you know among states I mean it's got non-state relationships but you know what's the benefit of cooperating with Hamas or Hezbollah when you could be working with you know the UAE in the Saudis obviously these things don't weigh similarly and and just as an example of this the the importance of the Belt and Road and how this features is that when China I from researching the Belt and Road I've seen that there's two general types of projects you can see there's projects that support a country's domestic development agenda and then there are projects that that kind of fit into this inter-regional or intra-regional connectivity so for example Chinese firms these state-owned enterprises can go into Qatar and they can build the FIFA World Cup Stadium and they can work on port expansion and they can build a mega reservoir and those things are great for Chinese companies but again Qatar is isolated you know so those projects don't really connect to anything else it makes a profit for China and it helps China develop stronger relations with Qatar but you know Yahoo what else do we get when they go to Abu Dhabi and they pour billions of dollars into the the Khalifa port complex that links them not just to Abu Dhabi but to to Dubai and to Saudi and to Amman and to Egypt you know it fits into a larger network of countries that fits into this more connectivity narrative which is driving a lot of the BRI so you're not going to hear Chinese leaders say that one country is more important than another or one Belt and Road project is more important than another but if you look at it it's quite clear it is you know these things that link up and kind of create a Chinese network a commercial network and supply chains and business clusters this actually creates you know the expansion of China's presence in the region in a much more useful way than you know building a metro in Tehran you know or building a soccer stadium in Qatar sorry football stadium my Canadian is showing so this is an important point because there's a there's a perception that China is transactional and opportunistic in the Middle East it's here to make a quick buck the US is strategic and it's never leaving and it's always going to it's it's building you know a sustainable presence whereas China's just here you know building cheap junk and selling cheap junk and and trying to make a profit and leave and I think this is a really short-sighted view of what's happening I think that China's actually been been laying the groundwork for a much more long-term approach to to to its Middle East presence now I'm not one of these guys you'll you'll you'll see people writing these these ridiculous books like The Hundred Year Marathon where they say oh these these Chinese guys thinking in centuries whereas Westerners think in election cycles you know this is I think quite a simplification of of how China is approaching it but I do think that they're looking at the region in a much more integrated way than we tend to well not we maybe folks in the US you know I guess is what I'm getting at just and in a lot of our academic disciplines as well it's not just in government agencies but you know when we look for example as academics that say the Red Sea region what we often see is there's the Middle East folks who look at the Arabian side of it and then there's the African folks who look at you know the the the the other coast of it and of course I understand why it's a it's a tough language you know you've got to you've got to approach different languages and different cultures and learn a lot of different history so we kind of specialize we silo off so the Mediterranean we see it as the north and the south and there's north Africa and there's there's southern Europe but when you look at these China Chinese maps there is the Mediterranean and these projects that are are being developed in the the port and Athens link up with the projects that are happening in Suez which link up with the things that are happening in Morocco and Tunisia so you know it kind of is looked at more as a regional hole I guess is how I how I describe it and it does seem to be I think a pretty clever way of looking at at developing a regional presence now to get back to this this China Iran GCC business which I get I'm really taking the long way to this you know when we look at China's presence in the Gulf like most countries it's it can't be looked at in isolation it's it's it's in it's relative to a lot of things and in chief among those is the relationship with the US you can't say that there's this China Saudi relationship or a China Iran relationship and not also consider how the US features in both of those and again looking at this from an IR perspective China hasn't been bandwagoning with America mostly because they especially under the the Trump administration they have very deep disagreements with how the US has has approached Iran you know China's spent quite a lot of diplomatic capital bringing the Iranians to the table to sign the JCPOA in the two years in the run-up there's something like 17 meetings between Chinese you know ministerial level officials and their Iranian counterparts kind of dragging them to the to the finish line using carrots and sticks you know carrots are we're going to do a lot more investment in your country if you start acting like a normal country the stick is if you don't sign this deal do you really think we're going to sacrifice you know 400 billion dollars worth of trade with the US so we can trade with you you know so there's always been that that extreme leverage that China has over Iran and I think Iran resents this deeply but they don't have anybody else to turn to and China's made it very clear you know we we we'll work with you we'll support you but up to a point we're not going to sacrifice our relationship with the US whenever the US is introduced sanctions Chinese firms have complied they might try to you know buy oil in a you know a sneaky third party route or something but most of the financial infrastructure that facilitated Sino-Iranian trade is gone most of the stuff that China was doing in Iran they're not doing anymore trade I saw something earlier today from last year or for this year for the first eight months of this year compared to last year you know China Iran trade or exports Iranian exports to China have dropped 62 percent from the same period last year basically they're buying nothing from Iran anymore and they're buying a lot of stuff from Saudi so when Iranian oil went off the market that was seven percent of China's oil the Saudis said hey we can make up that difference you know and China said great they they started developing stronger energy relations with Saudi so I think what we see is a lot of folks in the west and a lot of folks in DC have politicized this China-Iran relationship I really do believe it's a political discussion I don't think it's it's I don't think it's real we saw this happen in July when when China's foreign minister Wang Yi was meeting with his counterpart Javad Zarif and all these stories started breaking and a lot of newspapers saying 25-year strategic partnership military cooperation arm sales transfer of technology 400 billion dollars worth of Chinese investment into Iran and it was really presented as oh my god this block of revisionist powers are going to create this alliance that will threaten America's interests in the Middle East and some of the folks I see on the participant list have written pretty eloquently about this already but you know anybody who's been tracking that relationship the China-Iran relationship has has really it's it's been a massive eye roll when we hear this stuff because for one thing China's not investing 400 billion dollars anywhere Iran can absorb 400 billion dollars worth of investment China has a non-alliance policy and they have since 1982 they just don't do it they have partnerships which is another important point this partnership that broke the news that broke this July was announced in January 2016 about three days after China signed the same partnership agreement with the Saudis so it wasn't really a new thing and if you look at the two things so when China signed this partnership agreement with Iran again January 2016 this is right after the JCPOA was signed this was China saying you've made steps towards normalcy and here's a reward we're going to show you the benefits of not being this this revisionist disruptive country Xi Jinping became the first head of state to visit Iran after the JCPOA but almost immediately after Trump was elected and it became quite clear that the U.S. was going to pursue a different track with Iran and that partnership never really took off you know they've they've had lots of meetings they they they rhetorically support each other but China's done very little in real terms to support Iran materially financially and anything at the same time if you look at the trajectory of the the Saudi you China the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership again signed the same week they've they've developed a very sophisticated mechanism to drive this forward they've got the Chinese vice-premier you know one of the top officials in the country is the co-chair of this they called the joint they're the high level joint committee the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is a Saudi counterpart they meet every year to drive this relationship forward there are tangible material benefits to this partnership with the Saudis they signed a similar one with the UAE in 2018 and it's already far surpassed whatever China's been able to do with Iran the same thing Yang Jiecher who used to be the Chinese foreign minister is on the state council he's one of the top officials in the country he is the go-to guy from the UAE relationship and the UAE is appointed Haluna Mubarak as their presidential envoy to China so the same thing they have they have a mechanism to build this forward they have joint investment funds they have they're working on free trade agreements they've got cultural exchanges they're they're learning Chinese and public schools what Iran has is at this point nothing I mean a lot of the stuff that came out of this story that that we saw in July was reported last September from a magazine called patrolling economy and almost everybody debunked it immediately there was really very little that could be that could be proven of it and again when you look at the the the leak that came from this supposed agreement this 25-year cooperation agreement this was leaked by the Iranian side probably by Iranian politicians who are trying to create some division between Iran and China because there's a lot of folks in Iran who don't want a closer relationship with China they don't want to be so reliant on on China so it really does seem to be an overall thing and I think it seems to be driving a lot of the analysis of what's happening in the Middle East as soon as that came out we started seeing a lot of op-eds we saw a lot of analysis a lot of think tank up events talking about this new alliance between China and Iran and I think really if you look at it carefully if you look at the trade figures if you look at investment if you look at contracting the relationship that China has with US allies and partners just completely overwhelms anything that it has with Iran just numbers that I throw it often in 2019 according to the IMF trade with the China and the GCC was worth 170 billion dollars I get that the GCC is maybe not the best measurement of anything anymore but trade with those six six countries that generally have pretty negative impressions of Iran was worth 170 billion dollars trade with Iran was worth 19 billion so really if Chinese leaders or Chinese state enterprises are looking at the Gulf and they think who are we going to you know where are we going to plant our flag it's not Iran and and this is interesting because I think if we saw the US take a more a less politicized less great power competition narrative you know you can look at the South China Sea or you could look at South Asia and you could see legitimate concern whereas China and American interests maybe diverged to a point where they could be competition could could go to a higher level but in the Middle East really their interests line up very very very closely and it's something that I think doesn't really get discussed a lot but what China wants in the Middle East is very similar to what America wants in the Middle East so I think there's a lot of room for for these two countries to actually cooperate on some of these things if they could put the politics aside and I realize that's a big you know that's a big if especially today but again if you look at a lot of the US policy documents that have been issued in the past few years there was the the National Security Council in December 2017 ruled out what was it the national national security strategy and the whole thing was basically a containment strategy where the Indo-Pacific is meant to contain China and and it would refer to the BRI as you know like a normative threat to American interests and it was going to overturn this this free liberal order that that the US has championed which maybe is also kind of a simplification of of you know how how Asian countries might see Western involvement in those regions and then the State Department also issued a very aggressive document in 2018 also kind of like a containment strategy against China I don't believe Democrats are any more favorably predisposed to thinking of China as a potential partner but I do believe that they might consider diplomacy rather than the military as their only foreign policy tool and if that's the case we might see more opportunities for dialogue for for for you know just actually try to understand what is it that that you want to achieve in this region and how is it that our interests might actually support this so I could I could go on I would go on but I can I'm looking at the clock and I would actually like to you know have some more conversation about this and hear what you know some of the folks in the audience might think so so maybe I'll stop here but thanks for for listening this long if you've managed to thank you thank you very much Jonathan maybe I'll give the first question I guess first that whom I should introduce as being the other host of the talks and a key member of the SMEI and the chair of the Center for Iranian Studies so Marcus do you have any comment particularly because of you know you know you work on that I yes for all them yeah it's quite a lot but obviously I wouldn't hug the lime lime thank you very much Professor Falton really very interesting very interesting to see the hear the views of an observer from the other side of the Persian Gulf it was very interesting I was thinking that maybe in general in dealing with China one needs to perhaps revisit the history of the country and then the you know histories of interaction you know going back to the time of empire of course you know Iran's relations with China go back to at least 200 BC during the time of Parthians and the Hans and it was the Persians that's time who actually facilitated the passage through Kushan for Buddhism to actually get to China and so on and so forth and then the Sasanians and the first wall that was built you know the Gorgon wall which is by the Caspian Sea was really to keep the Hans out and that's when they took their eyes off the western front and you know never feared the Arab tribes in the 7th century and so this you know even flow of relations I mean Iran's is in a different category I don't think Iran envisages that you know with a hit sort of 5000 year history this is just a bleep the 40 years of competition with the United States or you know battles with it being cornered by the United States is nothing very significant this shall pass and it's you know I was thinking that if all things were the same Iran would probably much rather be in the back in the lap of the west of course west doesn't have that money anymore there was a time I mean if we spoke about this so the 12 months ago perhaps United States or EU would have the will or the finances to stop this to you know invest perhaps further in the global south I mean this is where China is looking at it is if you look at that road and belt it is you know Singapore it's Djibouti as you said you know going up through Suez and Latin America as well it's just you know I mean I don't know you said that this you know perhaps it's not so serious this relationship between Iran and China and you're quite right it was Ahmadinejad who you know made sure everyone knew and the MPs in the Iranian parliament were very alarmed by China probably because of a much longer history and they're going all the way to you know the your eagles as you call them so it's it'll be very interesting to see what if the oil wasn't there I mean I don't know what the benefit of reliance on China is who was it they had the saying that what was it them done your pain saying what is that you know hide your capacity and buy your time and I think this is probably China's strategy this Iran will be a useful ally partner ally maybe it's too much at the moment a facilitator of various things as it did the Mahan airline who allowed Chinese citizens to fly in and out of China and of course you know the rest of Middle East was horrified because the COVID spread through these flights etc but it's an extraordinary time to watch that region I think I'm much as you said much more interested in the belt than the road the road is been there the original silk road was very much you know really 200 BC between Iran and China and it's um I think Iranians do not want to be beholden to China they hate their markets been flooded by third rate Chinese goods and I don't know whether that will happen to the other side of water the wealth of Saudis they probably don't need to buy the third rate of products but it would be fascinating to see what effect this will have on the more regional relations and Qatar obviously is nowhere near any of these roads or belts so that probably have to be a reliance but I think perhaps enough I mean I'm sort of mulling over listening to all that you said trying to digest it but it's a very timely talk and very interesting time simply I think because China has the money and the counterbalance doesn't because the West is going to be just so you know out of pocket dealing with the COVID consequences and so the road is open to China and its investments in the global south yeah well I think thanks for your comments I think thinking about the Iranian leadership's distaste of closer cooperation with China I mean a lot of the way that this this partnership was being framed was really a new dependency and to think of everything the Iranian people have struggled with to have this you know post-revolutionary fiercely independent approach to global politics and then to say yeah yeah we're just going to throw our lot in with China and you know it's just not going to happen right so it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out in the region I think a big part of it is also the normative element because as I said this values-based versus interest-based approach I spoke with somebody from a western ministry of foreign affairs who was saying you know the Gulf Arabs are more closely aligned with us in terms of values right like they like us in what we represent more than what China does and I'm sorry man uh no no I mean liberal democracy is not really what people want to buy here and the China model is much more attractive for a lot of leaders and a lot of societies too I think so there is um it is a pretty fundamentally important shift I think oh thank you so I'm just going to ask a very simple question and then take and also put forward a question from Steve's time we're getting questions coming in quite quickly so when you talk about the Gulf you know you're talking are you talking about the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and what do you mean by the Gulf it's like Saudi Arabia being the main leader so in a sense the term Gulf is kind of homogenizing the region that has you know different states with different structures different economies interests and so on and we all know about you know the the vying for the leadership between the UAE and Saudi Arabia for example over the past decade but that's my question and I put forward the questions from Steve and there's one question in the from the audience also related to that which is you know what are the strategic interests of the Gulf states in relation to China and is that the reason why the Gulf yeah why do they are welcoming a stronger presence in in the Gulf but in relation to that is that you know can you comment briefly on the silence over the treatment of the U-views and and you know the silence from the Muslim world around that and if that factors in your discussion I mean I understand it might not be part of what you are talking about but if you comment at least that's a lot so the Gulf I mean it's interesting because like I said there's a sense that China's got this neutral approach and I think this is a total mischaracterization like I like I was emphasizing and even within say the Gulf monarchies within this so when Xi Jinping came to Abu Dhabi in 2018 and upgraded China or the UAE's relationship from a strategic partnership to a comprehensive strategic partnership that took that took the UAE from the second rung to the top rung they had signed in 2012 this this second-tier partnership agreement a few months later the Emir of Qatar went to Beijing for a state visit now he'd also had that second-tier relationship and I think the expectation was okay I want an upgrade too like the Emirati guys got and he didn't what he got was yeah this this this thing we have is working really well let's continue with that and this kind of comes back to the Xinjiang question because Qatar is the only Gulf country to remove its name from that list now I think what happened was I think Qatar probably wanted that kind of recognition that the UAE received especially given its isolation within the Gulf I think China recognized that it had much deeper interest with the anti-Katar block of the UAE Saudi Bahrain in Egypt and didn't see any point in antagonizing those countries especially the UAE and Saudi so you know you see this differentiation of how China sees the Gulf countries now there's no document that says this it's just you watch how these things play out over time and you you can kind of make an inference but but it seems quite clear that Qatar was dissatisfied it hasn't gotten a lot of new contracts since 2017 whereas the UAE and Saudi and Oman and Bahrain have been getting better stuff so there is kind of you know when you say the Gulf you're right it can mean a lot of different things but I think if you look at the countries that have the highest level of partnership agreement in the Gulf it's Iran Saudi in the UAE now even among that I would argue that they're not all weighted equally as I have and it's not what you think I think the UAE is the most important they get a lot more their their economic relationships with the UAE are much more mature much more sustainable much more well-rounded with the UAE than any country in the Middle East and in fact a friend showed me some data and if you extend the Middle East the Gulf all the way to the to the Mediterranean the only country in that that that configuration that has deeper economic relations with China is France you know so that puts the UAE at number two right across the Mediterranean as well so you know the Gulf countries there are there are different ones but you know also the UAE has between two and three hundred thousand Chinese citizens you know which is also very unusual so yeah you can look at it and you can think there there there are two or three tiers the bottom is Bahrain because they don't have any kind of agreement the next the next one would be Iraq Kuwait Oman and Qatar because they have the second tier status and then those three others are at the top but then you can even say at the top there's top A and top B now as to the question about Xinjiang this is important and it's it's interesting and and again it's not something you're going to really see any kind of official statement from anybody but when the crown prince of Saudi went to China last for his last round of this this cooperation or this this committee meeting the timing was interesting it was shortly after Jamal Khashoggi was killed and of course we remember when when when Muhammad bin Salman went to the US and he was hanging out with Bill Gates and Martha Stewart and Donald Trump and all of these great celebrities and and shortly after that the US immediately said we're done with you you know and you've got senators saying they've got to get rid of the guy and he can never come back well he went instead to Pakistan India in China and he was treated like a future king and one of the consequences of that was in China he he issued a statement saying China is dealing this isn't verbatim by any stretch but something like China has the right to deal with ideological extremism in any way that it sees fit if if they can handle this politicization of Islam in a constructive way then maybe we can learn something from them now I'm not saying I agree with that by any stretch at all but if you look at a lot of Gulf countries again looking at this regional security complex framework one of the biggest threats I think that that most governments in the region face is ideological and a lot of that comes from political Islamic groups like the Ikhwan Muslim Brotherhood which in a lot of Gulf countries is considered an extremist organization it's illegal so when Chinese government says Xinjiang is our way to deal with you know this this radical Islamic ideology which I think is not a fair characterization but that's how China frames it that resonates and Gulf leaders will say look if it maybe uh maybe you have the ticket what the what other countries have done with the war on terrorism or or Muslim bands isn't working maybe this reeducation thing will now again as as a Western liberal I find out the idea pretty awful but I'm not the I'm not the target audience right a lot of folks don't think it's a horrible idea yeah I can see that I want to be in a couple of questions or maybe more than a couple of questions we're getting some on Facebook as well so some of the questions are kind of related to each other which is in relation to the sanctions on Iran how are they impacting trade between Iran and China for example in terms of banks shipments lines etc and then the other one is a question to you know about Chinese strategies why isn't it interested in reshaping and extending this fear of influence in the Gulf states and so if you might answer those that are you know kind of much more yeah in a sense in in terms of the sanctions on Iran whether you have any comments on that and in terms of why isn't China interested in reshaping the political spheres in the Gulf states as the United States would have done right so to the second question I think they're not interested just because they've got a great deal as it is right the US has this this security excuse me security framework and you know it provides an umbrella for all these Chinese citizens and assets to be safe without any kind of security commitment I don't think that's a long-term long-term viable option but it's worked very well not just for China but for everybody you know there's not too many other countries except Turkey and the UK and France that have committed any kind of true presence and they've got nothing similar to what the US does you know so Japan for example or Korea have very intense domestic pressures that prevent them from projecting power so they they kind of rely on this US umbrella and China has as well I think there's a couple of points to this one for for you know we'll China do this forever probably not the trade war is the US weaponizing trade right it's it's it's China supply chains it's energy potentially being cut off so I can't imagine that they would be content to allow this to continue like you could expect to see that this supply base and Djibouti might might expand into something more than a supply base in this port commercial or whatever it is in Guadar and Pakistan might be more than a listening port in the future but I think another issue is that looking at it from the perspective of Gulf countries every GCC country save Saudi has either defense cooperation agreement or a facilities access agreement with the US and those are basically the the load bearing pillars of their their security policies if China comes to Oman and says yeah we're investing in this port in Dukum and we'd like it to also be a dual-purpose naval facility the Omani government is going to realize immediately that this threatens their most important you know extra regional relationship and it would put tremendous strain on on on the Omanis so I think China is probably also saying it you know what do I get out of this if I if I if I just go along with it as it is the US is going to bear the the burden of providing the security and I don't have to strain my relationships with these countries that would that don't want to say no to me and don't want to alienate the US either so it just kind of seems like a very polite response maybe thank you so there are a couple of questions I'm going to take one from Facebook which is the question on what role and side does China take in regard to the embargo against Qatar by the other Gulf states because this relates to another question coming from Muhammad al-Hajri on the chat box which says how do you see the development of relations of Arab Gulf states presumably amongst them uh under the uh BRI under the uh relative initiative or initiative so I guess you know sort of in a sense is there this type of influence on internal regional relations so the Qatar excuse me the Qatar issue was was disruptive for China because they were in the process of trying to complete a free trade agreement with the GCC and this is something they've been trying to work on for for years and it was kind of characterized by fits and starts they would you know work on it and then there would be no you know one side of the other would say no we don't we're not ready to expose our markets to Chinese you know retailers or whatever or China doesn't want to it's it's energy downstream to compete with Gulf ones or whatever they just kept saying no um in 2016 when when Xi Jinping went to Saudi he said let's let's get this done in a year you know I want I want this free trade agreement they they managed to get past a lot of the reservations that everybody had and I think there was like five rounds of talks that year with the goal of 2017 being the announcement of this FTA so when the business of the cutter started you know that was it all the momentum was gone because you can't negotiate a multilateral agreement with an organization that doesn't exist anymore right so I think for China it was quite disturbing they didn't say much publicly they they kept saying we're willing to mediate which everybody knows means nothing because China had no role in this this was you know completely facilitated I guess by by the Trump meeting in Riyadh and there wasn't much China could do to to walk it back so you know publicly they said all the stuff they were supposed to say oh this is terrible we we hope that they can find a peaceful resolution a diplomatic solution and we're willing to help if we can but then like I said they they've been working economically a lot more closely with Egypt Saudi and the UAE and and the and Qatar has kind of been a bit left in the cold so it kind of looks like they've they've picked their side in that particular struggle and maybe how how the Gulf States I'm not sure the question about the Gulf States and the BRI but I guess that's kind of similar in that a lot of these projects that you see happening in the Gulf seem to be in competition with each other you know like how many premier ports do you need in a relatively I shouldn't say a small spot I mean that's a mischaracterization I keep seeing people refer to like Oman as the tiny sultanate and I'm like nobody says Italy is tiny but Italy in Oman are basically the same size nobody says Austria is tiny but Austria and the UAE are basically the same size but to have a bunch of ports I guess in in sparsely populated areas with not a lot of urban centers seems a little unusual but then you look at what a lot of these countries have for their development projects and you can see that there is this you know when I came to Abu Dhabi in 2006 there was an enormous gap between Abu Dhabi and Dubai that gap has shrunk considerably like I see a point in the not too far future where it's basically just one big urban center that in in that case you can see why maybe they do need two big ports to to service these two big population bases so there does seem to be a lot of overlap in what they're doing in these BRI projects they seem to be competing with each other for Chinese projects but the other important thing to consider is that the BRI isn't some top-down initiative out of China this is a series of projects that are being rolled out under this BRI framework but a lot of them are being developed at the municipal or provincial level and what you'll see in the in the Gulf for example is that in Dubai a lot of the the Dubai Chinese commercial presence is from Fujian province or Wenzhou and then you come to Abu Dhabi and it's from Jiangsu province and then you go to Waman and it's Ningxia province and what what happens is these provincial consortiums in China we'll look at the map I assume and say hey there's a place where there's not many Chinese businesses and they need infrastructure and they need this stuff and let's get together and build it and they'll just go and say oh yeah by the way this is Belt and Road so it's not like you know Xi Jinping is sitting there with this great map saying ah this is where I'm going to put a port and here's I'll put a pipeline I think a lot of these are very loosely coordinated if at all so I think a lot of Gulf countries see it as opportunities to get FDI they see it as opportunities to build closer economic relations with a major rising power and I think they also see it as insurance you know should the US really decide that it does want to play a lesser role here okay there's a question from Bruce Daniels which asks about the if you could comment on the Israel China UAE investment survey surveillance tech producing urban control including private security companies and so on so whether that's part of your research or not or whether you could comment on it even sure it's not really it's something I'm actually a project I'm planning to start pretty soon because it's it's clearly something that's really important China announced in 2014 yet another clunky named initiative called the 1 plus 2 plus 3 cooperation framework and this was how they want to develop ties with different Arab countries and they specified Arab so you know Turkey and Israel and Iran technically aren't part of this but you can see how Israel has kind of become a bigger part of it um the one in the two are pretty traditional you know one is energy two is trade investment and construction and infrastructure but three is looking at things like digital cooperation renewable energy and nuclear energy and the digital of course is what's been I think causing a lot of friction between China and the US because again this digital stuff whether it's Huawei 5G networks or whether it's AI cooperation or whether it's selling surveillance tech this stuff isn't neutral it's not apolitical and it does present security challenges for the US military or the US Air Force or Navy or whatever so you can see why America does have some pretty legitimate questions about how closely these countries are cooperating with with China on this stuff without maybe discussing it a little more closely with their their biggest security partner but again the US has been has been complaining a lot about this stuff but they haven't really offered a lot of alternatives that's starting to change where you can see Ericsson or other Western companies come in and say you know with their what is it their their clean clean tech solution they're they're starting to try to address this but that kind of ignores the fact that China's already got like a good five or six year head start on this and at the same time when you look at the the interesting way that Mr. Stanley phrased this with Israel China and the UAE you know we've seen that when Secretary Pompeo went to to Israel in May and said you can't cooperate with China on sensitive issues and American officials in the UAE reiterated that point it seemed that that the US was telling these countries cool it we don't want you working with China on on things that we consider dangerous of course this is happening when the US is completely overrun by COVID-19 and has no material aid to give anybody let alone its own citizens meanwhile China's coming to the UAE and building you know COVID hospitals and providing PPE and and working with them on testing and tracing and apps and and building these huge testing centers and doing the same thing with Israel so this massive Chinese AI firm came to the UAE last year and signed this this MOU and they've been working on this on this vaccine together and they've also been working with the Israelis on it and it's not just vaccine stuff but they're also using this to develop cooperation in AI and other advanced medical cooperation and a lot of tech cooperation so it is a pretty real dynamic and it's interesting because again you know the UAE's bought a lot of surveillance equipment from the Israelis it's been kind of indirect until recently they buy it Israeli companies operating out of Switzerland would sell to the UAE but you know they've been working very closely on this and Chinese companies have also been working very closely on this and again that's where I think this normative element of the relationship is important because you know a German or a Canadian or American company might have certain constitutional or or parliamentary restrictions on how it can export some of this kind of tech but Chinese companies don't and you know companies in the UAE are just happy to get this stuff they don't want to have a liberal government wagging its finger and saying we'll give you parts of it but we'll give you all of it and don't use it for stuff that makes us feel uncomfortable whereas China will just say yeah we'll sell it to you we'll help you build it you know we have no reservations at all so there is a lot more cooperation on this type of thing than I think you'd expect and I don't see that slowing down anytime soon so in relation to that there are a couple of questions I'm sorry some of the audience members I'll come back to your questions but one from Sardar which is how does China see the Abraham accord and can China maintain neutrality and apolitical relations and obviously talked about the vaccine and so on but again what is the role of Russia in in this situation and how extensive will see the role of Israel being in the you know the Belt Road initiative and how does that affect countries in the region I you know I think it's a kind of a complicated question from Matthew but but it is you know sort of trying to think of this kind of shifting shifting relations and it's not it seems to be quite fluid rather than you know a static position but perhaps you know yeah so there was there was a lot of really interesting analysis that that talked about how the Abraham Accords were really going to stifle a lot of a lot of China's ambitions because this meant that you know trade flows would be happening intra-regionally whereas you know I think we all know that the Middle East is notoriously pretty weak at inter-regional trade and tech transfer and there's a lot of competition between countries so the idea that you know Israel and Bahrain and the UAE are going to start building these kind of networks and it's been really impressive to me to see how how quickly this has happened and how much energy has been kind of unleashed in doing this you know maybe this does create fewer opportunities for Chinese companies but again just look at the volume and look at the size you know China's a $14 trillion economy it's going to be pretty hard for Israel and the UAE and everybody else in the region to compete with it so I don't really see it as they're going to shut China out of the market I think really what what this presents is an opportunity I mean if I were in Beijing and if I were consulting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs I'd be like hey this is great because you know going through up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal to access the Mediterranean is pretty dodgy because the Egyptian government always looks like it's in trouble and you know Somalia has been a nightmare and Yemen's a problem but if Israel is suddenly a normal country in relation to its neighbors you can build all sorts of of access points to get to the Mediterranean through Haifa which you know this Chinese port company has a contract to manage so you can see how this kind of red med project could actually start to take shape and how you know a country that geostrategically hasn't been a piece suddenly becomes available to some of China's ambitions now the only issue of course is that obviously Israel's relationship with the U.S. means that there there's always going to be a limit you know when I was talking earlier about these comprehensive strategic partnerships Israel doesn't have one because if they called it a partnership then it would be you know problematic for everybody so I can't remember right now what they called it but they gave it a completely different name to neutralize it so it wouldn't alienate the Americans and it wouldn't alienate Palestinians who China historically has tried to show that as a third world leader it was going to support the Palestinians but of course their commercial interests have made that a little less concrete so there's another question which might be related to this from Flavius regarding the Chinese central bank revealing plan about the sovereign digital currency and whether that could be seen you know whether the Chinese currency will be in competition with the U.S. currency in terms of Gulf exchange rates and so on so in a sense would the Chinese currency become the default currency for trade deals and so on it's a futuristic question but might be do you expect to see a competition between petro dollar and yuan for example yeah I mean really if I try to answer financial or economic questions I just sound really dumb but because I don't understand economics it all just seems like witchcraft to me but you know there's always been that tension of especially with the Saudis that you know the petro dollar is seems like a weapon that they maybe could use like when the Saudis were having some problems with America they said you know maybe we'll we'll sell our American debt and we'll start buying selling oil and yuan I don't see that happening mostly just because Gulf leaders most of their investments seem to go you know in U.S. currency but certainly for things like digital payment and digital currencies and this kind of new stuff that I clearly don't understand China does this better a lot better so far than a lot of other countries do and you know Dubai for example has been working pretty closely with China I think in developing this this digital currency system and digital payment systems thank you um so there's a question on Facebook and there's a last question that I want to take because it seems to be talking to the moment but the one from Facebook is from Thailand and do you think with the deteriorating deteriorating U.S.-Chinese relations and the focus on domestic economy in China is China ready to sacrifice its relations with the U.S. to serve geopolitical or economic interests and then do perhaps we can see evidence from the why we trade with Iran despite the sanctions and do you answer the question about COVID but the last question from coming in the question and answers is how would it change in U.S. foreign relations back towards a rules-based international order say in the case of the Biden victory affect the Gulf and China equation that maybe push Gulf countries further into China's impris and I think this is kind of a topical question perhaps to end with but if you could answer those you know that other question about the deteriorating relations and impact on on China's attitude or kind of strategy is going forward yeah I'll try I mean the first question about the focus on domestic economy and if China is ready to sacrifice its relations with the U.S. I don't like I just don't see that happening I think I think that China I don't know maybe I'm maybe I'm naive or just an optimist but those two countries are just so closely linked and we keep hearing this phrase decoupling and it just I just don't understand what that means I mean how can they how can they isolate each other they're they're just so deeply connected not just directly bilaterally but through supply chains and through everything else so it really seems I just see this as political posturing more than anything where people trying to get votes or people trying to talk tough you know are you know playing up to a domestic audience I hope that's what it is because otherwise we're in worse shape than I think and I guess the last question about Biden and the Gulf I mean that's what everybody's wondering is is what will this mean because there is a sense that that a Biden administration would be a continuation of an Obama one which I think is is probably also quite simplistic you know Joe Biden was on the senate foreign relations committee for a long time and and I think he's probably a more deeply strategic foreign relations thinker than Obama was when when he came into the office but there is a sense in the Gulf that that maybe certain countries have have aligned themselves a little too closely to the Trump administration and the Republicans and that goes not just in the Gulf I mean look at Netanyahu he's really you know burned down any kind of relation with the Democratic party that he ever had so for a lot of folks in the region I have to think they're they're they're sweating right now and thinking you know what will Biden mean for us I think in Saudi Arabia there's there's quite a lot of concern that the relationship between between the Saudi government and the American government has been very very narrow under the Trump administration it seems to be an elite level more than more so than before where it really seems to be just you know Jared Kushner talking to Mohammed bin Salman seems to be the extent of it and a lot of those other important political ties you know in the senate and in congress have been really left to fray but I do also think that they're pretty important relationships for everybody so I can't imagine that there wouldn't be quite a lot of energy to make a course correction and try to bring some energy to to fixing it just because it is you know it's a strategically important region for everybody and despite you know American politicians saying they want to get out of the Gulf or they want to get out of the Middle East I really think this is also just political political the troop numbers aren't changing the arms sales aren't changing the bases aren't going anywhere and you know it's sure maybe America doesn't need the oil the way they used to maybe they don't have to worry about Israel the way they used to but at the same time the American alliance system is supported largely through you know Middle Eastern energy going to countries like Japan and Korea and energy going to Europe so you know if the US were to say we're not going to have any role in securing that anymore well who will you know a lot of America's allies which is the I think one of the most important sources of its its global power suddenly have to provide this for themselves we get a lot more dangerous fluid Middle East and Indo-Pacific becomes much more competitive and you know then we truly are dealing with great power competition so my expectation would be that hopefully calmer heads prevail and they look at things not emotionally but strategically and think okay this is politically not very the medicine doesn't taste good but it's going to help us so we're going to have to approach it in a certain way okay well we must end here I know there are some questions that haven't been answered but they kind of relate to each other but what I wanted to yeah thanks thanks Aki for putting that very very good comment or question do you cover in your book whether China is trying you know would strategically would like to try or want to play a role in mediation between let's say Iran and the Gulf state the Gulf Arab states do you talk about that in your in your book just it's my personal interest just in case yeah it's it's kind of similar to the Qatar thing they've they've made the offer and this was around the time when things got really really bad so after Nimr al-Nimr was was executed and then there were these attacks on the Saudi embassy in Tehran and and it really looked like things were getting out of hand and the Chinese foreign minister did make the offer to say look we have good offices in both countries we have a comprehensive strategic partnership with both countries you know not too many other countries have that type of relationship in both cities so they said you know we're willing to to offer some kind of mediation if you if you would like but I don't think there's any appetite in Iran or Saudi for that at that time and I don't think they saw China as the actor who is going to solve it I think they saw China as you know thanks for thanks a lot yeah yeah don't worry we'll call you you know later okay thank you for that and thank you so much for all the questions and apologies for not being able to to get to them but you could see how interesting your talk has been in China thanks you know good questions came up and really looking forward to reading your book the 2020 and learning more about diplomacy international relations and strategies and the BRI but thanks a lot and thank you Nargis and Aki you see you also yeah thanks so much thank you very much bye bye thank you all thanks guys