On this episode, Anita spoke with Jonathan Fulton, a Professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. We discussed China’s relationships in the Middle East and how they go beyond seeing the region as a source of cheap oil.
We also talk about the latest updates on the Russia-Ukraine war, including the flow of Western military equipment into Ukraine and Germany’s refusal to provide its Leopard 2 tanks. We also discuss why Putin is losing the energy war with Europe.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is in Africa this week. We explain why she is there and what the US hopes to achieve. We consider the trip in light of Russia’s and China’s recent diplomatic tours of the region.
Topics Discussed in this Episode
Articles and Resources Mentioned in Episode
Russia-Ukraine War Update: Tanks, tanks, and more tanks
Janet Yellen goes to Africa
Interview with Jonathan Fulton
Follow Us
On this episode, Anita spoke with Jonathan Fulton, a Professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. We discussed China’s relationships in the Middle East and how they go beyond seeing the region as a source of cheap oil.
We also talk about the latest updates on the Russia-Ukraine war, including the flow of Western military equipment into Ukraine and Germany’s refusal to provide its Leopard 2 tanks. We also discuss why Putin is losing the energy war with Europe.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is in Africa this week. We explain why she is there and what the US hopes to achieve. We consider the trip in light of Russia’s and China’s recent diplomatic tours of the region.
Topics Discussed in this Episode
Articles and Resources Mentioned in Episode
Russia-Ukraine War Update: Tanks, tanks, and more tanks
Janet Yellen goes to Africa
Interview with Jonathan Fulton
Follow Us
Anita Kellogg: [00:00:00] Welcome to Kellogg's Global Politics, a podcast on current events in US foreign Policy and international affairs. My name is Dr. Anita Kellogg, an international relation scholar specializing in the relationship between economics and national security. I'm here with my co-host, Ryan Kellogg, an expert in energy investment and policy.
Ryan Kellogg: Thanks and glad to be back. So this is episode 27 and we're recording this on January 22nd, 2023.
Anita Kellogg: On this episode, I spoke with Jonathan Fulton, an assistant professor at Zyad University in Abu Dhabi, and a senior non-residential fellow at the Atlantic Council. We discuss China's relationships in the Middle East and how they go beyond seeing the region as a source of cheap oil.
We begin with the latest updates on the Russia, Ukraine War, including the flow of Western military equipment into Ukraine and Germany's refusal to provide LE two tanks. We also discussed [00:01:00] why Putin is losing the energy war with Europe. US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is in Africa this week. We explain why she's there and what the US hopes to achieve.
We consider the trip in light of Russia and China's recent diplomatic tours of the region
Ryan Kellogg: So we've been. Pretty busy the last couple of weeks and probably the next month and preparation for an upcoming trip to India because the oldest son of one of my cousins is getting married on the subcontinent, and we're finding that it is a heck of an ordeal and preparing for this.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, I mean, and we're just cousins. .
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah, I know, but we are, I mean we're, we're representing the, representing the family. One of the few members making the journey to Uday poor. Where the wedding's going to be held. But the preparation, I mean, yeah, we knew, I think going in Indian weddings are a [00:02:00] big deal. This one's an exceptionally big deal.
And the wedding festival festivities take place across three days of which requires Indian outfits. So I know that you want to talk a little bit about your recent shopping experience
Anita Kellogg: and tell me that like, so when I first heard about this, I was so excited, because Indian clothes are beautiful, but then it ended up being this huge source of stress because of course, you know, brides tend to have this vision and then you're trying to figure out the vision and you don't know anything about Indian clothes.
So we did. At least all my outfits recently, and I'm really excited now that I have the outfits chosen. I think they're really beautiful, especially, you know, India Celebration Festival sort of clothes. They're just beautiful. They're colorful, there's lots of embroidery. It's a special experience to get to participate in the wedding and then amazing to get to go to India and we're spending two weeks there and could not be more excited about it.[00:03:00]
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. So that's, that's the exciting bar. The clothes scene it, but we also have work to do. So the,
Anita Kellogg: can we just talk about clothes? ? I enjoy that. , I'm sure everyone listening wants to hear more
Ryan Kellogg: about clothes. Want to hear more about the clothes? Well, no. We have to put on essentially a Bollywood style dance.
Mm-hmm. on the day of the Sanjeet, which is the first day of the Indian. Wedding festivities and we have a, we have a choreographer. We're really struggling with the dance steps and who knows how many hundreds of people are going to be watching us . So not think about that. .
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, we were doing that. We were trying to, lots of people trying to all at once from different places, try to practice the dance with Zoom choreographer on Zoom.
Yeah. And there was a lot of bandwidth. I think we struggled a little bit with that, but also trying to coordinate people like across screens like that is kind of interesting.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. So we definitely have a lot of work to [00:04:00] do and then, but I guess we'll have the day that we get there with super jet lag to pull it all together as a group.
Yeah. So,
Anita Kellogg: so that should be great. .
Ryan Kellogg: Yep. . So I'm sure, sure. More to come on those in future
Anita Kellogg: episodes. Yeah. Hopefully we can get a video and just zoom in online because that would be
Ryan Kellogg: perfect. Oh, no, no, no. I think we can skip that. We need to, yeah, she'd be like our daughter, she's, she's bragged enough about her dancing
Anita Kellogg: ability.
She bragged about it. She's been on video , she just hides from the camera the whole time.
Ryan Kellogg: I know. Talk and the walk . Exactly,
Anita Kellogg: exactly. So moving on to the main thrust of our show, we begin with our updates on the Russia, Ukraine War, and in particular, what's got a lot of attention this week is the flow of military equipment into.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah, so I think the, the main thing to happen this past week was a meeting of 50 Nations on January 20th. It's the Ukraine Defense Contract Group, which was [00:05:00] formed at the beginning of the war, and I think this is only the, the fifth in-person meeting that they've had. But so these group, which essentially are ministers of defense or chiefs of defense, of these 50 nations that are part of the part of either NATO or the Greater Alliance in helping.
Equipment to Ukraine, and they met at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany. And essentially it was to plan, uh, particularly looking ahead to the spring as both Ukraine and Russia plan offensives. So what equipment does Ukraine need? Zelensky, since the beginning of the war has been on kind of a constant diplomatic mission.
Mm-hmm. advocating for the equipment that's needed. I think the, the latest push, you know, beyond kind of the air defense equipment that we talked about. Was this push for main battle tanks in order to one, you know, stall what looks to be a potential Russian offensive, which [00:06:00] actually, you know, there's some noise going around today that may have begun in the southern part of Ukraine, and this is all coming from the surge from the conscription of 300,000 additional Russians.
So the Russians have kind of re-equipped, fully expected to launch their own offensive at the same time. Ukraine sees an opportunity in the spring to go on offensive itself. So either way, it's really seen that armed personnel carriers and tanks are still critical in order to have that, that capacity to either repel Russian push or to gain territory rapidly in the south and east.
Now in this, so it was interesting on the US side, the joint chiefs of staff, mark Milli, noted that it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces. Now, meanwhile, you have a contingent of other NATO allies [00:07:00] led by the UK that believe a victory could actually be won this year only if the allies move fast and try to exploit Russia's weakness.
So again, goes back to this discussion around tanks and what emerged this past week was. The push to get Germany to supply its leading edge tank. The leopard two and the UK tried to double down in terms of putting the pressure on Germany and committed to providing 14 of its challenger, two main battle tanks.
Now, unfortunately, Germany's been very reluctant to move forward and supply these tanks, and this is really you, you've seen this I think throughout the conflict. Now, mind you, and I think all analysts commend Germany on how much it's moved since the beginning of the war because this It's the second largest supplier.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's the second largest supplier in Europe. I think UK is probably number one, but right behind UK is [00:08:00] Germany in terms of providing arms, and this is unheard of in the post World War II period, and obviously, you know, Germany built its whole post World War II political culture.
Rightfully so given its history around this aversion to pushing any sort of military agenda. So there's this reluctance, especially within the leadership class to be seen and even like the visuals of having a German made tank on the Russian border. So is kind of a political issue, right?
Anita Kellogg: So it's interesting because other countries have said that they want to donate their leopard two tanks, but they have to get permission from Germany in order to be able to send those.
Yeah,
Ryan Kellogg: that's how Berlin would prefer it. Now Poland actually came out and said, We don't care what you say. We have these leopard two things and we're going to donate 14 of them regardless of whether we have your approval or not. And moreover, we think there should be a coalition because the leopard two is [00:09:00] actually widely held by most Eastern European countries.
So there's a great supply line, there's great maintenance, there's great experience in terms of personnel that are trained with the leopard two throughout Eastern Europe. So there's enough of a coalition of countries that essentially have, I don't know how many, there's so 2000 total leopard two s deployed within Europe.
I don't know how many are held within Eastern Europe, but Poland's saying, Hey, we're going to give these first 14 and then we're going to form a coalition of other leopard owning countries that could donate even more. Mm-hmm. to Ukraine. Mm-hmm. . So it's really putting the pressure on Germany.
Anita Kellogg: I have a question.
So what are these different kinds of tanks? Why is this one important, more important than the ones that have been sent before? I'm kind of a little bit confused about that.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. So part of it, and there is a, there's a funny tweet that I came across and it was a picture of, of basically different pieces of armor and it was kind of like the definition, [00:10:00] according to journalists, , and every single piece of armor was like tank, tank, tank,
Now everything that's been supplied thus far in terms of like modern equipment by the west are primarily armored personnel carriers. Mm-hmm. and these, and, you know, , this is totally layman's explanation. Mm-hmm. , but you know, it's just the amount of fire power that can be brought to bear from the size of the turret, the size of the ammunition.
Yeah. The ability to resist attack. Mm-hmm. is all much smaller and armored personnel carry, it's made for, for carrying small contingent of mm-hmm. of troops as well. So it has like multipurpose? Yeah, it has, it has a turds equipment, machine guns, it's armored, but it's not a tank per se. Okay. Now the tanks that have been provided have been mostly provided by Eastern European countries, and these are old Soviet.
Tanks. So the Ukrainians, their biggest supply are T 72 s, which I think at the time was probably the most [00:11:00] advanced tank at the end of the Soviet Union, but nevertheless are several decades old. But they're, they're okay tanks. That's essentially what they've been provided. But the Russians have begin to deploy.
They're more later generation tanks. Mm-hmm. . So to counter them, you have the more modern, so for the UK it's these challenger tanks. For Germany, it's the leopard two, and then for the us, and this is where kind of Germany comes back in, they said, okay, fine. We'll release leopard two to Ukraine if the US releases the M one Abraham tanks.
Now the US backed off of that mostly because. one, the tank hasn't been actively deployed in Europe, has been actively deployed since 2013. Now, mind you, some of our current forward positions within NATO have Abrams, but otherwise there's no supply line. There's no [00:12:00] experience in dealing with these. And the way that it's been explained is that these are the best things in the world.
Mm-hmm. , especially like the later M one A one or M one A two tanks, but they're technically complicated. Mm-hmm. , they take many months to train. They have kind of unique fuel requirements. So the supply line, you know? Mm-hmm. and in terms of keeping them running, especially around maintenance, because they'll again, right.
Technically complicated, going to break down. Right. More often if those maintenance. Stations Right. With equipped, you know, capable people, capable of maintaining it aren't close to the front line, then you know it's going to be more of a burden. So that's how the US has framed it is like, no, but you don't have those problems with the leopard two.
Well the leopard two, so I mentioned 2000 tanks currently exists within Europe. Mm-hmm. and Oh, cause you'd
Anita Kellogg: already have logistics.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. They've been trained on them. So they have all of that experience and logistics on the border country. Right. So Poland is perfectly equipped to Right. To kind of deal with that, that situation.
And [00:13:00] apparently training people is supposed to be quicker as well for the leopard two. Okay. So it's really seen as the, the ideal solution because it, this is talking about getting Ukrainian troops up to speed within a couple months so that they can actually deploy. Right. The leper two quickly. Right. So yeah, it's been just a big to-do, I think with military circles past week.
Anita Kellogg: I thing also that I think is interesting about this, there's a lot of discussion in the US about maintaining enough weapons for peer competitor war. They really mean in case we went to war China over Taiwan or some issue. But it seems to me like there's a slight difference here too, in that these were all made in defense of Russia, essentially.
Mm-hmm. . Like the reason why you have so many deploys. That's the reason they exist. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so it seems like a really natural fit to be using them in this conflict because they're not so worried they wouldn't be involved likely in a war with [00:14:00] China, but Right. Their main antagonist is Russia.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. And you shouldn't be getting in involved in a land war in Asia , so we shouldn't have the, the use for remain battle tanks. But yeah, exactly. This was, it was made specifically to repel the Soviet army in case of invasion of, of Western Europe.
Anita Kellogg: I, that just struck me as you were talking. .
Ryan Kellogg: Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.
You know, there has been a, a lot of criticism on, it's like, oh, you know, they, the US came out and said, oh, there's all these shortcomings about the M one. And it's like, well, why do we have the M ones? If they break apart, they're hard to maintain. They require so much training. . Well, part of
Anita Kellogg: the difference though, is being at the Eisenhower School where logistics is a big part of the entire school mission.
And I haven't taught specifically logistics, but from my students and such, it takes time to put those supply logistic routes into place. But if you can do it, and you have people there who can do the maintenance, but it's a, it's a [00:15:00] matter of putting those into place. And I can see if you don't have any of the personnel already in Europe, you're going to have to deploy a lot of people who can do that maintenance and then a supply line for the right equipment that you are going to need.
So that requires a lot of setup. Yeah. Which I think really to your point is Poland and all these other countries on the border already know how to keep the maintenance up for a leopard two.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So Germany didn't, didn't shut the door on it. They've just, they've been very deliberate.
They've been very conscious of kind of any sort of domestic pushback or domestic vulnerability. So I think everybody thinks. because they do eventually move forward that Germany will eventually give permission to deploy leopard twos. They've already backed off of the, well, the US needs to deploy Abrams first.
So I think it's just a matter of weeks, probably before they, they make some sort of [00:16:00] announcement. That being said, if you do want to understand more, because this is being actively debated within military circles on Twitter, we'll provide a link to Mark Hurling's feed. He had a nice thread, he was actually a commander.
He was, he's a lieutenant General retired Lieutenant General who commanded US forces in Europe. But during his periods, uh, further down in the reigns mm-hmm. , he was actually a tank commander. Mm-hmm. , you know, during Iraq. So he is very familiar with the limitations of the M one Abrams. Mm-hmm. . So he provides kind of a technical because there's still a debate going on, on Yeah.
The US could supply 400 of these mm-hmm. , you know, within weeks mm-hmm. and, oh, they, they make such a big deal. It's, you know, the Iraqis and the Saudis use these tanks, but what. General Hurtling kind of provides the details. Well, yeah. Iraqis and Saudis use this, but they have like a five year training period.
Right. The manufacturer has offices and set up, I mean, it's basically all just set up to maintain,
Anita Kellogg: which is also [00:17:00] was fascinating to me that I learned in one of my classes from Acquisition Specialists is that yes, they have so many people. on the ground, including the manufacturer. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. To be able to know what parts need are more in need to be produced.
Yeah. As well as the specific, so there's a lot that goes into those supply chains and so where you already have it set up like in the Middle East, it makes a lot of sense, but it's a matter of how long does it take to set that up in Europe. And is that a timeframe that, I mean, I assume when you're like, it's going to take nine months or so, something like that, it's just throwing out a number there.
You're like, well, I really hope the war to me over by then, or, or, well,
Ryan Kellogg: yeah. It's not going to make a difference now of, of the spring offensive in terms of repellent Russian forces. Right. Or in a gaining territory. Yeah. in terms of the other updates, I mean that, that was the main thing. Mm-hmm. occurring this week.
You did have tragic [00:18:00] helicopter crash. Mm-hmm. that occurred outside Kyiv on January 18th, and that resulted in the death of Ukraine's interior minister and all of his deputies really represents miss significant leadership loss with Ukraine's since the, the start of the war. Now the ministry itself is responsible for coordinating National Guard police emergency services and territorial defense services.
And you know, while a lot of this is localized, the fact that the whole leadership team was on board the same helicopter was, was kind of seen as a failure.
Anita Kellogg: They didn't know what the cause of the crash was either. No. So it's not like this was necessarily Yeah. Some people
Ryan Kellogg: think maybe it was weather because it was really foggy that day that they took off.
But yeah, I was in a fairly significant blow. Prior to this, we saw the continuing kind of indiscriminate Russian attacks. One of the worst ones that that made the news was on January 14th, you had a missile strike on an apartment complex and Dnipro, and that left over [00:19:00] 40 dead. So just really indiscriminate, brutal attacks.
So yeah, and I think this is, is really to buy time demoralize, just all the things that we, we talked about. But yeah, otherwise, no, no other major changes on the front lines. And then finally, wrapping up the, on the energy side, the warm winter has continued you the past couple of weeks since our last update.
Then gas prices dropped even further. Mm-hmm. like another 10% from where they were a couple weeks ago. So gas storage levels are really strong. So over 80% for the EU as a whole. And Germany's again, the largest economy in Europe is at 90%. So that just means heading into. this winter. Mm-hmm. . So this coming winter at the end of the year, Europe is actually in a really strong position where it'll certainly be well above 50% when it starts the re refilling period of the gas storage.
So the only real question is Chinese demand, which is still [00:20:00] unknown. And then will these lower prices and increased supply actually help European industry enough where they're able to ramp up production of thus creating kind of a demand loop again. Mm-hmm. , but otherwise it looks, you know, fairly optimistic.
Mm-hmm. now if they can make it again the full year, that allows additional l n g supplies to come online because you give enough timeframe. So a lot of, a lot of things online about general winter, which Russia was depending on mm-hmm. ,
Anita Kellogg: um Right. That just weirdly has not happened. I mean, it's been kind of weird because like it's been the same here in Maryland too.
Right. Where it's just, it's only been even cold enough to snow like one time and yeah. Cause I remember last year, like I was like, I hate winter so much. It was cold. Yeah. Yeah. And miserable. This year it's just been really mild. So yeah. To not have the type of winter that everyone was expecting, not having a normal winter definitely changes the dynamics of the conflict quite a bit.
Yeah, for sure. [00:21:00] Well, US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen is currently in Africa as part of a tour that she's been engaged in basically. The main thrust seems to be backing up many of the economic commitments that had been made in the US Africa Summit at the end of 2022. As might be obvious from the fact that it's the Treasury secretary, this trip has had a strong economic focus and it's included discussions about infrastructure funding and other development goals, as well as pandemic preparedness, democracy strengthening and anti-corruption partnerships, and really importantly, food insecurity.
The message also was that the United States is here to stay in Africa, that this is not purely transactional. Other issues that have been brought up were that Africa has a lot of the minerals needed for green energy and as well as the effects of [00:22:00] climate change in Africa. So that's also been a topic discussed.
And another element of this is that along with Yellen, several business delegations from the United States have accompanied, the administration wants to encourage US businesses to invest in Africa, but it's not clear that they will see any opportunities for profits. Although, of course, Russia and China have not been mentioned on this trip, nor were they mentioned in the US Africa Summit.
But they are certainly vying for influence with those two countries. Is kind of a backdrop drop to this. Both countries had foreign ministry trips that just concluded prior to Yellen's. I was doing a little bit of research on this, so I just thought there was some interesting facts about the relationship of both countries in Africa.
One thing that I didn't know a lot about was Russia's relationships in Africa and how they are very elite driven corruption and exclusively about military. And so one example of this is that [00:23:00] the Varner group is heavily involved in Libya and the backing the warlord leader There some points, we talk a little bit about China and Africa, but some kind of interesting points to me that stood out is that Chinese investment in Africa peaked in 2016.
And what's also interesting to me about that is China's investment also peaked in Europe and the US in 2016. I think there are a lot of signals there that that's around the time that China began to transfer from not caring about its low debt, to being more careful about the investments that it made.
It's not just about the backlash in the United States and in Europe, which is what I previously had thought. Part of the headlines are all about the state on enterprises in terms of resource extractive industries, but actually the majority of businesses, there's like three to 4,000 Chinese businesses in Africa that are profit driven and mostly operate in terms of selling [00:24:00] goods and services.
And then you have another 6,000 businesses owned by Chinese nationals, but operate as Afrin businesses. And then China, the opposite of Russia in that its ties are mostly economic, but there is some potential for growing military presence. What caught a lot of attention in 2016 is a military base in Djibouti.
The only one that the Chinese military has abroad is focused mostly on protecting ports and piracy, but there's always rumors that they're trying to make deals with other African countries. These rumors have failed to bear any fruit.
Ryan Kellogg: Yes, I, I mean, I, I see it largely as a positive sign that the US is kind of following up on its, you know, initial US Africa talks.
So I think it's good. Yeah, the Yellen. And her team and, you know, trying to build a coalition of US companies to show Africa in its own merits, which I think is the, the right way to frame it. Mm-hmm. And then was [00:25:00] something, of course, we, we talked about before that the administration was. Careful not, you don't want to mention China, you want to just see for Africans to see themselves as just a pawn and another cold war, but rather as an opportunity themselves.
And I think, I think there really is a compelling case and we, we talked about that previously on, just in terms of demographics. Africa is the fastest growing population, I think by something I was reading like by 2050 or 2060, you'll have two and a half billion Africans, which will mean a quarter of the world's population will essentially be African.
Anita Kellogg: Although the counter to that is that the number of young men also leads to a lot of military violence and that can lead a lot to poverty as well. So it's kind of a mixed bag. That demographic. It's,
Ryan Kellogg: yeah, it's a mixed bag. But I think there's the opportunity that, you know, with the right infrastructure investments that, you know, China has certainly been a big.[00:26:00]
Client, the big provider for these countries that could Africa be the new kind of cheap labor source kind of moving from Southeast Asia. Because we've seen that, you know, China being the factory of the world and of course it's scale. It's hard to replace kind of that scalability, but you certainly see more of a shift to Southeast Asia.
Will Africa in the next 30 years be that new cheap labor source so that they can also move up that economic ladder over time? I don’t know, because a lot of it, it's not just the infrastructure, it's educational structure, it's, it's a lot of things that have to kind of evolve with it, but, if the US takes that sort of long-term view and partners with African nations around building that you could really be at the ground floor of, because one of the articles that you provided a link to, talked about how we kind of missed the boat a little bit, were surprised on how Asia, you know, rose so quickly [00:27:00] in the 1960s and seventies.
Anita Kellogg: I though quibble with that a little bit because the US was pretty instrumental in a lot of that growth in the sixties and
Ryan Kellogg: as a, as a market. But in terms of production, investment and pushing. Yeah.
Anita Kellogg: No, I mean, so what people don't know is a lot of Japanese production was developed. We helped develop that in order to have supplies for the Korean War, and then we built, helped build the Korean industry for supplies for the Vietnam War.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. As a market. So it's just another form of a, as a market. In production capabilities. So one part of this, because we get very, I mean like only 1% of Africa exports go to the us but part of this being opening up US markets to African food and products and
Anita Kellogg: things, well that's the kind of complicating factor that I don't think this trip [00:28:00] covers, right?
Because you have some of the biggest cotton growers are in Africa, but there's a lot of cotton that's still grown in the United States and that agriculture is largely protected. It's one of the reasons why there's never been a new trade agreement is because the west, the United States and Europe kind of refused to stop protecting their agricultural markets.
So those things would be important for development, but will the US actually make commitments to be less protectionist?
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. It's just hard seeing kind of what material things. So that's definitely, I think trades. One item, you know, the US could potentially bring to the table, but obviously not probably in a bilateral, so maybe with like South Africa or Nigeria, where like the bigger economies within Africa, because we're not going to get through any sort of multilateral Right.
Big agreement with the Africa Union, if ever reaches the state where it's like negotiating big trade agreements on behalf of all the member countries. Yeah. And the other area was around debt [00:29:00] restructuring. Mm-hmm. . So this is, you know, the, it ties into the whole China element. The fact that they dropped their investment in 2016 and part of that, at least in Africa, was the investments that they made there.
A lot of these countries weren't able to necessarily pay back, but I wasn't uniquely a China thing. Right. So it's not a debt trap thing because it was also owed to the west. Right. Both the west and China have an interest in restructuring the debt in a way that, you know, you're not bankrupting or ruining these markets within Africa.
So it's an, it's an area. I don't think it's been approached at that high level between kind of the minister finance and, and Yellen between China and the US to take this on. But that's the other area. It seems like the US could take immediate action on that would have a material impact on African nations.
Anita Kellogg: Right. Well, one reason for the declining investment from 2016 is the [00:30:00] recognition on China's part that these loans might not get paid back and the real struggle to restructure them in order to not have to write them off completely. Right. And then, yeah, it was interesting. The countries that are most in debt to China are also most in debt to Western and other investments.
So like Zambia was a country that
Ryan Kellogg: gave us Yeah, Zambia. I think Kenya also had significant debts for both.
Anita Kellogg: And there's some belief that those loans might never get paid back. .
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. Which I think puts China in this position. Because the interesting thing about them now, I mean they started their relationship with African nations, you know, during the, the period of MAL and it was around political interest mm-hmm.
and around anti imperialism and post-colonialism and China's kind of this model example and it's, it's moved on to primarily an economic, but there's still that [00:31:00] element of kind of the global south. Mm-hmm. and China wanting to be a leader of the global south. Very much so. It puts them in this position where, well, if they're too hard edge mm-hmm.
on the dead, then they just seem like another version of, or even worse version than IMF or, or World Bank in terms, and they're not really. Politically allied anymore, right? They're no longer on the same page with, with the global south, that they're like, well, we're going to cripple your economy until you pay us back
Anita Kellogg: first, right?
Yeah. And it kind of came at a time in China where there's recognition that their debt levels have gotten very high and that they started to need to be more strategic. So there's just this sense that I constantly hear about that China. Disregards money whenever it's investing, you know, the amount of debt or just assumption that it can have loss after loss in most of its investments and that China's actually become a lot more conservative in that.
And to some extent they can operate at a loss, but [00:32:00] especially if you're getting particularly resource extractive. But for the most part, they've been more profit driven. And I think this is something that gets lost. And when I was reading it, it was not only Chinese businesses themselves, but also the provincial state owned businesses, which we talked a little bit about.
Mm-hmm. before and how profit driven that they are. And it frustrates me because I just hear every day where I work, the sense where China can do anything because it doesn't have to worry about profits and US companies. . But another aspect of this I think is interesting, and one of the articles I had put up there when I was reading it was that mostly China has been able to find a market.
Most of it is not investment in infrastructure. Most of it is in selling goods and services. Mm-hmm. being able to make profits. Yeah. And the United States has really struggled to even see that market. I think Chinese were very precedent in being able to
Ryan Kellogg: do that. Well, yeah. I mean I, but [00:33:00] I think this goes back to, and I guess this kind of economic theory and where you have a competitive advantage, I think it's hard for.
You know, advanced industrial or post-industrial economies like the us, like Europe, to compete on supplying the goods where China has succeeded so much within the market. I think where the US need and European firms, the opportunity is this emerging middle class. As Africans get, move up that economic scale, this is where you have a competitive advantage with more higher end advanced goods, healthcare, all the things that we have a competitive advantage in.
But the things, and there's actually your guest, uh, Jonathan Fulton. Mm-hmm. and listened to his last podcast and we'll of course provide links to it, but he had an expert from Wake Forest University and was really talking about the material impact that Chinese firms. Have, you know, within Africa, and they talked a lot about almost mispronouncing [00:34:00] it, like on the telecommunication side.
And having gone to Africa, you know, they never had that first generation of infrastructure with telephone wires. Mm-hmm. hard cable. Exactly. Things like that. And you have Huawei come in. Wow. Gosh.
Anita Kellogg: Sorry, I just hear it all the time
Ryan Kellogg: now. Oh, Huawei. Mm-hmm. . Okay. You have a Huawei come in and essentially provide all of these services and when you can do so many small scale entrepreneurs.
So to be able to use your mobile phone for banking, for sales, for communications, to be able to manage like your whole business. You know, using Huawei's infrastructure is like game changing. Mm-hmm. , I mean, and they're going to feel grateful for that. But it isn't something where Ericsson or some Western firm could compete just because it's overhead and cost structure.
No way you would take the risk of going into an emerging market like Africa, unless you, again, what we talked about before, unless [00:35:00] they were just subsidized by Western governments for strategic reasons that you don't want China to, to penetrate. But it's, it's kind of that material impact where I don't see where Africa is right now, how western firms compete.
Right.
Anita Kellogg: So, I mean, I think that is a problem. I was speaking to Jonathan about this, although I don't. No, for sure that it made it into the final interview, but about also, even if you were to come in at competitive prices, the infrastructure's already there, right? And so you're telling people like, oh look, you need to get rid of this and create a whole new infrastructure.
Which means, I mean, that's a cost in itself, but as well as having suppliers for that particular infrastructure, having people trained for it, you know, there's always a first mover advantage, and that's one of the issues in China being there is. that it got there first in setting up infrastructure, digital infrastructure, not only in Africa but in the global south is also like a real security concern too.[00:36:00]
The type of backdoors intelligence, just dominating the digital infrastructure of so much of the world is a little bit concerning and we don't ha at all have an answer to that, and we need something besides telling countries they shouldn't accept that when it makes a huge difference to the economy and being able to provide something at the same level of affordability, which would mean subsidizing heavily subsidizing it.
but that's very unlikely.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah, and that really got me thinking, and this probably isn't realistic at all, but it, it goes back to this idea of kind of the whole friend shoring the alliances, really approaching this in kind of a holistic way, but who's part, not really part of the greater alliance but part of the quad that could provide that scale.
And it's India. I guarantee you there are Indian telecommunication firms that probably would also require subsidies or some sort of vest. Were secure investment to be [00:37:00] kind of that anti-China champion that could go into these emerging markets. Because the other area they mentioned was like motorcycles and things as, and I'm thinking, yeah, you know, India really excels or could excel at these kind of merging market manufacturers entry points that would be a counter to China, but.
Just hasn't really done that, but that requires a whole level of economic cooperation and strategy, I don't think exists, but it doesn't exist. That's only one I thought that was like, well, if you want to counter to China mm-hmm. , and you want to firm a country that's actually set up to compute on price, there's only one that can do it at scale.
And it's India.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, you're right. And the way national security is talked about in my workplace, you know, we talk about more government intervention, but too little. I think emphasis is on multilateralism and the complicated nature. Could you ever have a strategy where you support the countries of other nations?
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah, I mean it's, I mean, it's expanding the framework because essentially when we say the [00:38:00] West, I mean, these are multitude of countries in which now I, I don't know. You know, the fundings are usually funded through multilateral organizations. Like you contribute a certain amount to the World Bank or IMF and you.
maybe some of those funds go to private firms
Anita Kellogg: existing within, I mean, you'd have to probably have a, have a different, that's why there's some talk about building up a counter to the Asian investment bank, which I believe does more of that. Yeah. But I think, you know, you're talking about setting up a whole infrastructure again, having to already deal with the first mover advantage problem.
But whether those companies are set up to kind of e export that obviously they're not because they haven't done that. So it require a lot of know-how, um, export from the west and then eventually those companies are going to compete with our own at higher levels. The other thing that I think is fascinating about telecoms is that Chinese telecom industry was built up because after [00:39:00] Tiananmen we had an export ban.
on telecommunication equipment to China.
Ryan Kellogg: Hmm. So, foreshadowing the semiconductor situation
Anita Kellogg: maybe, and I forget, I was asking some speaker we had about that and they tried to explain why this was going to be something completely different. But it was kind of shocking for me to learn that about the telecommunications and certainly part of the fears I think that are legitimate, that we should be concerned about, and how an export ban actually affects the development of semiconductors in China.
Yeah. You know, at the time it would seem like they were 20 years behind in telecom equipment. It seemed like it was going to cripple it and it just gave them incentive and, and now obviously that's sort of one of the biggest national security threats that China poses. Not directly. And again, I always point out why of these national security threats on just what China could do.
They may never do any of the sort of nefarious involvement that we [00:40:00] always worry about how it's collecting data, but being, setting up, being part of the infrastructure, so much of the global infrastructure should be somewhat
Ryan Kellogg: concerning. Yeah. So it'd be interesting to see, because like you talk about in your interview with Dr.
Fulton, that the whole paternalistic approach, you know, is obviously zero appeal to these nations. But yeah, the idea of using. , these nations that have adopted kind of Huawei and maybe not had the best experience using them to kind of advocate or educate other countries where, okay, you have this set infrastructure, but there's certainly precautions you can take to limit China's ability to exploit that system.
So it seems like we're locked in until the next generation of systems come in place or until something like Starlink becomes affordable for the developing world, there's no way around kind of a set infrastructure until that next generation comes up.
Anita Kellogg: I mean, [00:41:00] there are still places that China is just in the process of developing the infrastructure.
It's not like there's aren't places. Yeah. But
Ryan Kellogg: again, you have to have that, that champion that can, which we don't depend on cost, which we don't. Right.
Anita Kellogg: So there's some problems in our strategy and I think that is something that we haven't really, we don't, haven't settled on a strategy. So much. Like I said, the talk is like what the US does with its own companies, but I think a real solution has to be thought with our partners and allies.
And that's one of the problems the US has even in selling a lot of this foreign policy. You know, they're selling it to domestic audiences as protecting your jobs and, and sort of that. And so it makes it difficult to make the decisions that you need from a national security perspective. Right, right.
Yeah. So, yeah, so I thought all those were just some interesting elements of it. I, we really are going to have somebody hopefully soon to talk about more about China and Africa.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. And I'm becoming g increasingly bullish on [00:42:00] Africa as a future destination for capital. And I'm hoping that this whole trip with Yellen, the number of companies getting exposed, that they see it beyond, uh, frankly, I mean Africa, the 1% trade, that's all oil and oil products, right.
So, , hopefully, you know, this will open the eyes that Africa of, and there's certainly a popular imagination of what Africa is, right? American minds. And that's, that's not true
Anita Kellogg: anymore. Right? Too much just about violence and poverty. And that violence absolutely exists in Africa, many places of Africa. But isn't, isn't the whole story about Africa.
Ryan Kellogg: No. There's a real growing middle class there. Mm-hmm. . And with that comes business opportunity for, for Western, which then
Anita Kellogg: leads upon itself to further growing middle class. I mean Yep. That's why infrastructure is important, because once you build the road for one reason, then all these other businesses kind of develop around it.
Yeah.
Ryan Kellogg: And I think, I mean, there's a receptive audience like, you know, [00:43:00] Guest Joseph. Mm-hmm. , Osaka. Osaka, you know, head of the Afro Barometer and what the polls revealed. Both China and the United States are very well perceived in Africa. And so I think there's, there's tremendous opportunity
Anita Kellogg: there. Yes. And for Africans as well, you know, we're talking about them not wanting to be upon, but having both countries even sort of being very concerned about their influence in those countries gives them more opportunities.
Ryan Kellogg: Yeah. And I think it, I mean, it's great that they, you know, they have this infrastructure, where're basic infrastructure now. It's an advantage that that's in place. Mm-hmm. for US businesses. Mm-hmm. . So it's really, we're kind of riding on the back of Chinese risk. Mm-hmm. , which in a lot of cases didn't pay out economically for them.
So it seems like, yeah, let's, let's go in. But it's getting comfortable with kind of that different risk profile. It's finding the right opportunity. So I don't know if it's a necessarily infrastructure, I'm still skeptical. Without heavy [00:44:00] subsidies that the west can compete on that. But this growing middle class, there's a ton of things that the West can
Anita Kellogg: compete on.
Well, that's the problem. I think if you want to expand into areas like Africa, there have to be a lot of subsidies and incentives given to businesses. Cause I don't think they will do that on their own. So this kind of leads into my interview with Jonathan Fulton. I thought it was really interesting interview.
Learned a lot about what China is doing in the Middle East. We hear about Africa a lot. I study China and Latin America. But I think one of the things that kind of drew my attention to this issue is when the contrast and the receptions between Biden and Chi in Saudi Arabia and sort of all the discussions about that.
And I think as you're listening to the interview, I think he makes a great point that China. Really going to make a dent in Middle East US relationships because they are very long standing. They're built on [00:45:00] military alliances and China cannot do anything to compete with that. And China actually benefits from the US guaranteeing stability in the region, so then it can have its economic opportunities.
So here's the interview. Welcome to Kellogg's Global Politics, a podcast on current events in US foreign policy and international affairs. My name is Dr. Anita Kellogg and I'm here with Jonathan Fulton, who is a political scientist, AZA University in Abu Dhabi, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
He's the host of the China Mina podcast and his latest book is Asian Perceptions of Golf Security. We'll have a lead to podcast and book in our show notes and I highly recommend that everyone checks them out. Hello Jonathan, welcome to the show. Hey Anita, thanks for the invitation. Really appreciate you being here.
To begin with, can you provide some general background on China's role in the Middle East and how it has been [00:46:00] evolving over the past few years, particularly following the winding down of large US military operations in the region.
Jonathan Fulton: Well, it's interesting. I'll start with the back part of your question first with, when you say the winding down of big US military operations, it doesn't really mean the winding down of US presence, especially here in the, in the Gulf region where I live, US preponderance is just the ordering principle of the Gulf.
Of course, it's challenge because the, the biggest country in the Gulf of Iran and Iran certainly would be happier if, if you guys would just leave. But the fact is there's anywhere from 30 to 45,000 US troops in the region. I believe lots of bases and facilities in Kuwait and Qatar and the U a E and Oman.
So there's a very big presence. The fact that the US is actively engaged militarily as a had been in the first two decades of the century, seems to drive a lot of analysis where people think the US is leaving. And that makes a very interesting counterargument because people see what China's been doing in the region and say, oh my god, great power competition is happening in the Gulf.
The US is [00:47:00] leaving and China's coming in and we keep seeing these headlines. And uh, last month and early December, 2022, Xi Jinping paid a very heavily covered visit to Riyad in Saudi Arabia where there were three summits, a bilateral China Saudi summit, a China Arab state's summit, and a China G c one.
And the breathless overreaction from a lot of the media seemed to pause that China was playing this new role. And as the US was leaving, China was coming in. And it's interesting because you can see what's been, what the US has been doing the past couple of months especially, is it's been engaging more meaningfully with a lot of its, its Arab and Israeli partners in the region.
And if you look at it, uh, really you don't see a dynamic of a US pullout. I think that's really quite exaggerated, but it, it certainly fits into a, a, a pretty attractive story of great power competition. What China's been doing in the region, I think is meeting a lot of its own domestic. Agendas, right?
Like China for, its, its economic growth. [00:48:00] Of course, economic growth is, is everything in a, in a country like China where the CCP doesn't have these traditional forms of legitimacy, they get through elections. You got to perform, you've gotta give people a better future materially. And you need to, to keep growing that economy and you need a lot of energy.
So Gulf countries have been so important in that China typically gets between 40 and 50% of its crude oil imports from the Persian Gulf region to get a lot of l n g from Qatar. It's very important in terms of, of just kind of fueling a lot of that growth. And beyond that, you see a lot of, here in the region, a lot of countries that are trying to diversify their economies away from this single resource model of, of let's, you know, sell a lot of oil and hope that gets us through the next 30 or 40 or 50 or whatever years they're realizing that's not sustainable.
So they've been trying to build these new economies that requires a lot of foreign, direct and investment. It requires a lot of foreign technology. To do this. They've, they've all embarked on these different vision programs. You know, the Saudi [00:49:00] vision 2030, the new Kuwait, 2035. A lot of countries in the Middle East have these programs, not just in the Gulf, and they align perfectly with the Belt and Road Initiative, these cooperation priorities.
So you can see things, not just these big sexy infrastructure projects that cost billions of dollars, but things like digital cooperation or, or HR type things where they're, they're training people. Uh, we saw health when the, the pandemic hit where there's a lot of experiential knowledge traded back and forth.
So they're doing a lot of stuff with the partners here. Economically. It's important because a lot of Chinese data and enterprises have been getting huge contracts, especially in the Gulf, but also in countries like, uh, Iraq and in Egypt where they're, they're helping those countries achieve those development goals.
And a lot of that capital, a lot of that money is really important for, for what China's trying to do and beyond the region. So primarily what it's been doing in the Middle East is, is motivated by economics. There are second level considerations. One is geography. The fact that we call it the Middle East is telling you can't get [00:50:00] to China's biggest market in the EU without passing through the Middle East.
So it's important to have a positive presence here, but also to East Africa. You know, it links to a lot of important regions. And another thing that maybe doesn't get noticed a lot but is, is just as important. China's got a, a very large Muslim pop population, and this has been a domestic issue over the past few years.
So having good relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, which has this prominent role in global Islam, really does help Beijing with some of the maybe domestic political problems it might have
Ryan Kellogg: with Islam.
Anita Kellogg: You made several great points, and I definitely want to follow up on all of them, but to your very last point, you know, my understanding is the Uyghurs are Muslim, and how do the Middle Eastern countries sort of react to the way the Uyghurs have been treated in China?
Jonathan Fulton: So it's been puzzling for a lot of folks because you can see that a lot of Muslim majority countries, not just in the Arab world, but in Asia around the world, haven't really been animated by this issue. The way that I [00:51:00] think a lot of western countries, especially liberal democracies, would like to see you see repeatedly in the United Nations, where large blocks of countries will sign a letter in support of China's, not necessarily in support of what China's doing in Xinjiang, but in support of China.
Sovereignty, a sovereign right to deal with domestic pressures in the way that it sees fit. And I think that's an important consideration. Of course, that pillar of China's foreign policy, the, uh, non interference and domestic politics of, of its partner countries is deeply appreciated in a lot of developing countries, a lot of nondemocratic countries.
So when China says, look, we'll pay the respect of not criticizing you on the way you do domestic politics, and you pay us the same respect, you know, that's often reciprocated. Now, when you look at it specifically as a, a Muslim issue or an Islamic issue, I think there's a, a lot of dynamics in the Middle East that maybe get under-recognized in this.
And first and foremost is when China talks about Xinjian, they often say, this is a [00:52:00] response to a political group or political organization that's not affiliated with the state, that's trying to challenge state power. And political Islam is one of the things that seems to be a, a common denominator in a lot of these groups.
Affiliated with it. Now, whether or not that that's the case when China frames it this way, there are a lot of governments in the Middle East that have very strong concerns about political Islamic groups that are trying to subvert state power. You know, uh, the Arab Spring, uh, from 2011 is a very good example of that, and how a lot of countries in the region have, have, you know, put groups like the Muslim Brotherhood on the, uh, terrorist list.
So when China says to countries like Saudi Arabia, look, we're not against Muslims, we're against groups trying to overthrow the state and using religion as a motivating factor that aligns with how governments here a concern that they have. No, I'm not saying I agree with this. I mean, I, I obviously, uh, being a Western liberal, I find it pretty difficult to swallow [00:53:00] with, you know, stories that we hear about the camps in Xinjiang, but not everybody sees it the same way.
And I think the way China describes it's been pretty effective.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, that's, those are some really interesting points on sort of energy. China's the largest importer of energy from the Middle East, but it doesn't seem to be using that status to influence oil production during periods of high gas prices.
How would you describe China's relationship with the major oil producing states in the region, and do you see that relationship changing in the future?
Jonathan Fulton: Well, it's, it's complicated, right? Because they do a lot of the relationships they have with these major producers, like the Saudis, like the Iraqis, like the Emiratis and Kuwaitis.
It's much more than energy. I mean, if you, if you looked at 20 or 30 years ago, then energy certainly was a central pillar. I'd say it still remains a central pillar of, of how China's views these regions and in terms of their own interests. But I think also it's always been understood that if it's just a [00:54:00] a, a buyer seller transactional dynamic, the relationships would have a pretty low.
and that didn't really align with, with either side's ambitions. You know, I think the golf countries wanted to have a meaningful long-term relationship with a extra regional great power. I think there's always a concern that they had put too many eggs in one basket, that the relationship with the us, which is very, very important and meaningful, but you don't want to just have one option all the time.
Right. So I think they looked at China starting around the time of the Iraq war, thinking this could be, you know, a, a really useful other partnership to have or to develop. It's not just China. You can see with Russia, with India, with Japan, with a lot of, with EU, with the uk, they've been certainly engaging with a lot of extra regional powers in a, in a big way.
So for them, they look at China as, as more than just a customer. Like I said earlier, they do a lot of, uh, cooperation on infrastructure, on tech, on, on any number of things. So energy's a big part of it, but it's not the only part. I think China's been pretty satisfied with the energy dynamic [00:55:00] just because, you know, you could see different at different stages when.
Iranian energy imports for China weren't an option anymore when the, the last rounds of sanctions from the US kicked in and it became pretty clear that, you know, China wasn't willing to go under secondary sanctions at that point. They were getting about 6% of their crude from Iran. And, you know, when you import as much as China does, 6% is, is not nothing.
And the Saudis just very easily said, look, if you need 6%, we can get you 6%. We can just turn the tap a little bit and we can make up that gap pretty quickly. And that's what they did. And you can see this period of about a year where, you know, Saudi exports to China almost doubled and the pricing remains pretty similar because they've, they've got these great deals because it's such a, a deep relationship.
So, you know, China's been getting a lot of what it needs from Saudi. I think they appreciate that, you know, it is the swinging producer and it can step up when China needs it. That creates some pretty interesting [00:56:00] political dynamics as well, I think.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah. When Xi went there in December, a lot of people were interpreting that in terms of the deteriorating or challenges to the US Saudi relationship.
But listening to you, it makes me want to ask the question backwards. Has Saudi Arabia's relationship with China altered the way that it deals with the United States?
Jonathan Fulton: I wouldn't say it altered. There was a report, maybe, so today's January 10th, I mean it was at some point in January there was a report that the US is helping Saudi develop.
Its, you know, new national security strategy. The stuff that the US does with golf partners is by far. By far more important than what any other country does here. You know, just look a almost a year ago to the day, there were some missile strikes and drone strikes here on Abu Dhabi where I live, and the US base just down the road is responsible for protecting the country, along with, of course, [00:57:00] the UAE military.
No, the, you know, China doesn't provide that type of security relationship. So I think the Saudis realize that. I do think it's pretty clear that the Saudi US relationship has been pretty rocky for quite a while. I think there was maybe hopes in Riyad that this was simply a Democrat issue. This was a post shoji issue.
I think there are more structural things there that, that have to be addressed. I think first and foremost, it's mostly, uh, an elite relationship. You know, that US leaders and Saudi leaders have always seen the importance. That each country plays to each other's interests. And that's been cultivated. But then you look, you know, on a people to people level, there's a lot of convergence.
There's not a lot of areas where the American public and the Saudi public look at each other and think, yeah, this, this is a natural partnership for us. So politically it's pretty tough for both countries to manage. And when you've got the US president describing, uh, the, the Crown princes of Pariah and you've got the [00:58:00] Crown Prince making pretty snide comments about the president, it makes it pretty hard to, to bridge that.
And then when you see Xi Jinping arrive in town and they roll out the purple carpet and there's, you know, 50 billion worth of deals, it looks like, uh, a contrast, you know, the US is blowing the relationship up and China's building it up. But for China to get to a level in its engagement with the Saudis that America is, I mean the us the US Saudi relationships been underdevelopment since 1945, since FDR and King of Saud met.
and that's like, at this point I'm terrible at math. You know, 70, 80 years worth of, of relationship building on counter-terrorism, on trade, on energy, on politics, on diplomacy, on any number of things. State building, you know, China is it's, it's a new relationship and it's an important one, but it's not as multifaceted or deep by any stretch.
As the US one is now 80 years down the road, that could be changed, but at this point it doesn't really compare [00:59:00]
Anita Kellogg: more on that. You wrote into 2022, a report for the Atlantic Council titled The Great Power Projection in the Middle East. You wrote that Russia and China are not trying to challenge you as leadership in the Middle East.
Of course, China's foreign policy is driven by its domestic and strategic interests and may not have the direct ability to challenge leadership right now. But can you explain why you think China's not even interested in challenging US leadership in the region?
Jonathan Fulton: So, yeah, I, I co-authored that with a friend of mine, Dr.
Lichen Sim, who's also a prof here in the UAE. She's a Russia specialist. And we basically finished writing that in December 21. And, you know, we were just waiting for the, the end of the holidays to get it published. And then there was some editing issues and then we were done with it. And then there was that meeting between she and Putin, you know, and mm-hmm.
Yeah. Last February when they talked about our partnership without, uh, limits. And we went, oh my God, we're going to have to like, [01:00:00] change so much of this. And then the war happened, the invasion of Ukraine happened, and we thought, well, does, this is going to change the way we look at this. But when we looked at Middle East, it didn't fundamentally change the way we saw it.
So China especially looks at the Middle East as, as I said earlier, a place where it gets a lot of really important stuff that supports its deme domestic political economy. What they want from the Middle East as much as possible is stability. And they realize that that is, that is underwritten by the US security commitments with a lot of important countries.
When you look at the countries, China's the most deeply engaged within in the region. There're countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Egypt countries that have very important security or political relationships with the us. They're not supporting revisionist actors. They're not working with non-state actors.
What they want is to work with status quo actors that can kind of shore up a pretty fragile region. And I [01:01:00] think China is, when they look at the Middle East, I think they're, they're actually quite a responsible, extra regional power in a lot of ways. I think people in DC probably disagree with me and think anything China does here is, is.
Subversive. But I do think that China's preferences are largely for things to remain, much as they are, as much as possible. Now over the past year or so, I think that's changed a little bit largely because I think China's been feeling a lot of pressure from the US from 2017 when, uh, the National Security Strategy was released and, and introduced this great power competition framework.
And then you saw throughout the Trump presidency, you know, the narrative out of DC about China was not very positive. And I think people felt that pretty acutely. You could see China feeling challenged by the quad, by this more muscular Indo-Pacific feeling that within their own region of Asia, that they were getting challenged by the us.
It didn't make sense to push back in Asia, but it does make sense to push back in other [01:02:00] regions where the US might be vulnerable. And that's where you see things like, oh well now, we'll, we'll sign this conference, strategic partnership with Iran that's been cooking for five years and we didn't do anything with, you know, we're going to start politically supporting Iran on things that, uh, before we wouldn't have even considered.
Because I think it puts the US on its back foot makes America think a little more carefully about challenging China elsewhere, because now they've got to return to the Gulf. So it's a strange dynamic. I think on the one hand, their preference is that the US stays rooted here and continues to provide the security architecture that benefits not just the Gulf countries except for Iran, not just the US but also China and every regional country that has interest here.
But at the same time, this idea that, you know, they could always activate the region if they had to, to get a response from the us. They kind of say, look, uh, stop poking us and, and not sell China Sea, or we'll poke you with Iran. Yeah, that's
Anita Kellogg: interesting. And I want to follow up on Iran, because you talked about, and I agree, how much [01:03:00] civility in the Middle East is important to China, but Iran seems to be a source of potential insecurity in the Middle East and sort of the tensions around that and billing and nuclear program.
So how does China reconcile that in its relationship?
Jonathan Fulton: Yeah, well it's not potential. Iran is a flat out revisionist power that's trying to upend the region. And they've used proxies, they've used any number, they've used terrorism. They've used a lot of pretty shady means to try to achieve their goals. And China has offered support to Iran, but it's always been pretty limited.
And it's always been kind of with the caveat, this is something I've been saying for years, I think a lot of people in the US have seen China as a challenger and Iran as an enemy, and they'd see this bilateral relationship. And see this as a potential block of revisionist powers. And there's at the same time [01:04:00] in this, this idea which is perpetuated by a lot of Iranian diplomats that China, you can't really trust the Gulf countries, the GCC countries because the, their US allies are partners.
And you know, the US could always tell them to stop supplying youth energy. They'd have to listen and we would never listen to the us We'll always be there for you. I don't think any of these is true. Like I think both of these points are, are pretty flimsy. When you look at the trade data, and this is stuff I've been seeing for years mm-hmm.
when I started seeing it, I, I've got a lot of pushback, but I think it's kind of become. Maybe a little more obvious. Now, China's got a huge compatriot population in the UAE. They do a lot of investment in, in GCC countries. They do a substantially more trade with the GCC countries. If they're their goal in the region is economic, then there's no question that the GCC is a block and almost every country individually is worth a lot more than Iran is.
When people say Iran is an important piece of geography because it connects to China by land. Well, yeah, it does. If you go through Turk Afghanistan and Afghanistan in a lot [01:05:00] of spar populated Central Asian republics where there aren't enormous markets, most global trade happens through shipping, you know, maritime shipping and the Gulf Port countries on both sides of the Arabia Peninsula are hyper linked into the global economy.
The UAE Dubai is, is you know, this premier logistics hub that can connect you to South Asia Central Asia. Africa, Europe and no time. Iran doesn't even have a decent port. So what China does with Iran is mostly rhetorical. There is deep resentment in both countries that they don't have the respect that they deserve, that they, they don't have the position internationally that they feel that is their, their birthright.
It's great classical civilizations, both of them would love to see a redistribution of, of power, less liberalism and more order like rules based without the liberal rules. A less US centered or western centered international order is something I think both countries would like, but I don't think they agree on much beyond [01:06:00] that.
I don't think they say us working together or with Russia have the blueprint for what we think would be the ideal situation. They just want things to be different for them to get a little more respect and people to leave them alone. So I don't think they represent any kind of coherent. And I think certainly when you look in the Gulf, China looks at Iran as a troublemaker.
Uh, the example I frequently use in my public speaking engagements is when you look at, when Saudi Aramco was attacked in the fall of 2019, of course it was attacked by Iran. It's not been, I don't think anybody's come out and said, absolutely, we have a hundred percent bulletproof evidence that it was Iran.
But we know it was. And when that happened, there was a very brief period, I mean, it wasn't very successful, but there was a very brief period where prices of oil shot up by something like 97 million. Or sorry, they shot up significantly for China. It meant they were spinning an extra 97 million a day to import the same amount of energy.
And you can't convince me that people in Beijing thought we're going to continue to support [01:07:00] Iran if it's going to do stuff like this because there's no country that's worth a hundred million a day to anybody. The same thing you could imagine if, if there were a security threat here in the Emirates.
From Iran and China had to evacuate 300,000 citizens. You know, think of the domestic backlash, if they couldn't, right. So what China wants in the Gulf is they want it to remain stable, they want to be able to do business here, and they want Iran to be a friend that they can count on to things like vote with them in the United Nations, but otherwise, you know, stop with the destabilization stuff.
It's bad for business.
Anita Kellogg: You mentioned in the very beginning, B R I, the Belton Road Initiative, while I was reading some of your work recently, it seems like China has more recently kind of developed those partnerships in the Middle East, unlike maybe deeper ties to other countries, maybe in Africa or before.
I may be misreading this completely, but [01:08:00] how important is the Middle East to the B R I and how has that been developing over the past few years? .
Jonathan Fulton: Yeah. So going back to the point I made about the geography belt and road's, all about connectivity, whether it's connecting countries or markets or people or whatever, the Arabian Peninsula especially is pretty useful real estate in that regards because what we've seen from China is, um, something that didn't really get picked up on very much.
There's every two years there's been a summit where the Chinese foreign minister meets with the counterpart of all the Arab countries and when they have these meetings called the China Arab States Cooperation Forum, when they kind chart out what they're going to work on for the next two years. And in 2018, they talked about, uh, won Ye the then foreign minister talked about this very cnk named.
Two wings, two wheels, industrial Park, port interconnectivity framework. But what it was, was you saw in the preceding years, there were a lot of different Chinese [01:09:00] Port Park projects that were happening around the Arabian Peninsula, and this was a way to kind of bring them together, showing how they connect as business clusters or as, uh, you know, supply chains.
So just down the road from where I am now, there's a, a big industrial park port complex called Za Khalifa City, or sorry, Khalifa, um, port and, uh, industrial zone. China's been investing very heavily in that. And then in Oman there's one called Dham, where they've been doing the same. And then in Saudi, uh, in Za, just, uh, north of the border with Yemen and of course the port or the naval port, naval facility in Djibouti and projects in, in Egypt on the Red Sea and uh, along the Suez.
So you can see how these different ports. commercial ports. I should stress that through this b r I initiative, kind of link Chinese influence and power, uh, economic power, industrial power from the Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean. Because you can link the Heifa port in [01:10:00] Israel to that as well. So you do see the Middle East being pretty important for the BRI.
You know, you look at the US and, and, and you guys have bases all over the world. China's got one base, but through Costco and it's different, you know, port operators, they do have access to a lot of facilities in strategically important regions, strategically important cities. And that connects a lot of opportunities for Chinese business.
So the Middle East in particular, you know when you've got the Eastern Med and you've got the Red Sea and you've got the Arabian scene, you've got the Persian Gulf, you can see how. Interested in maritime trade. This is a very, very important region. You've got those two global choke points and babo mend and, and straight of Hormuz, which are crucial for global energy and global shipping.
So it makes sense. A country like China would want to play a bigger role there.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, I mean there's been, fortunately, as I've written about and talked about sort of, people are recognizing that the debt trap idea diplomacy, that China was using [01:11:00] debt to take over land and property in other countries is not true.
I hope people realize that by now, but I know people are concerned about these large investments in Poors and what that can mean in, you know, the potential of cutting off those ports to the United States. If there was some type of war or tension that way, do you think that this is something the West should be concerned about, or is this just business as usual?
Jonathan Fulton: Oh no, I, I don't think it's something anybody really has to worry too much about. I mean, I was in Israel recently and that was one of the bones of contention with a lot of US officials was, was China's role in Haifa port. And the Israelis would counter with, look, you see a bunch of Chinese commercial ships coming and going, but you see the US Naval fleet coming and going all the time.
Mm-hmm. like it hasn't stopped you. Right. Same, same holds here in the UAE where Jeb Ali is the most visited US port [01:12:00] outside of the us. Um, I'm not sure on that, but it certainly sees a lot of traffic from the US Navy. The, the difference being, again, like the US. With its alliance partner network and with its base network that that's really global.
The US has this, this power projection and naval power projection that, uh, is really unparalleled. And China, you know, it's, it's managing a lot of ports in the Middle East, but it doesn't project power across the Indian Ocean region, yet it doesn't have military facilities across the ior, the US does. If China were to say we're going to develop a military installation somewhere in the Middle East, beyond Djibouti and, and say a key US partners country, , well first of all, it would unnecessarily provoke the us, which would be bad for China.
Second of all, it would destroy the relationship between the US and the host country, which nobody would want. Third of all is just look at how the US Navy could shut China down. You know, [01:13:00] like what could China connect to? It would be isolated. So if they built a base say in, I don’t know, Jordan, which is just unfathomable, it couldn't happen.
Mm-hmm. . But if they did, then you can just see like the US saying, okay, we're going to shut off Baba Mende and you're not going to get to it anymore. So I don't think anybody's got to really worry about Chinese commercial port operations. Uh, beyond issues like what people do worry about. Not the hard power stuff, but on, you know, whether it's, uh, IP that's getting stolen and whether it's, uh, intelligence that's being gathered through different 5G networks or whatever.
That obviously drive a lot of concern, but I don't think the idea that there's any kind of hard military threat, we're very far away from that.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, those are all good points. What Chinese activities in the Middle East do you think that Western policymakers should be paying the most attention to? Hmm.
Jonathan Fulton: Well, I think the biggest issue is always going to be tech because [01:14:00] China's really good at it and there's an enormous appetite for it. But it comes with more than just the obvious, excuse me, just the obvious technological application. This is not just about buying and selling the software, the hardware, they're coming with the full stack.
There's an normative component too. If you start implementing Chinese systems into networks, then you're kind of embracing Chinese norms for doing these things. And I think that's the area where you see a lot of Western countries starting to have some really serious misgivings. Cause we look at how that stuff is used in China domestically, and it comes with some pretty chilling effects.
What happens in Xinjiang with a lot of their, their tech. Whether it's, you know, surveillance or counterterrorism or whatever they want to call it. Flip side of that, and if you've, if you've not read surveillance state by Joshua Wain and, and, uh, Lizzie Lynn, I believe the, the authors were, it's a great book.
They show how what's being used in in Xinjiang is very scary for Western [01:15:00] liberals. But then it's being, the same stuff is being used differently in the coastal cities to provide really great stuff in terms of healthcare or public goods for people. And that's the stuff that gets, that's very attractive here.
When they say, look, this technology can help you develop smart cities. It can help you deal with traffic issues, it can help you deal with labor issues. It can help you, you know, address any, any number of problems you might have. The other side of the coin is, is the, the really creepy stuff. Mm-hmm. that, uh, everybody worries about.
So I think that's probably what, what has most people worried about what China's doing. Not just here, but in a lot of, uh, the global south because. , there's the price issue, right? Like I, I remember talking to somebody from Chad and he was saying, we don't want Huawei, we want Ericsson, we want, you know, but we can't afford it.
Mm-hmm. , China comes in with a great price. It's, they come with great after purchase servicing and they come in not just with that, but with all the software, hardware, the phones, everything at an affordable [01:16:00] price. It's just, it's what we can work with. If you guys will come to us with something affordable, you know, it'd be competitive, but it's not.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, I think that's a good point. And certainly tech is something that we talk about enormously at where I teach at the National Defense University, but the frustration sometimes in the way that the US approaches this by just telling countries, warning them, you don't want this. You don't want China to have this access to your data or these inroads.
Well, at the same time, just telling them that, right, and not providing these realistic alternatives for them and how, I think that's really ineffective and problematic approach.
Jonathan Fulton: Yeah, I agree. It's, it's problematic and it's also tone deaf because it's, there's an assumption built into that, that China is the authoritarian country that that's going to do shady, underhanded things with your data.
Mm-hmm. , and we are the good liberals and the democracies who won't, and nobody believes [01:17:00] that. Everybody looks at and says, look, you don't know how you look to us. I know that everybody in the west sees yourselves as the guys in the white hat. But we lived under colonialism. We lived under the horrible institutions, lending institutions that put these terrible restrictions on us economically.
That's how a lot of people see Western countries and when western countries start wagging their fingers and saying, don't work with China, and China says, Hey, I went through that stuff too. We all know what it's like to deal with these hypocrites that resonates a lot more than people wagging their fingers and saying, don't work with China.
One of the things everybody here seems to say is, look, we, we remember Ed Snowden, right? We know that US companies do a lot of shady stuff with their tech. The Facebook that you guys get in the US is different from the Facebook. People in Myanmar get, or different from the Facebook. People in the Philippines get those countries.
It's being used for stuff that that doesn't really support people very much. Sometimes that serves political loans. [01:18:00] So I think it's really ham-fisted to just tell countries, don't do it because you don't know what you're putting yourselves into. And at the same time saying, well, the only alternative you have is to rip up all the stuff you have.
Then replace it with more expensive stuff you can't afford, and then retrain everybody. Mm-hmm. . , because that's the other issue is that nobody really caught onto this until about 2018. That's when it became a big story in the us. But you can find in 2014 China saying, and it's, you know, rolled out this policy, this one plus two, plus three cooperation framework for cooperating with countries working on tech, working on space satellite, working on digital technologies was a really important thing.
And they started implementing it before 2014. But in 2014 is when they, they built it into the policy. So you've got countries that at this point, were like at least four years deep into working with China on this stuff. And then people in, in the D O D recognized what was happening in [01:19:00] today. We don't like to stop.
And everyone's like, well, why, why? Stop. Mm-hmm. , we're, it's, it's serving a need for us. Well, because we don't. And at that point, I think you have to realize too that for a lot of people watching the US in 2018 mm-hmm. , it was kind of a mess domestically. And people thought, well, who are you to really tell us how to run our business when you can't even , whatever.
So it's, it's a really, I think, the wrong way to approach it. I think the right way to approach it would be to have other countries allies and partners talk about their experience instead of saying, don't work with China. Say, yeah, hey, we let Chinese systems into our networks and this is what happened.
You know, these are the, these are the types of vulnerabilities you might face. Here's how we've dealt with it. Just to let you know going in, this is something that you have to be aware of. And I think to their credit, we've seen more and more US officials using that to rely on the like-minded countries to say, [01:20:00] can you help us craft a better message?
Because the finger wagging certainly wasn't doing the trick.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah. And again, you made so many interesting points there. I think when I studied in the Netherlands, there was a lot more emphasis on post-colonial legacies, and I think so much leap in the US but in a lot of lot of the West, there's this sense that, oh, colonialism was a long time ago, so you should be over it in, in the sense the way that those history and those legacies still are very much a part of politics.
And you can see that even in with India and Russia as well. And then I think this paternalism that countries don't know what's best for them, they're naive and they don't have their eyes open to what China does. And then I think there's the third problem to which you're alluding toward to the end is that so much of what the US raises about China is about what China might do, not what [01:21:00] China's doing now.
And I imagine that that's also a, a difficult argument to make to other countries too.
Jonathan Fulton: Yeah. Well I think the issue is the US has identified China as its pace competitor and, and, and a threat. And nobody in the region has made the same assessment. Nobody sees China as a threat. They see China as an opportunity.
They don't have blinders on. Mm-hmm. , nobody thinks like, oh, win-win for everybody. Everybody knows that an external power that comes into the region has some kind of motive, especially in the Middle East, where they've seen this play many, many times before. So they're going into this with their eyes wide open, but they just, they've made their own risk assessment and they've decided that it doesn't carry the same threat that America believes it carries.
Probably because the circumstances are different for countries here than they are for the us. Nobody here really see, nobody here has an intention of challenging China. You know, in Asia, for example. So [01:22:00] Middle Eastern countries aren't really too high on China's threat map. So I think in that case they look at and say, look, what does it matter if we, if we work on this stuff?
That's important. You know, I was talking with some, some people in the region not long ago. I mean this topic comes up all the time and I was in the room with some former US officials and as they were saying, look, you've got to stop working with China. You've got to stop working on China. And they say, look, we agreed with you on the Soviets.
We saw that as an existential threat. You haven't made that case to us that China represents that. All we see is a country that we have to be very careful in engaging with. But we're building in our own capacity to be careful in that regard. And a lot of it is by working with other countries that have been around the block with China already.
But nobody's come to the conclusion yet that China's a threat in the way that America has here.
Anita Kellogg: Yeah, I think those are, are definitely excellent points. So do you think the fact that the China has an authoritarian government, which is somewhat similar to [01:23:00] many of these countries, non-democratic governments, , do you think that creates some synergy and do you also think the US China competition maybe gives them more autonomy instead of just being forced to go with what the US tells them to?
Essentially,
Jonathan Fulton: I think the regime type is interesting, but mostly because the US makes it that the nobody in China's trying to say, let's export our party model, or let's export this Marxist Leninist Xi Jing system to mm-hmm other countries. And there's certainly no appetite for that here. But you could see, for example, when President Biden was talking about his summit of the democracies and that was something, I understand why the US was doing that, but the fact is a lot of your allies and partners aren't democrats.
and this was kind of an insult to say, yeah, we're, we're having a party, we're not inviting you because we don't like your type of government. What China says, and I think this is also an attractive message, is [01:24:00] we're not about the, the model, we're about the result. If you're able to deliver good governance and you're not a democracy, but you're a monarchy or you are a, you know, military government or whatever, if you're able to deliver good governance and you give your people material goods and a job and dignity, then that's more important than having a vote.
And it's not always abstract here in the Middle East, like people could say, you know, they can look at Iraq under Saddam and say, okay, we didn't have freedom too, but we had freedom from Right. We weren't, we weren't able to choose our leaders, but nobody. Blowing up our neighborhood and then we remove the tyrant, and now all of a sudden we have, we can vote in an election, but uh, our lives aren't miserable and there's no governance and there's no police, and we live other chaos, but hey, we just voted.
So it's not always an abstraction in the region, right? It's, it's not really that kind of theoretical question. And so when China says, look, there are different ways to get the result, I think that's useful, [01:25:00] uh, when they're engaging with countries here. I think for the US the reason why the, that focus so prominent early in Joe Biden's presidency was pretty obvious, right?
Under President Trump, there was a very transactional approach to a lot of relationships, especially with allies and partners. And that really fractured, not fractured, but it tested, it strained a country, a group of countries that would've been a pretty natural coalition against a lot of what China was doing during the Trump years.
But because everybody was dealing with the US and these kind of bilateral. Approaches it, it didn't, there was no block the way there would traditionally be a block. So when I'm from Canada, when there were a couple of Canadians who were kidnapped and locked up in China, that was used as a bargaining ship in the US China relationship, you know, on both sides.
You know, when the UK was undergoing problems with China relationship, it was doing it on its own when Australia was mm-hmm. , you know, getting hammered by China. It was on its own. So I think when [01:26:00] President Biden came in to pow to office, the idea was we're going to have this framework of like-minded countries, liberal democratic countries who cooperate on a lot of stuff, and that will help us in dealing with China's worst impulses.
But by describing it that. Sure you get the Europeans on board or, or us, you know, lovely Canadians or the Australians or whatever, the Japanese and the Koreans. But you also alienate all those really important countries that aren't democracies. Mm-hmm. and those countries can then go back to this message China saying like, look, they'll never trust you the way that, uh, they trust the other guys.
Right. Because they don't like your regime. So the messaging was pretty off on that, I'd say.
Anita Kellogg: Well, thank you so much. This has been such a great and insightful conversation and I cannot thank you enough for coming and sharing your expertise on all of these matters. Yeah, sure thing. It was fun. Yeah. Well, thank you so much.
Okay. Thank you, Anita. [01:27:00] Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Kellogg's Global Politics. You can visit our website at www.kelloggsglobalpolitics.com and follow us on Twitter @Global Kellogg, or me @arkellogg.
Ryan Kellogg: You can also reach us by email, so anita@kelloggsglobalpolitics.com and myself, ryan@kelloggsglobalpolitics.com.
And as always, please see the show notes for the articles we discussed in this episode. And if you like this show, please take the time to tell your friends, share it on your social sites. It's simple, quick, and free to support the show.
Anita Kellogg: Bye everyone. Bye.