... the Middle East, as this could damage its core interests, which remain centered on trade and economic cooperation, provoking new tensions with the United States.
Yuliya Alekseeva:
China in the Mashriq: New Best Friend
As a key trading partner of the Gulf states, China has more than
doubled
its oil imports between 2010 and 2020. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, Kuwait and the UAE act as key oil suppliers to the Middle Kingdom. Chinese companies are expanding their footprint in infrastructure and technology ...
The U.S.-Saudi Arabia-Iran Tensions: It Seemed We Were Moving Towards a Conflict More Dramatic Than Anything We Have Already Seen
Key ideas from Daniel Levy’s speech during the “Persian Gulf: War and Peace” session of the
9th Valdai Discussion Club’s Middle East Conference
(Moscow, February 17–18, 2020).
Wars have terrible consequences, conflicts are devastating, the human cost primarily, then economic and opportunity costs, entire ...
... on the Americans for their actions. After the funeral processions in honor of Soleimani that brought together hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Middle East, Iran exercised the promised military response to the Americans. On January 8, Iran ... ... East, built by Iran for decades, increases the risk of an asymmetric Iranian response and threatens US allies in the Persian Gulf and Israel.
Such a war would have affected global markets, given the importance of the Middle East to world’s oil trade....
Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf would gain from taking control over their security interests
The beginning of 2020 was marked by yet another major crisis in the Middle East region. The crisis culminated with the US elimination of General Qasem Soleimani and could have slipped ...
How to ensure security and freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf?
In recent weeks, the world’s attention has been riveted on the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. On May 12, four tankers owned by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were attacked by unknown forces when entering the Strait off the coast ...
..., and that is an understatement; many Sunnis do not even consider Shiites to be Muslims. That is why so much money from rich Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar is going to fund, train, arm, and equip Sunni jihadist extremists like ISIS to go fight ... ... people to sneak into next-door Ukraine or a little further into Russia itself. This restive population includes hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees now, most of whom will have legitimate gripes against Russia. Russia itself has a significant and growing ...
... to the Syrian Civil War, 2.) was not even not the among first Western nations formally recognizing the opposition, 3.) has been very lightly involved compared with other major international meddlers in this conflict (e.g. Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, the Gulf states…), and 4.) since the overall post-2003 Iraq mess, for which the U.S. does bear a majority of overall responsibility, was actually at its best levels of security all throughout the first two years of the protests/fighting in Syria, we ...
... and the GCC agreed to “cooperate in countering Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region and continue consultations on how to enhance the region’s security architecture.”
REUTERS/Jim Bourg/Piхstream
Nikolay Soukhov:
One Thousand and One Nights: Barack Obama
on Missile Defence in the Persian Gulf
Оne of the agreements reached at the summit was to jointly develop a region-wide ballistic missile defense capability and a ballistic missile early warning system.
Quite significantly, one of the agreements reached at the summit was to jointly ...
... stalled and we were ending our military deployment in Iraq.
With the region experiencing the most tumult since WWI, what will America do now?
Going forward, here’s what we can expect:
1.) America will try very hard to distance itself from the Gulf.
It’s amazing that it’s taken us so long to realize how much our money going into Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states comes back to haunt us: though Joe Biden recently got in trouble for saying so, support for ISIS and other ...