As President Biden meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a geopolitical expert explains that Biden’s role with China is to keep them ‘contained and restricted’ as they supply weapons in conflicts around the world, including to Hamas
‘Biden has to ensure China is contained and restricted,’ says a geopolitical expert on the eve of President Biden’s meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping.
“China’s role within the axis between Russia and Iran, and, on a peripheral regional level, between Ukraine and the situation in Israel, is such that they are seeking to be the supplier of forces that are [trying] to destabilize the rules-based international order,” says Alp Sevimlisoy, a geopolitical strategist & national security expert on NATO’s role within the Mediterranean, focusing on regional unionism and defense policy and a Millennium Fellow at the Atlantic Council headquartered in Washington, DC.
President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping held their first face-to-face meeting in more than a year today, pledging to work to stabilize fraught relations in talks with far-reaching implications for a world grappling with economic cross currents and wars in the Middle East and Europe, according to an AP report.
“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed,” Xi told Biden during their meeting. Biden was expected to speak to Xi about circumstances in the Middle East, hoping that China would use its sway over Iran to make clear that Tehran or its proxies should not take any action that could lead to the expansion of the Israel-Hamas war.
The Biden administration sees the Chinese, a big buyer of Iranian oil, as having considerable leverage with Iran, which is a major backer of Hamas. Additionally, the US and China have disagreed on issues surrounding Taiwan. “If it continues to go down this route, we’ve seen countless extremely successful examples, like micro trip restrictions, that have been brought in against China,” began Sevimlisoy.
“But moreover, where I’d like to really draw a distinction to will be the placement of Ohio-class nuclear-armed Submersible vessels, submarines, both in the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, and also in Asia. And there’s a component that was widely spoken of, and it’s going under the radar at the moment.
“President Biden will be saying that the AUS agreement will be expanded with other countries that share the same concerns concerning China. And that will be both from a military standpoint, but also from a nuclear deterrent standpoint,” explains the geopolitical expert.
“Having US military capability deployed in the Middle East and in the Black Sea will be a sign for China to understand that the next step from this will be in all shapes and forms a direct confrontation with any of its proxies or itself.”
As relations between the US and China frequently fluctuate, Xi was hoping for assurances from Biden that the U.S. would not support Taiwan’s independence, start a new Cold War, or suppress China’s economic growth.
“Whether we’re looking at this from the lens of what China is doing or what Russia is doing, Russia was firmly behind the activities that took place on October 7th, obviously with the desire to create a new front now that new front has been has been created,” claims Sevimlisoy.
“However, we as the United States have been hugely successful in deploying both naval vessels in terms of land command, ensuring that the military capabilities of US forces in the Gulf in the Middle East are at a very high level of readiness,” continued the expert.
America’s intervention in the Middle East crisis, though disputed, is generally seen as an attempt to keep the peace by military and international relations specialists.
“When it comes to confronting the regional players such as Iran, the regional threats such as Iran, we are there ready to take the conflict to the next level, and when I say take the conflict to the next level in the event of spillover, as in Iran, using proxies, for example in the Middle East in the Gulf, there is now enough capability to ensure that this will be a very swift victory for the United States and its allies,” says Sevimlisoy about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
“So these frontiers that have been opened up have actually obviously with regard to their calculations, have actually strengthened us due to the way that we have responded to this, standing by our ally Israel, and deploying significant resources across the Med, the Middle East, and the Black Sea,” finished Sevimlisoy.
Biden and Xi are in California for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and met one-on-one at Filoli Estate, a country house and museum about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of San Francisco.
Alp Sevimlisoy originally featured as per: Daily Mirror
