Scrap that idea. I was recently in the United States, and was arguing for a need for policy to start thinking of China and the Middle East as the same policy challenge. What I learnt is that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
It seems that the financial sector can look beyond geographical divides. But the military and political sectors are struggling. It’s perhaps not surprising. It’s easy enough to move an investment banker from Dubai to Beijing. Money is, after all, pretty much the same in any country. But it’s far harder asking a Chinese-speaking political analyst, after spending years tracking the activity of China’s Politburo, to think about relations between Iraq’s central government and Kurdistan.
If this seems an obvious point, it shouldn’t. China’s ability to import oil from Iraq may yet play a role in the country’s energy security. And the Iraqi central government’s recent blacklisting of Sinopec, a major Chinese oil company, for dealing in Kurdistan, is an example of how globalization has already changed the way we need to think about the world.
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I am in the U.S. this week, speaking at the State Department, Columbia University and CSIS. I intend to use the opportunity to test drive one of my favourite themes.
In a globalized world it is time to view China and the Middle East as part of the same policy challenge, rather than two distinct challenges.
How so? The growing commercial relations between the two mean that a change in one affects the other. I am thinking specifically about jobs. The rise of China has resulted in a historic shift of manufacturing from the industrialized to the industrializing world. It is a shift that is unlikely to reverse.
However, the consequences have been mixed for the Middle East. A flood of cheap imports to the region has meant factory closures in low-cost countries, such as Egypt and Syria. And that’s a problem given that two-thirds of the region’s population is under the age of thirty. And many are unemployed.
But it could all change, and for the better.
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It is easy to feel giddy about the rise of the Silk Road. But the outcome is far from guaranteed. One threat in particular might yet bring the region to its knees.
Water.
There is no escaping the Silk Road’s water shortages. The region is one of the driest parts of the planet. Yet, water is needed to run everything from textile factories in China, five-star hotels in Dubai, to washing- machines in Cairo.
Let’s start with a few figures. The Silk Road has an average of 2,260 cubic meters of internal renewable water per person. The equivalent figure is 9,300 in the United States. In fact, an abundance of water is an important, but often overlooked, reason why the United States might defy its critics and remain the world’s major power through the end of this century.
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President Obama’s speech in Cairo last Thursday was a remarkable achievement.
It was also a lesson in America’s ability to produce a foreign policy U-turn in a short space of time. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that President Bush was given a standing ovation by Israel’s legislature, as he spoke of risks of terrorism.
So, where does this leave China? The country had benefited from growing mistrust between America and the Middle East. Riyadh’s warming relationship with Beijing, for instance, was in part a hedge against its deteriorating relationship with Washington.
Critics will argue the speech puts Beijing on the back foot. And it perhaps isn’t a surprise that the People’s Daily, China’s official newspaper, referenced the speech, not on the front page like other major dailies, but instead on page three.
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