Podcast & Substack recommendation: ChinaTalk

I wasn’t planning to post anything here today. The election back home in Canada has taken a lot of my focus lately and I’ve spent most of the day reading, listening, watching and thinking about it.

That said, on my drive into the city for a meeting today I listened to the most recent episode of ChinaTalk and thought I’d share:

Allied Scale: Net Assessment with Rush Doshi - Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk Podcast/Substack. The China watchers among you will be familiar with the great work Jordan and his team do at ChinaTalk, but the Middle East specialists might not be. It’s a consistently interesting Substack with in-depth podcast conversations. This one with Rush Doshi is excellent - the rare podcast that I re-listened to. Doshi was deputy senior director for China and Taiwan in President Biden’s National Security Council and wrote an excellent book, The Long Game, just before going into government service. He’s a thoughtful analyst of China and this conversation gave me a lot of food for thought.

The discussion is based on an article he recently published with Kurt Campbell in Foreign Affairs which I haven’t read yet but the argument converges with a point I’ve frequently made over the years - that the US’s competitive advantage with China is its network of alliances. In a lot of sectors - trade, manufacturing, technological innovation - it’s next to impossible for any one country to compete one-on-one with China. Doshi’s point in this conversation is that by looking at alliances more in terms of capacity building you get a formidable advantage of scale

I’ve thought about this a lot as a different way of looking at extra-regional partnerships in the Gulf. The “Great Power Binary” framework that is constantly pressed upon the rest of the world, that China and the US shape the playing field and the rest of us react, is profoundly troubling to me and is also inconsistent with how I see events progressing in this part of the world. Leaders from the Gulf constantly say they have no interest in the US-China choice. I think they are very much aware that what they get in their partnerships with Washington is far greater than what they could get from Beijing, but why antagonize China? And especially when the US gives the rest of the world whiplash from one election to the next?

But I digress.

A key feature of the binary is always the US handles the strategic stuff and China handles the economic stuff, and this is where I think Doshi’s argument is interesting. If you look at the volume of trade, then yes, China is on the top of the heap. But when you look at trade with countries that are allied or aligned with the US you see a different picture - the EU, Japan, UK, Korea, and India are all major economic actors in the Gulf, all provide trade in services that are so important for countries trying to diversify their economic models, all invest, set up companies, and support development agendas. And they all have deep concerns about the norms and values that China is trying to promote in global governance. Taken together, you see a region where like-minded countries can provide attractive options. It’s not simply a matter of US vs. China.

Jonathan Panikoff and I wrote a short piece about this a couple of years ago:

The binary construct in which the US is Arab states’ security partner and China is the economic one ignores the substantial roles that US allies and partners play as trade, investment, and contracting partners throughout the Middle East.

The UAE, for example, China is its top trade partner, but India is a close second with Japan third, followed by the United States. Importantly, India and Japan also have problems with China. For Saudi Arabia, China is its biggest export destination; but the United States, UAE, Germany, and India round out the top five.

A smarter approach would be for the US to end the bilateral strategic competition narrative and instead leverage its networks of allies and partners to quickly develop more multilateral coalitions—like the India, Israel, UAE, U.S. grouping (I2U2). This would address the economic and developmental requirements that make China an attractive partner to Middle East countries.

Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India have all experienced the sharp end of China’s economic statecraft and the raft of problems associated with an embrace of Chinese technology.

Canberra can help cut further into China’s lead on critical minerals. There should be a formalized agreement with Seoul and Taipei as global, non-U.S. alternatives on semiconductors, given Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC’s leadership in the field. Tokyo is already leading on 6G and could be brought into Saudi-US agreements for joint cooperation on the topic. And India can be even more of an alternative for production, and consumption, given its population rivals that of China’s.

In any case, I still have more election analysis to listen to. Go listen to the podcast, check out the Doshi and Campbell article, and let me know what you think.