12-12-2022 Dale Hurd
China has moved in on the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.
The communist government co-hosted a regional summit of Arab nations with Saudi Arabia, where it pledged to buy more oil from the region. It also urged oil-producing nations to stop using the U.S. dollar in their sales to China and use the Chinese Yuan instead.
It’s the next phase in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign to ‘de-dollarize’ the world economy.
China announced earlier this year it would start paying for Russian natural gas in rubles and yuan.
Xi is exploiting Saudi Arabia’s anger over the Biden administration’s attempts to strike a nuclear deal with its sworn enemy: Iran.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Sunday Morning Futures program, “When you won’t be partners with your friends and your allies and you offend them, and you simply won’t do anything to push back against your adversaries like Xi Jinping, you see exactly this kind of hedging behavior.”
Retired General Jack Keane told Fox News that China was always going to have a relationship with Saudi Arabia because it gets two thirds of its oil from the Middle East.
Keane said, “But what is actually happening here, because of the Biden administration’s missteps with Saudi Arabia and the Arabs in general, and going immediately to appease Iran at the beginning of the administration, the Chinese clearly recognize that there’s a vacuum here and they want to fill it.”
President Xi tried to woo Arab leaders with his call for an independent Palestinian state and an end to ‘Islamophobia’, but did not mention China’s genocide campaign against its own Muslim Uighur people.
This is only the latest move by China to seek to take over a U.S. trading relationship. As we reported early this year, China has all but replaced the U.S. as the dominant trading partner in Latin America.
Keane says if the White House wants better relations with Arab world, it should seek the help of incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “Who wants to strengthen and expand the Abraham Accords – that means a relationship with Arabs and Israelis. Work with (Netanyahu) and have him help you renew the relationship with the Arabs.”
China has one big advantage over the U.S. It’s perfectly fine with Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses, a major point of contention with Washington.