THE WAR ON GAZA: UNITED STATES, CHINA AND THE THEORY OF CONTROLLED CHAOS
Plan to make Israel a hub of world trade and derail China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Israel is massacring tens of thousands mainly Palestinian women and children in Gaza, with no end in sight.
China told the United Nations Security Council that a ceasefire is a top priority and condemned Israel’s violations of international law.
In direct contrast to China, the United States is sending weapons to Israel. It says the Zionist state has the right to attack with no humanitarian limits, thereby sanctioning a genocide.
The superpowers’ clash of views exposes a much deeper schism, over which country controls world trade through the Middle East – the US or China. Examining the geopolitical context sheds light on the war on Gaza.
China in the Middle East
Since 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been funding and constructing infrastructure, roads, ports, pipelines and trading routes to facilitate economic integration around the world.
China needs secure land and sea routes through which to transport oil and gas from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As part of the BRI, China has signed strategic partnerships with Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. It has invested heavily in the MENA region’s transportation infrastructure.
A primary goal for China is to ensure political stability and peace in the region. To this end, it engages in peacekeeping diplomacy as well as joint military drills with countries such as Iran and Russia in the Gulf of Oman. Its first overseas military facility was established in Djibouti in 2017.
The US could have joined, at China’s invitation, the BRI in the Middle East to ensure cooperation between the two states. Instead, Washington has sought ways to counter the influence of its peer rival.
Finally in September 2023, it announced a very big new initiative designed to upstage China in the Middle East.
India-Middle East-Europe Corridor to make Israel a central hub
On September 2023, it was announced at the G20 Summit that the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, France, Germany and Italy plan to form an 'India– Middle East–Europe Corridor' (IMEC.)
A key goal of the IMEC is to build an alternative trade route to Egypt’s Suez Canal.
The IMEC transport corridor would connect India’s west coast with the United Arab Emirates by sea, and a rail route crossing the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Haifa. The route would bypass the Suez Canal. See map below.
‘After the acquisition of Haifa Port, Israel’s second largest port, by a consortium led by India’s Adani Group, it is being transformed into a world-class facility that can be an alternative route, besides challenging China’s growing footprint in the region,’ reported The Week on October 9.[ii]
This is bad news for China, and also for Egypt. If completed, the Suez Canal revenues will decline. Egypt has refused to sign onto the IMEC Memorandum of Understanding.
Map source. India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor: A passage of possibilities - Frontline (thehindu.com)
The idea of supplanting the Suez Canal is not new. In the 1960s, Israel mooted a plan to build an alternative canal to the Suez Canal. Named the Ben Gurion Canal, it would run from the Gulf of Aquaba to the Gaza Strip and on to the Mediterranean Sea.
China intends to continue using the 193-kilometre Suez Canal, the shortest route from Asia to Europe through which 70 ships pass every day. Egypt has been signed onto the BRI since its inception in 2013.
A map of the BRI plan from 2020 is below. A maritime route connects the South-eastern coastline of China to the Mediterranean Sea through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal.
Map source: Suez Canal, and the Belt & Road Initiative: the Role of the Mediterranean countries - Docks The Future
Another major goal of Israel, outlined in its Maritime Territory strategy, is to develop its territorial waters for hydro-carbon production.[iii] Gaza’s offshore gas and oil field legally belongs to the Palestinian Authority but is controlled by Israel.
Map source: Exclusive: Hamas 'allows development of gas field off Gaza' (newarab.com)
A planned EastMed pipeline includes 1,300km of offshore and 600km of onshore pipeline sections. It will transport natural gas from the Levantine Basin in Israel as well as from the gas fields in Cypriot waters to Greece and Italy.
United States: Empire of Chaos
A few weeks after the IMEC plan was announced, the conflagration in Gaza blew up.
China views the chaos the war has created as threatening to its Middle East BRI corridor. It’s why Special Envoy to the Middle East Zhai Jun is on a diplomacy tour, urging restraint.
There are worries that ongoing Gaza bombardment will delay the IMEC project[i] but since it’s only in the planning stage, there will have no real material impact. More detrimental to the success of the Western-backed Corridor will be its high cost.
The US must find ways to deter China’s influence in the region other than the IMEC.
It is well known that China doesn’t like to do business in an unstable environment.
The theory of controlled chaos has been applied to explain the ‘colour’ revolutions – a type of external intervention designed to overturn an established order.[ii]
A question arises: Does the US welcome chaos in West Asia, in line with its ambition of undermining China’s established trade links with Israel and the region?
Last year, US-led NATO named China ‘a security challenge.’ Flip the script: the US is the world’s security challenge. Today, whether it’s Gaza, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Ukraine, the US and NATO sow the seeds of division and conflict to maintain a position of dominance – even if that means perpetual chaos and war.
American intellectual Noam Chomsky says that massive loss of life is not the purpose but a consequence of US foreign policy. [iii]
In my view, the US foreign policy points to an international strategy of creating the most chaos possible. Shifting alliances, resort to bombardments in the first instance and tactics such as ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ – these are short-term knee-jerk responses that indicate irrationality and lack of judgment.
Blowback is often the result, as we saw with US support of Saddam Hussein, the Afghan fundamentalist jihad in the 1980s and rebel armies in Syria in the 2010s. These ‘unintentional’ consequences don’t concern US policymakers. They barely acknowledge the millions of lives lost in US foreign wars since World War 2.
When confronted with the consequences of their murderous actions, Western ruling elites shrug their shoulders. This is the behaviour of psychopaths.
Conclusion
Whatever you think about China’s domestic policies, one thing is clear: it doesn’t invade other countries. It acts as a mediator in the international space: recently it brokered an agreement between sworn enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran. China’s envoy is desperately trying to avoid the widening of the war on Gaza through diplomacy.
There is another signal of its intent to stand firm against the empire of chaos.
On October 14, the US positioned warships and weapons in the Mediterranean in response to the crisis. On October 23, China’s People’s Liberation Army dispatched six warships to the Middle East, to an undisclosed location. China says the deployment is routine and has nothing to do with the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.[iv] (Updated 8/12/23.)
[i] Israel-Hamas war may affect India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor timelines - The Hindu BusinessLine
[ii] The Influence of the “Controlled Chaos” Technology on the Geopolitical Situation in the Greater Middle East (scirp.org)
[iii] The Empire of Chaos: An Interview With Noam Chomsky | Truthout
[iv] China's warships in Middle East on routine escort missions, not involved in Israel-Palestine conflict - Global Times
Other references Map source: China massive Belt and Road Initiative integrating Eurasia and global supply chains | VentureOutsource.com and China Steps Up Middle East Diplomacy in Multi-Front Push – The China Global South Project
I've been wanting to find out what the 'bigger picture' for the war in Gaza might be, so I read this article with interest: I've been wanting to know what the true agenda behind it might be and this is certainly a different take on it that I hadn't thought of.
However, I was initially taken aback by the opening line: "Israel is massacring tens of thousands mainly Palestinian women and children in Gaza, with no end in sight" followed shortly after by "the United States.... says the Zionist state has the right to attack with no humanitarian limits, thereby sanctioning a genocide." A couple of one-sided, sweeping statements if ever I read any! Even the BBC have been more balanced in their reporting of this topic recently.
A few things to consider: if Israel is truly "massacring" civilians "with no humanitarian limits" and committing genocide, how do you explain the fact that, most unusually for a country at war, their military have repeatedly advised civilians to relocate to somewhere safer before attacks on terrorists are carried out: terrorists who routinely use their civilians as 'human shields' and value martyrdom above human life?
I don't condone all the actions carried out by Israel in the past - nor those of any government if it comes to that - but I do find it puzzling that they are currently being demonised for doing what any country would do in the circumstances: defending their citizens against an enemy that launched an unprecedented attack in which many innocent civilians were killed and 240 were taken hostage.
I believe that one should always look at both sides of a situation before publicly voicing an opinion on it. Therefore, I implore you to do your research before discussing this further; for example. please do watch https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/338-the-sin-of-moral-equivalence.
If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that the 'powers that be' want to create more division between people and that wars are a great way of doing that (as well as distracting us from what's really going on under the radar, the true evils we should really be eliminating from our world). So I'm surprised that someone of your calibre would want to play into their hands by adding fuel to the fire. I truly hope that my words have given you food for serious consideration.