![]() He argued in his piece that Washington has to position itself favorably to “counter Russia’s aggression” and “out-compete China, and work for greater stability in a consequential region of the world.” In defending his decision to travel to the region, China and Russia were conspicuous motives in President Biden’s reasoning. While it might be overblown, the gap between perceptions of the US’s part in engineering regional security and the reality of its engagement on the ground has taken root. Now, China occupies almost every policy discussion in Washington-a trend that emerged from former President Donald Trump’s “America first” policy-creating a significant regional discourse gap. The predominant anxiety among those countries originates from a prevalent sense of insecurity. In the past three years, the US’s failure to address the growing perceptions regarding its future commitment to regional stability and security has granted Beijing favorable circumstances to portray the US as an unreliable partner in the eyes of regional powers. President Biden’s visit will allow the administration to recalibrate the popular, entrenched post-Afghanistan and Ukraine war narrative around the perceived US rebalancing away from the region to better compete with China. This path has been unrepentantly laid out in the president’s opinion piece published in the Washington Post on July 9, as part of his aim to “reorient-but not rupture-relations” with Riyadh.ĭiscussions with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members in addition to Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan (GCC+3) will cast an unpalatable shadow over the courteous approach the US is trying to promote ahead of the summit. The trip will focus on the administration’s push to patch up US relations with Saudi Arabia, encourage it to pump more oil into the world market, bring it closer to Israel, and revive US standing in the region. ![]() However, the rising power, which is fixed on expanding its influence in the region, will be the elephant in the room at the Saudi summit in Jeddah, which many Arab leaders plan to attend.īiden’s agenda is crowded with a diverse set of objectives he wants to achieve in a bid to dismantle skepticism that has engulfed relations with the region for years. US President Joe Biden’s visit to the Middle East on 13-16 July won’t directly focus on China. JBiden’s Middle East trip focuses on the region.
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