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Leading Chinese Middle East Scholar Niu Xinchun: 'Perhaps, In The Future, It Will Be China, Rather Than The U.S., That Coordinates Oil Prices With Saudi Arabia And Russia'
Russia, Saudi Arabia, China | Special Dispatch No. 9751
On January 18, 2022, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled Chinese media outlet Global Times published an article titled "The Global Energy Transition Is Accelerating." The article was authored by Niu Xinchun, research professor and director of the Institute of Middle East Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a leading think-tank affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) and overseen by the CCP Central Committee.
The article was published following a January 10-14, 2022 visit by foreign ministers from four of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, accompanied by GCC Secretary-General Nayef Al-Hajraf, to the northeastern Chinese city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province. A high-profile visit by Turkish and Iranian foreign ministers followed, and that entire week of January was dubbed "Middle East Week" by Chinese diplomats and academics.
In his article, Niu wrote that Middle Eastern oil-producing countries had recently demonstrated "unprecedented enthusiasm for furthering their relations" with China, and that the Middle East was clearly departing from the "American orbit," with both U.S. allies and adversaries "looking east" as well.
As China draws closer to Riyadh and Moscow, he concluded, in the future it may be China, rather than the U.S., that coordinates oil prices with Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Below is Niu's article:[1]
'There Have Been Clear Signs Of Warming Relations Between China And The Middle East'
"This year is shaping up to be a big year in China-Middle East relations. Six Middle Eastern foreign ministers and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) secretary general visited China in close succession at the start of the new year, and Saudi Arabia will host the first China-Arab Leaders Summit later this year.
"In recent years, there have been clear signs of warming relations between China and the Middle East, particularly in light of the strategic contraction of the U.S. in the Middle East, making the phenomenon of a 'rising East and declining West' all the more striking.
"In the author's view, this is a result of the global energy transition as well as a reflection of the changing global power dynamics. China-Middle East interdependence is growing, with China's maneuvering room expanding and its Middle East policy facing unprecedented opportunities.
"Despite the fact that oil's importance has diminished as a result of the global energy transition, the Middle East continues to be the largest player in the oil market. Energy transition is a long process, with coal taking 200 years to replace the dominance of plant-based fuels and oil taking 100 years to replace coal. Even under the most optimistic scenario of carbon neutrality by 2050, the world would still need 24 million barrels of oil per day.
"In this process, the Middle East enjoys a competitive advantage due to its large oil reserves, low cost and low carbon footprint of production. Other countries' oil will be the first to leave the market, allowing the Middle East to increase its market share. In 2020, the Middle East accounted for 34% of global oil production, with the possibility of exceeding 50% in the future.
"China is the world's largest crude oil importer, and its influence in oil politics is growing. The gap has widened since China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest importer of crude oil in 2017. In 2020, China imported 10.85 million barrels per day of crude oil, compared with 5.87 million barrels per day for the U.S. China was also the largest importer of Middle East crude oil that year, importing nearly 5 million b/d compared with 700,000 b/d for the U.S.
"More importantly, when China became the world's largest crude oil importer, the oil market shifted from a seller's to a buyer's market, and oil importers' position improved...
"The Middle East needs China's market and investments, and China needs the Middle East's oil, making the two sides interdependent. In contrast, the demand for Middle East oil from the U.S. and Europe is rapidly declining. In 2020, all European countries and the U.S. together accounted for 19% of Saudi Arabia's crude oil exports, while China accounted for 26%. It is clear that the interdependence between the Middle East and China will gradually increase.
"The trend of a 'rising East and declining West' is also evident in the field of investments. Companies in Europe and the U.S. have recently divested from the oil and gas markets because they are pessimistic about their prospects. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell, among other U.S. and European multinational oil companies, have sold $28.1 billion in assets and plan to sell another $30 billion, leaving the industry with $140 billion in assets on market.
"Upstream oil and gas investment in 2021 was $315 billion globally, down 30% from the previous year and 60% less than the 2014 peak. The European Investment Bank stopped financing fossil fuel projects in 2021, per the European Commission's 2050 roadmap to carbon neutrality. In 2010, China accounted for 2.4% of FDI stock in the Middle East, rising to 5% in 2019; similarly, in 2010, China accounted for 3.3% of FDI flows in the Middle East, rising to 10.1% in 2019. Clearly, the Middle East desires Chinese investment as well.
"As the Middle East 'lifts its head' in anticipation of the new energy sector, China appears to be the ideal partner, with the world's largest production capacity. China is a global leader in solar and wind energy production and consumption, having invested nearly $900 billion in renewable energy since 2009, more than twice as much as the U.S. China currently produces more than 70% of the world's solar panels and 50% of the world's wind turbine manufacturing capacity; it is also the world's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles, with nearly half of the global total and 77% of lithium ion batteries.
"Originally, the U.S. was the technological leader in nuclear power sector, but it has not developed any new projects since 2007. Russia, China and France are particularly active in the international nuclear market. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have all announced new energy targets, with Egypt aiming for 42% renewable energy by 2030, Saudi Arabia for 50% by 2030, and the UAE for 44% by 2050. To achieve these ambitious goals, the Middle East needs a significant amount of new energy capacity, where China has a distinct advantage."
'The Middle East Is Clearly Departing From The 'American Orbit,' With Both U.S. Allies And Adversaries 'Looking East''
"The international oil market's transformation has occurred at a time when the international political landscape is undergoing significant changes. The Middle East had been dominated by the U.S. since the end of the Cold War, particularly in security [affairs], leaving little room for China to play an active role. American and European companies monopolized the Middle East economy's upstream industries, and China had no say in the matter.
"Now, the U.S.'s strategic contraction in the Middle East is becoming more evident, with Middle Eastern countries hedging their bets on both sides of the table, if not multiple sides of the table, leaving China with significantly more room to expand. In light of this, Middle Eastern oil-producing countries have recently demonstrated unprecedented enthusiasm for furthering their relations with China and have been open in areas such as the oil yuan, upstream oil and gas explorations and production, and long-term bulk oil supply contracts.
"The Middle East is clearly departing from the 'American orbit,' with both U.S. allies and adversaries 'looking east' as well. According to Emirates University political scientist Professor Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, Gulf countries have lost faith in the U.S. The U.S. influence is waning, not only in the economic sphere, but in all aspects of politics, military, and strategy.
"Stabilizing international oil prices necessitates full cooperation between oil-producing and consuming countries. Since 1973, most oil crises have entailed cooperation between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to control oil prices by reducing or increasing production.
"In 2020, when the world saw a rare ultra-low (negative) oil price, then-President Trump called Saudi Crown Prince Salman and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss how to stabilize oil prices. However, when the U.S. considered oil prices to be too high at the end of 2021, President Biden did not call Saudi and Russian leaders, instead lowering oil prices by releasing crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves.
"The reason for this is that the recent deterioration of relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia, has harmed coordination between the three nations. At the same time, China is getting closer to Saudi Arabia and Russia. Perhaps, in the future, it will be China, rather than the U.S., that coordinates oil prices with Saudi Arabia and Russia. At that point, it will be another landmark event in this period of changes unseen in a century."
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Why should we be. What comfort comes when one is in decline?
Why aren’t we happy?
By David M Shribman
And yet GDP is rising by an annual rate of 6.7 percent, an astonishing figure during a pandemic. Unemployment remains below 4 percent, by traditional measures signaling “full employment.” The country is basically at peace. Omicron spread through the country like a cyclone but seems to be easing up. Sensible, sober people are employing the phrase “endemic” instead of “pandemic.”
With all that good news, the pollster John Zogby, citing what he called “some of the most dismal feelings and evaluations that we’ve ever seen,” produced a half-hour podcast the other day titled Why Aren’t We Happy?
In 1968, the year of two assassinations, Vietnam protests, disruptions at the Democratic National Convention and the calming words of Genesis from Apollo 8 in Christmastime orbit of the Moon, the political journalist Theodore H. White published his only play. In “Caesar at the Rubicon,” Mr. White, known for his landmark “Making of the President” series, spoke of “the terrible conflict between the idea of liberty and the idea of order,” and he said, presciently, “Rarely does any civilization harness the two; but when that happens, the results can be spectacular and magnificent, as they were in Republican Rome, in Ancient Athens, in England at its apogee, in the United States for how long we do not know.”
Note the last seven words, written 54 years ago: for how long we do not know.
Those words haunt us. Republicans want ballot security because they believe the 2020 election was compromised. Democrats want ballot security because they believe Republicans will compromise the 2024 election. Everyone wants order but is willing to resort to disorder — the phrase “go to the streets” is heard as often today from Democrats as it is from Republicans — if things don’t go their way. The sportswriter Grantland Rice (“It’s not that you won or lost but how you played the game”) has been supplanted by UCLA football coach Henry “Red” Sanders (“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”).
Later in the 20th century the Sanders quote would be appropriated by Vince Lombardi. Now that notion has poisoned our politics in the 21st century, prompting us to recall the (possibly apocryphal) 18th century warning of Benjamin Franklin, who, asked what kind of political system the Constitutional Convention produced, replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Meanwhile, there are faint signs — “green shoots,” as economists say — the country is recovering from its ennui.
There is reason to believe that both parties will join to pass legislation to clarify how Electoral College votes are reported and counted. That would be a good thing.
There is reason to believe that the public is impatient with Capitol Hill partisanship. Three-quarters of Americans say they disapprove of Congress, which paradoxically is a good thing; politicians hate nothing more than being hated, and there is reasonable hope that public contempt might change their public comportment.
There is reason to believe that the country’s long-term economic woes are easing. Look at Ohio, often a bellwether. Intel has announced it will build a $20 billion chip plant near Columbus. Farther south, in Cincinnati, an Innovation District is reshaping the economy of a city once dependent upon Procter & Gamble. “The Intel investment is one of many signs that, after years of unsung effort, the revival of America’s heartland is fully underway,” Richard Florida, the University of Toronto economic futurist, and David J. Adams, the lead architect of the Cincinnati initiative, wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
They added that upstate New York, Western Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota are showing encouraging signs of joining the trend that prompted Ohio’s Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown to tweet: “Today we’re finally burying the term ‘Rust Belt.’ ”
There is reason, amid a long overdue racial reckoning and a broader, more inclusive view of our own history, that several aspects of American life are again worth noting and celebrating.
So much of the country’s modern identity — so many of the elements of modern American pride — can be traced to World War II, which created American economic, political, military and cultural supremacy. The recent death of Senator Bob Dole, an injured veteran of the conflict, provided a vivid reminder.
Consider the remarks of a Japanese naval officer captured by American forces in the Philippines. Kiyofumi Kojima looked at the men who took him as a prisoner and said, “Blond, silver, black, brown, red hair. Blue, green, brown, black eyes. White, black, skin colors of every variety. I realized then that we’d fought against all the peoples of the world. At the same time, I thought, what a funny country America is, all those different kinds of people fighting in the same uniform.”
National unity cannot be decreed. No matter how many times Mr. Biden stands before a microphone and plaintively pleads for unity — no matter how many times he beseeches, “We’re Americans!” — the country will not rally together. National unity comes from the heart, not from the rostrum.
Abraham Lincoln tried in 1861, when he said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Some 39 days later, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter.
John F. Kennedy tried a century later, in 1961, when he bid Americans to “ask what you can do for your country.” The nation blithely went on with its business, watching “Babes in Toyland,” listening to Patsy Cline “fall to pieces,” doing the “Twist” with Chubby Checker and for the most part turning a blind eye to the racism that prompted the Freedom Rides of that year.
Maybe the antidote is in the words of a Black poet who said that America never was America to him but nonetheless pleaded, “Let it be the dream it used to be.” Let it.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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Wish begets the thought?
A once great corporate entity/creation destroyed by progressive radicals. Everything they touch eventually they destroy including America.
CNN's collapse is now complete
BY JOE CONCHA, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
It all began 42 years ago — Ted Turner's creation of a 24/7 news network that would exist on something called cable TV. Few believed it could succeed.
And, for its first decade, CNN largely chugged along but wasn't seen as a game-changer or a true competitor to big broadcast news entities based in New York in the form of CBS, NBC and ABC. That all changed when war broke out between the United States and Iraq in 1991.
On the night war exploded over Baghdad, CNN was the only news organization that was able to broadcast from the city under siege as the U.S. onslaught began, all courtesy of the CNN team’s ability to convince the Iraqi government to grant them a line out of the city to broadcast, one that the competition could not secure.
"How CNN Won the War" was the glowing headline from the Washington Post on a story that perfectly chronicled the events that led to CNN officially becoming a major player. And off it went.
Until 2002, CNN was No. 1 in the cable news race. But competition that hadn't existed before ended its dominance forever, primarily in the form of Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC. Despite the ratings results, CNN continued to carry itself as a credible, facts-first network of integrity that leaned heavily on solid reporting with a sprinkling of opinion and infotainment mixed in via programs such as "Larry King Live" and "Crossfire."
In 2013, the network hired former NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker to take the reins as ratings continued to be below average at best. This gave Zucker a mandate to radically change the network from its journalistic roots of more than three decades — the months-long wall-to-wall coverage of a missing Malaysian airliner being an early example.
But two years later, the move to insert heavy doses of partisan opinion into its news reports only accelerated when Donald Trump – a Zucker hire at NBC for "The Apprentice" – jumped in to the 2016 presidential race. At first, CNN bear-hugged Trump's every move. (Hillary Clinton's giving a speech somewhere? Screw it. Let's show an empty Trump podium with chyrons stating "Trump to speak soon" instead.) The real estate mogul's 17 Republican challengers never had a shot; Trump blotted out the sun in terms of media coverage on his way to winning the nomination.
At that point, Zucker and CNN began to worry. Because while it was a ratings boon for the network to make Trump the centerpiece, there was growing concern that the guy could actually beat Hillary and become the nation's 45th president. So Zucker unleashed the hounds, but it was too late. Trump would go on to shock the world in November 2016.
Undeterred, CNN decided there would be no honeymoon period for the new president. Talk about Russian collusion handing Trump the White House began even before the inauguration. And after the nonstop Trump-bashing, Harvard University concluded that CNN led the way, along with Zucker's former home of NBC, in giving Trump 93 percent negative coverage in his first 100 days.
For the next four years, CNN served as the leading media resistance to Trump, throwing objectivity out the window. And after Joe Biden got elected, the network cheered the new president as it had throughout the entire campaign while still making Trump a prime centerpiece for over-the-top negative coverage despite his being out of office.
But as much as CNN tried to resurrect its lead character – who was banned from social media and largely off the grid for the year – his absence clearly showed the network was a one-trick partisan pony. Ratings fell 90 percent overall when comparing January 2021 to January 2022. That’s hard to do.
Which brings us to the events of this week: Zucker released a statement saying he had to resign because of a consensual affair with a female executive named Allison Gollust. WarnerMedia apparently has a rule against this, so Zucker – instead of a slap on the wrist for a benign offense – simply had to go abruptly.
Nobody believed this excuse. Turns out they may have had plenty of reason to be skeptical.
Per several reports, Zucker and Gollust allegedly advised then Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) – the older brother of then-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo – on what to say during his COVID-19 daily briefings in the spring of 2020. They also reportedly told Cuomo how to respond to and how to criticize then-President Trump, to make it more compelling TV. (Gollust is a former communications director for Andrew Cuomo.)
Let's unpack all of this:
In the spring of 2020, the country was in a horrific place. Businesses shut completely; people were scared. There were no COVID therapeutics, no vaccines. Hospitals were overwhelmed, thousands were dying each day. If ever there was a time for news organizations to educate and inform the public, this was it.
Instead, Zucker apparently believed it was the perfect time to exploit the situation for political gain and to help the network's ratings.
Andrew Cuomo benefitted from briefings that made him appear to be the adult in the room regarding COVID and Trump appear to be the villain. Cuomo got a $5.1 million book deal as a result.
Chris Cuomo and Zucker/Gollust/CNN benefitted from marathon interviews with Cuomo's governor/brother, which didn't touch the governor's alleged nursing home scandal. Ratings soared.
So, was Zucker's departure simply about a consensual relationship with a co-worker? One might be forgiven for questioning that.
Moving forward, what's next for CNN when the company falls under the Discovery Channel umbrella later this year? Let's hear from its soon-to-be largest shareholder, John Malone of Liberty Media.
"I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing," Malone said in an interview that recently aired on CNBC.
Republicans back Pence rebuke of Trump on overturning 2020 election
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The collapse of CNN is now complete: Nine-out-of-ten viewers, gone. Its top-rated anchor, Chris Cuomo, gone. Its network president, gone. Its integrity in shambles.
Oh, and new management coming in that is signaling big-time changes ... changes that may bring CNN back to the proud network it once was before Jeff Zucker destroyed it.
Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist.
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back to the proud network it once was before Jeff Zucker destroyed it.
Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist.
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