OBAMA’S POWER VACUUM: China Pivots to the Middle East.

This year, China has opened its first foreign military base in Djibouti and sent a senior military advisor to Syria. Both the FT and SCMP report that some prominent Chinese academics and officials are rethinking the wisdom of non-alignment. Meanwhile, a 2015 law gave the PLA the ability to intervene in other countries to prevent terrorism even without a UN mandate.

Nowhere is China’s expanding hard power more visible than in the Middle East, and it’s hard not to see that at least partially as a consequence of U.S. withdrawal. The United States is still a big player in the region. But as Ambassador Dennis Ross and others have observed, these days Arab leaders are turning to Putin, not Obama, for assistance. Now China is also looking to fill the vacuum.

Obama Administration officials past and present keep saying they’re playing a “long game.” That’s hard to dispute directly, of course, because we have no vision of how things will look in the long run. But we can see the short term pretty well, and increasingly the outlines of the medium term are coming into view. As far as stability and prosperity go, the foreseeable future doesn’t look promising.

Actually, Obama’s brilliant. He thinks that this troublesome region can only be controlled with an iron heel, and the United States, for various reasons, can’t wield an iron heel. So we let the Russians and Chinese do it. In that past the oil would have been an issue, but now fracking has made that much less important. So Islamists will be bought off, or killed and tortured en masse, but the world won’t care because America isn’t the one doing it. Genius!