China and the UAE: The Long Game

China is playing the long game and if left unchallenged, will secure Beijing's control over the global economy for the next century.

The unipolar world that formed in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which the United States reigned as the unrivalled global superpower, appears to be over. The rapidly spreading influence of China as a major economic heavyweight is creating something akin to Cold War conditions wherein countries of strategic importance to both Beijing and Washington find themselves with considerable bargaining power. Case in point: the United Arab Emirates.

Largely through its cooperation with the US over the past 30 years, the UAE has been able to position itself as a key strategic ally and asset for the United States in the Middle East, and this has enabled and empowered the Emirates to expand their own regional influence. Having attained such a vital status, the UAE, like so many emboldened Western client states in the past (think Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s, or Israel in any era), has begun to act with presumptive impunity and increasing belligerence. They feel they are in a position to map their own strategies and pursue their own objectives in the region without fear of reprisal from the Americans, and one of the new factors at play in this power dynamic is China.