Eurasia Press & News
China would probably have never entertained using IMEC had it not been for the Red Sea crisis, but its decision to rely on this route serves the interests of all responsible stakeholders in the global economy, which should prompt members of the Alt-Media Community to radically reconsider their worldview.
Ynet, which is the online-only spinoff of Israel’s largest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, reported on Sunday that Mentfield logistics is facilitating Chinese exports to Israel via Bahrain and the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. This route aligns with the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) that was unveiled in September, which was covered critically by RT, Sputnik, as well as this top Alt-Media influencer here, only to become one of the most important regional connectivity corridors just a few months later.
According to YNet, “China and India unload their cargo in Bahrain and Dubai where it is loaded on Saudi and Jordanian trucks and makes its way over land to Israel, where Israeli trucks then receive the goods at the King Hussein border crossing with Jordan.” Those who previously cast doubt on this megaproject’s viability could never have imagined that China would soon come to rely on a route that’s supported by the US, hence why it’s worth explaining how this came to happen.
One of the Alt-Media Community’s (AMC) top dogmas, which is regularly reflected in the previously cited top influencer’s work, is that China would never utilize American-backed connectivity corridors out of fear that they’d be weaponized to constrain and ultimately cut off its trade. This belief is based upon the false assumption that all American partners like India, whose bilateral ties have recently become troubled, and the Arab Monarchies would side with the US over China if forced to choose.
The reality is that the IMEC countries are strategically autonomous players in the New Cold War who multi-align between China and the US but will always put their national interests first if something unexpected happens to pressure them into picking a side. In this case, the expansion of the latest Israeli-Hamas war into a regional Israeli-Iranian proxy war that’s since stretched into the Red Sea gave the Arab Monarchies the opportunity to promote IMEC to China and profit accordingly, which they’ve done.
The previously mentioned top AMC influencer speculated that the US wants to “Cut off the EU from Chinese imports” as part of its plan for de-industrializing Europe, and while there’s a certain logic to that train of thought, it doesn’t address why the US doesn’t mind China using IMEC. A compelling counterargument to his point is that the US only wants to partially de-industrialize Europe but not fully, nor does the US want to destabilize it, which is what would happen if Chinese imports were fully cut off.
Critics might retort that this doesn’t account for why the Anglo-American Axis and now also the EU are both interested in breaking the Iranian-backed Houthis’ de facto blockade of the Red Sea, especially after that Yemeni rebel group reaffirmed that Chinese ships are free to pass through there. The Washington Post provided the answer in a recent report where they claimed that the US is driven by the desire to present itself as the “indispensable nation” while the EU just wants to restore this low-cost trade route.
Ynet noted that IMEC is 10 days quicker than the Red Sea, but there are additional costs due to gasoline and trucking, though they pale in comparison to the surge in insurance premiums that Reuters recently reported are causing serious problems for some Chinese exporters. Going around the Cape adds a lot more time to deliveries and can therefore greatly disrupt very fragile “just-in-time” supply chains right as the global economy recovers after COVID, hence the appeal of IMEC as a partial alternative.
The US doesn’t want a full-blown European recession caused by the Houthis’ prolonged blockade of the Red Sea despite some of the competitive advantages that it could reap from this, which is why it wants to unblock that route together with the EU while not doing anything to stop China from using IMEC. In fact, it hasn’t even criticized this, and might even be pleased with this unexpected development since it helps alleviate economic and supply problems for its Israeli ally with whom China is also very close.
The takeaway from Ynet’s report is that it debunks the AMC’s dogma about China and the presuppositions about American partners like the Gulf Monarchies upon which that same dogma is partly built. China would probably have never entertained using IMEC had it not been for the Red Sea crisis, but its decision to rely on this route serves the interests of all responsible stakeholders in the global economy, which should prompt members of the AMC to radically reconsider their worldview.
