An American writer and academic said that the United States is risking the lives of its soldiers and exhausting high-tech and expensive ammunition to help its greatest geopolitical opponent, China, by intensifying its military raids against the Ansar Allah group (Houthis) in Yemen.
Minxin Pei – a columnist for Bloomberg News and a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California – considered it natural for the United States to undertake this mission to protect the flow of global transport through the Red Sea and keep the waterways open.
But China will inevitably be the biggest beneficiary if the American and British forces are able to suppress the Houthi attacks, especially since 60% of its exports pass through the Red Sea, according to what Peay mentioned in his article.
The writer confirms that the Chinese Navy did not send a single warship to the region, even though it has a workforce carrying out the task of combating piracy in the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean, not far from the Red Sea.
Two different factors
However, this is not evidence of Uncle Sam’s “stupidity”, but rather it is just an example of the unequal nature of the competition between the United States and China, which is in fact characterized by two different factors: the first is that the United States has reasons for power, especially in military capabilities and technology, And establishing alliances, which makes it significantly superior to China, according to Bloomberg.
Then, according to the Bloomberg article, the United States, as the only superpower in the world, bears the greatest security burden, which requires it to devote enormous resources to meeting the requirements of this responsibility.
In contrast, China is a regional superpower with East Asia as the focus of its security interest. While the United States has 170,000 soldiers and about 750 military bases in at least 80 countries around the world, China has maintained a single military detachment in Djibouti since 2017 to support anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden.
As for the second factor that distinguishes the nature of the competition between the two countries, it is clearly in China’s interest, according to Pei, who adds that America’s commitments to world security require it to constantly shift its attention and resources towards crises that occur far from China’s neighborhood.
The writer – an American of Chinese descent – continues that despite its economic footprint across the world, Beijing sees itself as a great power in East Asia in the first place, and therefore resists undertaking security obligations far from its backyard.