the market and undercut European and U.S. companies. The CCP has openly threatened governments in Europe that have merely paused to consider the economic and national-security costs of cooperating with China on key critical infrastructure projects.103
The Middle East and Africa
In the near term, China aims to enhance its energy security in the Middle East and obtain market access to extend the Belt and Road Initiative and other PRC interests. Beijing also actively engages with the Iranian regime and Syria’s Assad regime, both of which face significant U.S. and international sanctions and also are U.S.-designated State Sponsors of Terrorism, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, and egregious abusers of human rights. At the same time, the PRC’s brutal repression of millions of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang raises profound questions of conscience in particular for Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and around the world. In the long term, China seeks to increase its economic and security influence in the region at the expense of the United States.104
Beijing’s reliance on oil imports from the Middle East has grown tremendously in the last two decades, rising from 0.33 million barrels per day in 1998 to just over 4 million barrels per day in 2018.105 Meanwhile, the PLA Navy visits the region with an eye to developing deep-water ports like that of Salalah in Oman. China also wants to expand military sales — for example, Chinese defense companies sell unmanned aerial vehicles at cut-rate prices with little-to-no regard for nonproliferation106 — and expand security cooperation with regional states in other ways. This undermines U.S. defense companies. It also endangers regional partners’ access to U.S. military networks, eroding U.S. military interoperability and other forms of cooperation with regional partners.
China sees a particularly appealing target for the Belt and Road Initiative in Israel, which possesses an innovative high-tech economy with few barriers to entry.107 Perhaps the most controversial of several projects underway is the Shanghai International Port Group’s partial construction and operation of a new terminal at the Haifa port, which also serves as the strategic port for the U.S. Navy 6th Fleet. If Chinese workers obtain “high levels of access to potentially sensitive commercial or military information,” the United States will face surveillance and cyber-espionage risks.108
