Has China joined Russia & Iran in Syria to neutralize US influence in the Middle East?

Has China joined Russia & Iran in Syria to neutralize US influence in the Middle East?
Azeem Ibrahim in his article in Al-Arabiya English writes that China has announced that it is stepping up its involvement with the Assad regime, providing it with more training and humanitarian aid. This move seems designed to step on American toes.

The writer confirms that the Chinese have long been a supplier of weapons to Assad. Top Chinese military officers are now visiting Damascus and making public statements about their friendly relations.

The Chinese stand to gain on two fronts. The first is that they are putting themselves in line for the construction contracts to rebuild Syria after the presumed Assad victory.

Ibrahim adds that Russia and Iran have been much closer allies to Assad, and sacrificed many of their own men to keep him in power, but they do not have anywhere near the capacity to do all that work. And all the other countries which might have been able to compete, which is to say Western countries, will no doubt be excluded from that process by a hostile Assad. So China can expect to reap the lion’s share of that bonanza. Secondly, it gives the Chinese the opportunity to elbow the US out of the way in yet another region of the world.

The writer explains that the US seems completely inept at ensuring peace, or intervening successfully in troubled regions of the globe. American intervention since 2001 has been one mess after another.

The US is encircling China in its own neighborhood. And the Chinese, rather understandably, do not appreciate that. So if they can knock a few chinks off the American armor here and there, they will most certainly do so.

China is getting rather too friendly with Russia and Iran in doing this. China wants to assert itself to what it considers its rightful place in the geopolitical order of the world, but feels like the US and the West are rather keener to keep it within bounds.

Ibrahim concludes by stating that the Chinese are looking at alliances with the West’s traditional enemies. This is almost certainly going to be a problem down the line, unless the US-led Western world and China can agree on a fair distribution of the job of leading the world.

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