Welcome. I'm Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and I'm here with my colleague.

John Hoffman, Research Fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Thanks for having me, Justin.

My pleasure, John, and has just published notably Policy Analysis Number 1000. Great milestone for the Cato Institute. It was released July 10th. And it's titled aimless rivalry, the futility of U.S.-China competition in the Middle East. So the first question that I wanted to pose to you, John, is how is it possible to justify a U.S. Middle East policy

on the basis of competition with China? Who's making this case and what are they saying?

Sure. So I'd say the way China factors in is since China in great power competition more

generally has become the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy. I would say this has been

selectively applied to almost every region on planet Earth now. And of course, it's found its way

into the Middle East as older arguments such as oil or terrorism or so on and so forth have

kind of gone out of fashion. They're still used, but, you know, there's a lot of holes have been poked in those theories. This underlying idea of, oh, well, we can't leave because China is going to come in and eat our lunch is kind of the prevailing consensus now of why we need deep engagement. What is it that we're afraid they're going to steal from us in the Middle East? I mean, let me tell you my story about the Middle East that you've heard 10,000 times in my office, which is we've spent between $7 and $9 trillion over the past couple of decades in the Middle East. We don't have a heck of a lot to show for it other than several thousand dead Americans, a lot of madness and mayhem on the ground there. What are we afraid China's going to take?

Is there some great pot of magic beans over there that they're going to steal from us?

I think really the first thing is this idea of just zero-sum competition whereby any form of Chinese gains in the Middle East is inevitably our loss.

I obviously don't agree with this, this framing, but it's this

idea that rooted in this, in American primacy, that the United States needs to be the number one

dominant actor in the region and that China encroaching on its territory somehow undermines

U.S. interests. But that's always, those U.S. interests are always left, you're left wondering what

exactly those interests are and how China would tangibly threaten those. And in the paper,

I really detail that China's greatest interest in the Middle East is economic in nature.

It's the free flow of oil out of the region. We share that interest. But those who really advocate for

this strategy, one of the number one reasons, you know, kind of the, the General Corrilla argument

is... General Carilla, the erstwhile, Sencom commander. Yes, exactly. Who, what, retires August?

If he's not out already, yeah, he's on the way out. Yeah. So it's kind of that line of thinking whereby we need to stay deeply rooted in the Middle East because in the event of a hot war with China, we could close the oil straits in the Middle East and block the flow of oil to China in the event of a war.

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