- May 30, 2023, 6:00 PM CDTChina waited for the dust to settle before it too signed new cooperation agreements with Iran on 23 May.
The best place to start here is at the end point of what China wants in its grand scheme of things, as delineated in its multi-generational power-grab project, ‘One Belt, One Road’. What it wants is to turn the Middle East into a large oil and gas station by which it can fuel its economic growth to overtake the U.S. as the number one superpower by 2030. The three biggest oil and gas reserves in the region belong to Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, so it wants to control those to begin with.
Cue the other recent cooperation agreements aimed at making sure that whatever is Iran’s it is also China’s and Russia’s. First up was Moscow, signing 10 new cooperation agreements with Iran for the oil sector alone on 18 May.