China’s been going full boar for years in it’s expansion throughout the world......but it’s coziness with Saudi is to weaken our relationship and leverage against us.
Important to be aware of China. Russia and M.East movements among their leaders now...and who is visiting who.
Putin and Xi meeting this week as an example.
If we’d simply go full bore with natural gas production here, in a few years some of this excrement would solve itself. Ditto if Saudi (divert some defense and “stir up trouble” $$), Jordan (manpower) and Israel (technical expertise & coastline) would cooperate on massive undersea pipelines to Europe.
Of course this is not a total solution — there are still Iranian nukes (likely soon) and Chinese expansion to deal with, but, Putin would be plenty busy with his own problems and Iran much weakened.