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What to Know About the 6 Nations Joining BRICS
Iran was the surprise among the countries invited to join the bloc of emerging economies. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Argentina and Ethiopia were also tapped.
China hopes expanded Brics will turn world upside down
The size of proposed 11-country grouping would put G7 in the shade
www.ft.com
China hopes expanded Brics will turn world upside down
The size of proposed 11-country grouping would put G7 in the shade
5 hours ago
Xi Jinping wearing an earpiece with the flag of China on the table in front of him
China’s president Xi Jinping at the Brics summit in South Africa this week. An expanded grouping would give Beijing the heft it wants to reform the way the world works © ALET PRETORIUS/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
For China, a decision on Thursday to expand the Brics bloc of developing economies by adding six new countries is all about trying to right the perceived wrongs of a global system that favours the US-led west.
The move to add Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to the five existing members of Brics — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — creates a grouping of impressive size and influence.
After decades of the western world dominating global institutions, China is attempting to build a club that, by some measures of economic power, would turn the world upside down.
“Beijing’s focus is on creating a counterweight to the G7,” said Moritz Rudolf, research fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center in the US. “Strengthening the Brics grouping is a valuable tool in the pursuit for Chinese leadership.”
The size of the new 11-country grouping puts the G7 — which consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US and EU — into the shade.
Excluding the EU — which is classified as a G7 “non-enumerated” member — the group of advanced democracies accounts for just 9.8 per cent of the world’s population and 29.8 per cent of global gross domestic product, calculated by purchasing power parity (PPP).
The new Brics group, by contrast, will account for 47 per cent of the world’s population and 37 per cent of its GDP by PPP.
Bar chart of Share of global total, 2023 (%) showing The expanded Brics group has almost half the world's population and will produce a third of GDP
The new grouping also possesses the lion’s share of the world’s oil and gas reserves, as well as a huge endowment of other natural resources.
All this, China hopes, will give it the heft that Beijing has long sought to reform the way the world works. Indeed, China cherishes many ambitions, some of which were discernible through a heavy loam of diplomatic language in the 26-page declaration after the Brics summit this week.
“Beijing seems to have been particularly successful at shaping the agenda and the Brics discussion this year,” said Helena Legarda, lead analyst at Merics, a Berlin-based think-tank on China. “Much of the language in the leaders’ declaration reflects Chinese positions.”
A repeated call in the declaration was for the reform of international institutions to give more power to developing countries.
One of these demands was for an overhaul of the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF. Currently, the operations of both institutions are dominated by the US, Japan and other western democracies.
The call for reform included an explicit demand for “a greater role for emerging markets and developing countries, including in leadership positions”, the declaration said. Traditionally, the World Bank’s president has been an American citizen, while the IMF’s managing director has been European.
The declaration also urged “comprehensive reform” of the UN, which Beijing regards as central to global governance. One reform demanded was to the Security Council, the UN’s most powerful body, which should “increase the representation of developing countries”, the declaration said.
The Security Council currently consists of five permanent members — two of which are China and Russia — and 10 non-permanent members. Both Brazil and India, as well as other developing nations, are seeking elevated powers at the top of the UN.
This suite of reforms, if achieved, would have to come largely at the expense of some developed countries’ influence in the World Bank, IMF and in the UN. For this reason, such demands have aroused considerable resistance from G7 countries and others in the developed world.
The new Brics bloc also faces other challenges. Not all members — particularly India and Brazil — are comfortable with the overtly anti-western tone espoused by China and Russia in meetings, said one official from a Brics country, who declined to be further identified.
Geopolitical unity is also elusive on some other key issues, including the war in Ukraine, analysts said. Amid a long list of calls for political solutions to prevail in crises in Sudan, Haiti, the Palestinian territories and elsewhere, the wording on Ukraine was notably awkward.
“We recall our national positions concerning the conflict in and around Ukraine,” the declaration said. There was no mention of Russia’s invasion and subsequent aggression.
“It will be difficult for Beijing to create a parallel structure to the G7,” said Rudolf, adding that levels of political mistrust between some Brics members were high.
Nevertheless, the expanded grouping represents the most influential bloc the developing world has ever produced. There is a sense that after decades of accepting the west’s rules, the era of the “global south” is dawning. That feeling may be enough to give it traction.
Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt Invited to Join Emerging Nations Group (Published 2023)
Argentina, Ethiopia and the U.A.E. were also offered membership of BRICS, strengthening the group’s role as an alternative to Western-led forums.www.nytimes.com
More authoritarian failed states
Multipolarity
Piff Perkins
Veteran
This thread is gonna be bumped multiple times this year and each time it'll be even funnier.
What’s your predictions?This thread is gonna be bumped multiple times this year and each time it'll be even funnier.
Piff Perkins
Veteran
BRICS will fail and have little to no real world impact. Dollar isn't going anywhere, US is poised for further dominance while the major BRICS countries are facing unstable short term situations (including complete collapse, in Russia's case).
the sheer internal strife is unreal
This whole "fukk the USA" thing is weird cause its not even ideological its just generic "we dont know what we are but we aint them"
its seems more jealous than independence...but I guess revolution means imagination so we'll see...
Gotta watch Kenya and Nigeria tho...
Piff Perkins
Veteran
Lot of people are mad, inside the US and outside, that we're not about to collapse. We're about to have nearly 6% GPD growth lol. The tankies and leftists couldn't be more mad.
China is in trouble right now, Xi's domestic policies are faltering and the aggressive foreign policy only serves to push countries closer to the US. These attempts to half ass the "US super power" playbook aren't working. You see these weird attempts to export their culture and memes? They have no soft power, man.
People really aren't peeping how India basically tanked their currency idea. It's like everyone decided to ignore that. I find it ...interesting
And Brazil seems to have toned down on the "anti West" rhetoric
#DarkBrandon
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
The resilience of Russia's stock market and its economy is a complete mirage masking deeper pain, Yale researchers say
"No one will invest in Russia for a long time," Yale researcher Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told Insider.
markets.businessinsider.com
With BRICS Invite, Iran Shrugs Off Outcast Status in the West
The invitation came after a tumultuous year of domestic unrest and economic gloom, and follows a pivot by the country toward Russia and China.
@Piff Perkins
www.ft.com
A paint-daubed monument in Brussels of King Leopold II, who claimed Congo as his personal colony © Wiktor Dabkowski/Eyevine
An extended essay on Europe is something of a European public intellectual tradition, played out among connoisseurs of the genre. In this sense, Hans Kundnani stands in the company of Jürgen Habermas, Ivan Krastev and Tony Judt. Of these, Judt’s much earlier (1996) A Grand Illusion? is perhaps closest in spirit, with its somewhat plangent critique of the European project.
Eurowhiteness is a version of that critique, updated for the second decade of the 21st century. It stings — as it should do. An expert on Germany who has worked at think-tanks Chatham House and the European Council on Foreign Relations, Kundnani is undoubtedly a European insider. But he is no EU booster.
His stated aim in writing this book is to “stimulate debate”. He already has. The book springs in part from a 2021 essay in the New Statesman that provoked an immediate, defensive, response from his erstwhile colleague, ECFR director Mark Leonard.
The eye-catching term of the book’s title — “Eurowhiteness” — is borrowed from a Hungarian sociologist, József Böröcz, whose work, among other things, looks at the overlap between conceptions of Europe and sociocultural notions of whiteness. As Kundnani points out, although some pro-Europeans like to imagine political Europe as an open-ended, universalist peace project, the truth is that it has always been to some degree exclusive.
For a while, he argues, the ethnic-cultural component of the contemporary European project was hidden by the fact of Europe’s cold war division, and the notion of the EU as a, theoretically, infinitely extensible space of shared civic values: the rule of law, democracy, human rights, the social market economy. The idea that the EU could and should be a model for the world was understandably popular in Brussels at the turn of the 21st century.
The past two decades have been an awakening. The euro crisis and 2015 refugee crisis showed the limits of European solidarity — let alone global solidarity — and the ways the notion of Europeanness could be abused in the exercise of power, like any other slogan. While the EU has remained open to the east — both to new member states and Ukrainian refugees — it has been firmly shut to its south. Kundnani makes us think about what that difference says.
The idea of European unity as a means of defending its civilisation against the “Other” (Islam, communism, unbridled American capitalism) has a long genesis, going back to the Middle Ages. So does the concomitant idea of Europe’s “civilising mission”.
But they can’t just be confined to a distant past. The legacies of empire loom large in Eurowhiteness. It’s not happenstance that the first steps towards the EU’s founding were taken while European states were clinging on to their imperial possessions. The notion of “Eurafrica” was inherited from interwar pan-Europeans (as one pioneering, and still active, group of integrationists was known) by postwar pro-Europeans. The EEC’s border once lay across the Sahara — Algeria remained partially associated with the EEC until 1976.
Yet the EU later became a vehicle for “imperial amnesia”, Kundnani argues. While some individual European countries are addressing their imperial past, the decolonial project is stuck at the European level. With typical contrarian verve, Kundnani suggests that Brexit offers an opportunity for the British left to adopt a more internationalist position than Eurocentrism would ever allow.
Meanwhile, the civilisational component of the meaning of “Europe” is making a comeback. Elements of the far right increasingly couch their narratives in Europeanist (though not necessarily pro-EU) terms. As one leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party put it last month: “The EU must die so true Europe can live”.
But it isn’t just them. Mainstream pro-Europeans in France and elsewhere have co-opted language and concepts that were very much on the fringe a decade ago. Kundnani partly ascribes the shift from European “civic regionalism” to “ethnoregionalism” to economic neoliberalism, which has hollowed out the idea of Europe as a socially protective construct and thereby opened the way to its replacement with a more culturally inflected version.
The author has been on an intellectual journey over several years, close to the heart of the European mythmaking machine without being part of its institutional apparatus. What has emerged from this slow disenchantment is a clear, elegantly written polemic. Some people won’t like it, which is probably why they should read it.
But it is a polemic. The term “pro-European” appears — in inverted commas — on almost every page. It’s a catch-all term, a rhetorical device. There has never been an undifferentiated tribe of “pro-Europeans” whose thinking has been unified through time and space. The content and extent of “Europe” have always been subject to debate; the EU has always been a project with different imagined endpoints, or none.
Kundnani is right to point out that “Europe” is not an antidote to nationalism, an ointment that can be rubbed on the wounds of the past to make them magically go away. Indeed, isn’t Europe at risk of turning nationalist itself, at the EU level this time?
On the other hand, surely there is something to celebrate in the fact that Europe has gone from being the bloodiest continent to one of the most peaceful over the past century. It’s worth recognising the role the EU, flawed as it is, has played in this.
Yet now more than ever Europe needs polemics that depart from the dominant narrative, deconstruct the false dichotomies of European politics, and provide a broader frame. Kundnani’s book is more than an insightful one, it is a necessary one.
Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project by Hans Kundnani Hurst, £14.99, 248 pages
Eurowhiteness — the limits of European solidarity | Financial Times
Hans Kundnani offers a stinging critique of the EU as a bloc rooted in ‘imperial amnesia’
www.ft.com
Eurowhiteness — the limits of European solidarity
Hans Kundnani offers a stinging critique of the EU as a bloc rooted in ‘imperial amnesia’
August 22 2023
An extended essay on Europe is something of a European public intellectual tradition, played out among connoisseurs of the genre. In this sense, Hans Kundnani stands in the company of Jürgen Habermas, Ivan Krastev and Tony Judt. Of these, Judt’s much earlier (1996) A Grand Illusion? is perhaps closest in spirit, with its somewhat plangent critique of the European project.
Eurowhiteness is a version of that critique, updated for the second decade of the 21st century. It stings — as it should do. An expert on Germany who has worked at think-tanks Chatham House and the European Council on Foreign Relations, Kundnani is undoubtedly a European insider. But he is no EU booster.
His stated aim in writing this book is to “stimulate debate”. He already has. The book springs in part from a 2021 essay in the New Statesman that provoked an immediate, defensive, response from his erstwhile colleague, ECFR director Mark Leonard.
The eye-catching term of the book’s title — “Eurowhiteness” — is borrowed from a Hungarian sociologist, József Böröcz, whose work, among other things, looks at the overlap between conceptions of Europe and sociocultural notions of whiteness. As Kundnani points out, although some pro-Europeans like to imagine political Europe as an open-ended, universalist peace project, the truth is that it has always been to some degree exclusive.
For a while, he argues, the ethnic-cultural component of the contemporary European project was hidden by the fact of Europe’s cold war division, and the notion of the EU as a, theoretically, infinitely extensible space of shared civic values: the rule of law, democracy, human rights, the social market economy. The idea that the EU could and should be a model for the world was understandably popular in Brussels at the turn of the 21st century.
The past two decades have been an awakening. The euro crisis and 2015 refugee crisis showed the limits of European solidarity — let alone global solidarity — and the ways the notion of Europeanness could be abused in the exercise of power, like any other slogan. While the EU has remained open to the east — both to new member states and Ukrainian refugees — it has been firmly shut to its south. Kundnani makes us think about what that difference says.
The idea of European unity as a means of defending its civilisation against the “Other” (Islam, communism, unbridled American capitalism) has a long genesis, going back to the Middle Ages. So does the concomitant idea of Europe’s “civilising mission”.
But they can’t just be confined to a distant past. The legacies of empire loom large in Eurowhiteness. It’s not happenstance that the first steps towards the EU’s founding were taken while European states were clinging on to their imperial possessions. The notion of “Eurafrica” was inherited from interwar pan-Europeans (as one pioneering, and still active, group of integrationists was known) by postwar pro-Europeans. The EEC’s border once lay across the Sahara — Algeria remained partially associated with the EEC until 1976.
Yet the EU later became a vehicle for “imperial amnesia”, Kundnani argues. While some individual European countries are addressing their imperial past, the decolonial project is stuck at the European level. With typical contrarian verve, Kundnani suggests that Brexit offers an opportunity for the British left to adopt a more internationalist position than Eurocentrism would ever allow.
Meanwhile, the civilisational component of the meaning of “Europe” is making a comeback. Elements of the far right increasingly couch their narratives in Europeanist (though not necessarily pro-EU) terms. As one leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party put it last month: “The EU must die so true Europe can live”.
But it isn’t just them. Mainstream pro-Europeans in France and elsewhere have co-opted language and concepts that were very much on the fringe a decade ago. Kundnani partly ascribes the shift from European “civic regionalism” to “ethnoregionalism” to economic neoliberalism, which has hollowed out the idea of Europe as a socially protective construct and thereby opened the way to its replacement with a more culturally inflected version.
The author has been on an intellectual journey over several years, close to the heart of the European mythmaking machine without being part of its institutional apparatus. What has emerged from this slow disenchantment is a clear, elegantly written polemic. Some people won’t like it, which is probably why they should read it.
But it is a polemic. The term “pro-European” appears — in inverted commas — on almost every page. It’s a catch-all term, a rhetorical device. There has never been an undifferentiated tribe of “pro-Europeans” whose thinking has been unified through time and space. The content and extent of “Europe” have always been subject to debate; the EU has always been a project with different imagined endpoints, or none.
Kundnani is right to point out that “Europe” is not an antidote to nationalism, an ointment that can be rubbed on the wounds of the past to make them magically go away. Indeed, isn’t Europe at risk of turning nationalist itself, at the EU level this time?
On the other hand, surely there is something to celebrate in the fact that Europe has gone from being the bloodiest continent to one of the most peaceful over the past century. It’s worth recognising the role the EU, flawed as it is, has played in this.
Yet now more than ever Europe needs polemics that depart from the dominant narrative, deconstruct the false dichotomies of European politics, and provide a broader frame. Kundnani’s book is more than an insightful one, it is a necessary one.
Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project by Hans Kundnani Hurst, £14.99, 248 pages
@Piff Perkins @Adeptus Astartes
See what I'm saying...they all want USA stuff! This is just "I'm mad at you, daddy" energy
US president Joe Biden has largely patched up his relationship with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, above, but the kingdom still faces strong criticism in Washington © Reuters
Saudi Arabia is considering bids to build a nuclear power station from countries including China, France and Russia as the kingdom seeks to sway the US over a sensitive security pact.
The kingdom, which is the world’s largest oil exporter, has long sought its own civil nuclear capability and has made US assistance with the programme a key demand in a potential deal to normalise relations with Israel.
A breakthrough in relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be a major diplomatic victory for President Joe Biden’s administration, which has described it as a priority. But Washington has baulked at Saudi Arabia’s demand for there to be no restrictions on enriching its own uranium.
With the US insisting on placing curbs on the use of the technology, Saudi Arabia is considering alternative offers to develop the nuclear facilities from countries including China, Russia and France, according to people familiar with the matter.
One person said Saudi Arabia would make its decision based on the best offer. Another said that while Riyadh would prefer the US, which is seen to have better technology and is already a close Saudi partner, Washington’s restrictions on uranium enrichment would scupper co-operation.
The Israeli government, which has pushed for a diplomatic deal with the kingdom, has remained guarded on the issue. But Israeli security officials and opposition leaders have raised vocal objections, arguing the transfer of technology could lead to more nuclear proliferation in the region.
But Israel’s strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer earlier this month suggested that Saudi Arabia could turn to China or other countries if the US withheld its assistance. Russia has also announced a bid.
Those countries would be expected to accept Saudi Arabia’s conditions on domestic enrichment, while Korea, which uses US technology, would need to work within US export constraints.
The process of finding a provider of nuclear technology has already been running for several years. Bidders including France’s state-owned EDF and Kepco of South Korea were initially shortlisted along with a Chinese offer in 2018.
Consultations have since continued, though there is little indication of when they might conclude or a developer might be chosen, one person close to the process said.
Kepco was chosen to build a nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates, its first in the Middle East, which is now operational. EDF said the company’s “[bid] proposal addresses all expectations from Saudi stakeholders”.
China National Nuclear Corp, the country’s state-owned nuclear power group, did not immediately comment on the bidding process. But it has announced partnerships with Saudi Arabia in the past to develop the nuclear industry in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia has drawn closer to China, its largest trading partner, in recent years and earlier this week was invited to join the Brics group of emerging economies. It hosted Chinese president Xi Jinping last year for a Gulf summit, and months later Beijing brokered a rapprochement between the kingdom and its main rival in the region, Iran.
But the kingdom remains heavily reliant on US security assistance, and wants Washington to agree a defence pact.
Any such deal, along with nuclear co-operation on Saudi terms, would face opposition from some American lawmakers. Biden has largely patched up his relationship with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after having pledged to turn him into a pariah following the 2018 murder of Washington Post commentator and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by state agents. But the kingdom still faces strong criticism in Washington.
Earlier this week, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the administration would ask the International Atomic Energy Agency for an opinion on nuclear co-operation with Saudi Arabia to guide any decision on assistance. “There are still some ways to travel,” he said of any deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Additional reporting: Joe Leahy in Beijing
See what I'm saying...they all want USA stuff! This is just "I'm mad at you, daddy" energy
Saudi Arabia weighs nuclear power offers from China and France in bid to sway US
Kingdom has made such technology a key demand in talks with Washington over sensitive security pact
www.ft.com
Saudi Arabia weighs nuclear power offers from China and France in bid to sway US
Kingdom has made such technology a key demand in talks with Washington over sensitive security pact
www.ft.com
Saudi Arabia weighs nuclear power offers from China and France in bid to sway US
Kingdom has made such technology a key demand in talks with Washington over sensitive security pact
11 hours ago
Saudi Arabia is considering bids to build a nuclear power station from countries including China, France and Russia as the kingdom seeks to sway the US over a sensitive security pact.
The kingdom, which is the world’s largest oil exporter, has long sought its own civil nuclear capability and has made US assistance with the programme a key demand in a potential deal to normalise relations with Israel.
A breakthrough in relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be a major diplomatic victory for President Joe Biden’s administration, which has described it as a priority. But Washington has baulked at Saudi Arabia’s demand for there to be no restrictions on enriching its own uranium.
With the US insisting on placing curbs on the use of the technology, Saudi Arabia is considering alternative offers to develop the nuclear facilities from countries including China, Russia and France, according to people familiar with the matter.
One person said Saudi Arabia would make its decision based on the best offer. Another said that while Riyadh would prefer the US, which is seen to have better technology and is already a close Saudi partner, Washington’s restrictions on uranium enrichment would scupper co-operation.
The Israeli government, which has pushed for a diplomatic deal with the kingdom, has remained guarded on the issue. But Israeli security officials and opposition leaders have raised vocal objections, arguing the transfer of technology could lead to more nuclear proliferation in the region.
But Israel’s strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer earlier this month suggested that Saudi Arabia could turn to China or other countries if the US withheld its assistance. Russia has also announced a bid.
Those countries would be expected to accept Saudi Arabia’s conditions on domestic enrichment, while Korea, which uses US technology, would need to work within US export constraints.
The process of finding a provider of nuclear technology has already been running for several years. Bidders including France’s state-owned EDF and Kepco of South Korea were initially shortlisted along with a Chinese offer in 2018.
Consultations have since continued, though there is little indication of when they might conclude or a developer might be chosen, one person close to the process said.
Kepco was chosen to build a nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates, its first in the Middle East, which is now operational. EDF said the company’s “[bid] proposal addresses all expectations from Saudi stakeholders”.
China National Nuclear Corp, the country’s state-owned nuclear power group, did not immediately comment on the bidding process. But it has announced partnerships with Saudi Arabia in the past to develop the nuclear industry in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia has drawn closer to China, its largest trading partner, in recent years and earlier this week was invited to join the Brics group of emerging economies. It hosted Chinese president Xi Jinping last year for a Gulf summit, and months later Beijing brokered a rapprochement between the kingdom and its main rival in the region, Iran.
But the kingdom remains heavily reliant on US security assistance, and wants Washington to agree a defence pact.
Any such deal, along with nuclear co-operation on Saudi terms, would face opposition from some American lawmakers. Biden has largely patched up his relationship with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after having pledged to turn him into a pariah following the 2018 murder of Washington Post commentator and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by state agents. But the kingdom still faces strong criticism in Washington.
Earlier this week, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the administration would ask the International Atomic Energy Agency for an opinion on nuclear co-operation with Saudi Arabia to guide any decision on assistance. “There are still some ways to travel,” he said of any deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Additional reporting: Joe Leahy in Beijing
Piff Perkins
Veteran
@Piff Perkins @Adeptus Astartes
See what I'm saying...they all want USA stuff! This is just "I'm mad at you, daddy" energy
Saudi Arabia weighs nuclear power offers from China and France in bid to sway US
Kingdom has made such technology a key demand in talks with Washington over sensitive security pact
Saudi Arabia weighs nuclear power offers from China and France in bid to sway US
Kingdom has made such technology a key demand in talks with Washington over sensitive security pact
11 hours ago
US president Joe Biden has largely patched up his relationship with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, above, but the kingdom still faces strong criticism in Washington © Reuters
Saudi Arabia is considering bids to build a nuclear power station from countries including China, France and Russia as the kingdom seeks to sway the US over a sensitive security pact.
The kingdom, which is the world’s largest oil exporter, has long sought its own civil nuclear capability and has made US assistance with the programme a key demand in a potential deal to normalise relations with Israel.
A breakthrough in relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be a major diplomatic victory for President Joe Biden’s administration, which has described it as a priority. But Washington has baulked at Saudi Arabia’s demand for there to be no restrictions on enriching its own uranium.
With the US insisting on placing curbs on the use of the technology, Saudi Arabia is considering alternative offers to develop the nuclear facilities from countries including China, Russia and France, according to people familiar with the matter.
One person said Saudi Arabia would make its decision based on the best offer. Another said that while Riyadh would prefer the US, which is seen to have better technology and is already a close Saudi partner, Washington’s restrictions on uranium enrichment would scupper co-operation.
The Israeli government, which has pushed for a diplomatic deal with the kingdom, has remained guarded on the issue. But Israeli security officials and opposition leaders have raised vocal objections, arguing the transfer of technology could lead to more nuclear proliferation in the region.
But Israel’s strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer earlier this month suggested that Saudi Arabia could turn to China or other countries if the US withheld its assistance. Russia has also announced a bid.
Those countries would be expected to accept Saudi Arabia’s conditions on domestic enrichment, while Korea, which uses US technology, would need to work within US export constraints.
The process of finding a provider of nuclear technology has already been running for several years. Bidders including France’s state-owned EDF and Kepco of South Korea were initially shortlisted along with a Chinese offer in 2018.
Consultations have since continued, though there is little indication of when they might conclude or a developer might be chosen, one person close to the process said.
Kepco was chosen to build a nuclear plant in the United Arab Emirates, its first in the Middle East, which is now operational. EDF said the company’s “[bid] proposal addresses all expectations from Saudi stakeholders”.
China National Nuclear Corp, the country’s state-owned nuclear power group, did not immediately comment on the bidding process. But it has announced partnerships with Saudi Arabia in the past to develop the nuclear industry in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia has drawn closer to China, its largest trading partner, in recent years and earlier this week was invited to join the Brics group of emerging economies. It hosted Chinese president Xi Jinping last year for a Gulf summit, and months later Beijing brokered a rapprochement between the kingdom and its main rival in the region, Iran.
But the kingdom remains heavily reliant on US security assistance, and wants Washington to agree a defence pact.
Any such deal, along with nuclear co-operation on Saudi terms, would face opposition from some American lawmakers. Biden has largely patched up his relationship with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after having pledged to turn him into a pariah following the 2018 murder of Washington Post commentator and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi by state agents. But the kingdom still faces strong criticism in Washington.
Earlier this week, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the administration would ask the International Atomic Energy Agency for an opinion on nuclear co-operation with Saudi Arabia to guide any decision on assistance. “There are still some ways to travel,” he said of any deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Additional reporting: Joe Leahy in Beijing
Honestly? I'm not sure you can do anything with Saudi Arabia until MBS is gone, and anything that speeds up his demise/removal is likely a good thing.