After China secretly began building a military facility at a port near Abu Dhabi, Washington stepped in and convinced the UAE to stop the construction, the Wall Street Journal reported.
This happened after the US intelligence learned that China was building a secret military facility, sources told the Wall Street Journal.
According to sources, US intelligence learned about the suspicious activity in the port of Khalifa, located about 80 kilometers north of Abu Dhabi about a year ago. In this port, the Chinese conglomerate COSCO has also built its container terminal.
At first, the information seemed unconvincing to US officials, but in the spring of this year, “classified satellite images” allowed them to conclude that China is in fact building a military facility in the port.
The data alarmed the Biden administration and it made diplomatic efforts to convince the UAE of the military purpose of the facility and the need to stop construction.
After a series of meetings and visits of US officials to the UAE, the construction of the facility was stopped.
The UAE Embassy in Washington stressed that Abu Dhabi did not have “an agreement or plan to deploy a Chinese military base.”
Last week, Bloomberg sources reported that US top officials do not receive enough intelligence about what is happening in Beijing, and that in turn they “do not understand much” about the real state of affairs in the Chinese leadership, and in particular, on the matter of who could succeed Chinese President Xi Jinping.
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