In front of the railway station building at the end of "Nejad", the passerby sees the Chinese flag between the Djibouti and the Ethiopian flags, while more Chinese air appears inside, as soon as you enter the station, an hour of Polaris is seen on the Chinese wall, and the passerby deals With Chinese citizens selling tickets before boarding a Chinese-made train.
The 900,000 people of Djibouti are happy to see China join the club of foreign actors that have a presence there, including Japan, Italy and Britain, because they view the total foreign presence as a stabilizing force that protects their country from potential threats from neighbors such as Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, and gives them money that does not compensate for them. They lack resources, and these forces, according to the residents ’belief, are a bulwark against terrorism that has destabilized other countries in the region.
But at that strategic geographic point, there are those who do not welcome the inattentive Chinese presence, but rather consider it an existential threat to it, they are the Americans who do not share common borders with their Chinese opponent, but they have a historical hostility that makes them always revolve around each other, and point their weapons to each other's cities, as Djibouti, on which China decided to build its only foreign military base in 2017 today, has become an important venue for rivalry between the two strategic rivals, a place where the balance may tilt in the near future - according to analysts' estimates - in favor of Beijing.
Being the smallest country on the African continent, it has not been solved from having many advantages that made it an entity of strategic weight that attracts global powers. Djibouti controls one of the world's busiest marine roads, the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the waterway that connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and passes through it towards 4% of the world's oil supply.
Global interest in Djibouti is due to the existence of a stable political structure in the Horn of Africa that is mostly torn by conflicts, a structure that is most convinced that external support and diversification of external partnerships is its way to ensure the continuity of the political system and the provision of autonomy, a conviction that has already made the country a center for foreign military installations that generate the most important The sources of income used to improve the country's infrastructure and increase its commercial capacity, as the United States, China, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and others have broken down their military bases in Djibouti, or are still working towards obtaining a military share on this land, and at the footsteps of those countries China has moved to put a fingerprint Military navy in the blue waters of Djibouti.
China has become the seventh country to establish a military presence in the small African country, after years of diligent work in expanding its military ties in Africa, through extended peacekeeping missions, training of military personnel, and increased arms sales, as shown by research conducted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute , China is the second supplier of weapons in sub-Saharan Africa after Russia and the third supplier of North Africa after Russia and the United States.
Initially, after announcing the construction of a military facility in 2015, China focused on making the most of the strategic location of Djibouti, which is located on the eastern edge of the African continent and the West Bank of the Indian Ocean. In a country where there is almost no natural resource, China wanted to convert Djibouti to Dubai, the Horn of Africa, so it invested Significantly in infrastructure projects such as international airports and railways that extend to landlocked Ethiopia, for example it constructed an Ethiopian-Djibouti electric railway worth $ 4 billion, and has funded a $ 300 million water pipeline network that transports drinking water from Ethiopia To Djibouti, and Beijing has spent hundreds of millions of dollars converting the port of Djibouti into the largest port in the region.
With regard to the Chinese military base, which is one of the bases that is an important source of income for Djibouti, China pays $ 100 million annually in rent, which is much more than what the United States and France pay, as it is important for Beijing that Djibouti become a reliable and reliable economic partner that brings it to the Pearl New in the "pearl chain" that Beijing is working on by connecting maritime ports to each other, to secure the sea lanes for transportation, trade and communications from China to Africa.
In July 2017, warships left the southern coastal city of Zhanjiang heading towards the first Chinese support base in Djibouti, these ships, and in the practical implementation of an agreement granting Beijing a military presence in the country until 2026, they carried about 10,000 Chinese soldiers into existence It is in the vital location that Beijing wanted to show its strength in Africa and the Middle East.
Just before the inauguration of the base, which cost $ 590 million to build, specifically in 2015, China spoke of the base as a "logistical facility," with specific tasks, such as participating in United Nations peacekeeping and anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and other humanitarian relief tasks in Djibouti, and the Chinese insistence that these are the tasks of al-Qaeda continued even as the Chinese forces demonstrated, two months after their arrival at al-Qaeda, their combat power significantly in the first live-fire exercises.
As the navy of the People's Liberation Army said, "The People's Liberation Army forces stationed in Djibouti must be able to protect themselves and resist attacks by terrorists, pirates, the local armed forces, or even foreign forces." This happens at a time when piracy has decreased significantly, and no Chinese peace-keeping operations pass through Djibouti, and the Navy of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, which handles that base only once a year, carries out humanitarian escort missions to WFP shipments to Somalia.
The Chinese goals go beyond everything that the Chinese leadership has tried to assert to the world, as the base that will also be used to strengthen the position of Beijing in the Indian Ocean to serve the Chinese maritime strategy based on confronting India in the Indian Ocean aims economically to boost Chinese exports through land and sea trade routes, as the base of Djibouti will be achieved To a large extent, the goals of the One Belt, One Road initiative are the fact that most of China's billion dollar exports to Europe cross its path through the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal.
As for the military, China's current moves at that base, which were revealed by satellite and unofficial reports, show that the base is rather a military fortress that could accommodate thousands of soldiers due to the huge military infrastructure that includes barracks, storage and maintenance units, and docking facilities that can deal with most of the ships in its navy fleet. The supplier, the helipad, and also are equipped with cyber and electronic warfare facilities that provide easy intelligence gathering, and a retired Indian Army intelligence officer said, "The 200-acre facility includes at least 10 barracks, an ammunition depot, and a heliport, surrounded by four Layers of perimeter guardrails; the inner fence is eight to ten meters long and has guard posts.
The most obvious is that the naval base in Djibouti was designed with a wide security perimeter characterized by three layers of defense, as "the inner layer consists of a large perimeter wall with many two-story towers in the corners for observation or for the forces to reach the wall, and outside these large walls a wall can be seen Smaller or thicker fence with many watchtowers scattered along the ocean, as the distance between the walls and outside the outer wall provides the third layer of safety, "as stated in the report of the American" Stratfor "site, but that last May, satellites revealed that China, which Work continued on the fortified base as a modern castle equipped with a dock with a length of 1120 to allow the use of ships soon, as well as accommodating new Chinese aircraft carriers, attack carriers or other large warships, but the platform could easily accommodate four nuclear powered attack submarines in China.
Although it is not possible to refute the fact that foreign military bases in Djibouti in general have strong military defenses such as the US "Lemonier" base, it reveals nothing comparable to the strength of the Chinese base, which now includes large defenses on all sides, and includes a group of automatic guns and anti-missile For tanks and large guns.
Ironically, it was Djibouti, that small geographical spot in the brown continent, that made the strategic rivals Beijing and Washington our neighbors, as China established its first foreign military base in Djibouti only about 7 miles from the only US military base in Africa, "Lemonier", which The United States established it in 2001 to coordinate its operations in "de facto combat zones" in Somalia and Yemen, with about 4,000 soldiers.
American officials realize that building the Chinese base in Djibouti is a milestone in Beijing's expanding moves at the expense of long US military hegemony. In recent years, Chinese military spending has risen to the point that the defense budget in Beijing is expected to reach $ 233 billion in 2020, that is, With an amount that exceeds what all Western European countries combined spend, and at a time when Chinese naval ships and nuclear submarines are roaming most parts of the world, Washington is looking with great caution to the proximity of the Chinese base to less than 5 miles from the main container port in Djibouti visited by American and European warships. The main source of supplies to support its forces is at the Limoner base, as nearly 98% of logistical support to Djibouti, Somalia and East Africa comes through this port.
American fears that this Chinese presence could threaten American interests and operations became a tangible reality in May 2018, when Chinese forces at that base fired lasers at American pilots in an attempt to interfere with American flight missions, and this was preceded by sending Pentagon official complaint to Beijing condemns the injury of American pilots slightly injured as a result of targeting Chinese laser printers, and in the same range, China complained that US low-flying aircraft are carrying out spying missions near the Chinese facility.
As China continues to expand and strengthen its military base, American fears of increased Chinese control and influence in Djibouti are exacerbated by two important points. The first is the leverage that generous Chinese funds pumped as debt can finance vital infrastructure from ports, airports, a new railway, and a water pipeline in Djibouti. This country, like other African countries that bite more than they can chew on Chinese debt, is easy to undermine the Chinese debt, which amounts to 60% of the country's gross domestic product. One of the most important American concerns is that the government of Djibouti, which is facing an increasing debt, is easy to hand over some assets. The main, including the "Limoner" base to China, which has the lion's share of public debt in Djibouti, supports achieving this that the difference in aid is sufficient to create a conflict of interest between foreign parties and then directing the scales towards taking into account the interests of Beijing, especially since the President of Djibouti Ismail Omar Gili It appears ready to "sell his country to the highest bidder," the Americans said.
The second point that can deepen the Chinese security and intelligence presence in Djibouti at the expense of the Americans concerns the increasing presence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Djibouti, as Riyadh, which is largely concerned with strengthening security relations with Beijing, is striving towards all that can be strengthened by possible defensive and offensive measures in its conflict. With Iran, which uses Djibouti as a stop and a road through which it encrypts military communications equipment and other devices, Djibouti, which is a member of the League of Arab States and joins the Saudi-led "Islamic Alliance", responds to the Saudi influence on any of the non-Arab military installations in the country, so it refused The Djiboutian government proposed Russia to create a special base for Moscow, which is allied to Iran. While Moscow was unhelpful to Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war, China recently began expressing its support for the Saudi position in Yemen on the grounds that these ties reduce Saudi Arabia's dependence on American support.
In the end, American leaders look very cautiously at their country's changing circumstances in Djibouti, which are a symptom of its broader political and military withdrawal, and demonstrates its weak ability to exert soft power in politically disputed foreign environments, and with the prospect of China disavowing American influence in Djibouti. One whisper from Beijing suffices in the ears of the President of Djibouti. It is clear that the Trump administration, which does not yet have a suitable strategic plan to protect its country's interests in Djibouti, urgently needs a plan that gives it the ability to defend itself and its allies.