U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has already indicated that the Middle East is going to be a central focus of his second term's foreign policy. He's already named Elise Stefanik, a fiercely pro-Israel lawmaker, to be his ambassador at the United Nations and he's been in regular contact since his election last week with both Arab and Israeli leaders.

But Trump is coming back to power at a time when the region is very different than when he left office in 2020. Back then, China was a marginal player in Mideast diplomacy which is no longer the case. China's economic and diplomatic influence in the region has increased significantly over the past four years.

In this special edition, produced in partnership with The ChinaMed Project, Eric hosts six of the world's leading China-Mideast scholars to discuss their forecast for how Donald Trump's re-election will impact U.S.-China relations in the region.

The conversation is divided into two parts:

Panel 1: How the arrival of a new U.S. President fits in the national strategies of regional actors and their relations with China

• Ahmed Aboudouh is the head of the China studies unit at the Emirates Policy Center and an associate fellow at the Chatham House in London.
• Gedaliah Afterman is the head of the Asia-Israel policy program at the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy and Foreign Relations and a lecturer at Reichman University and Tel Aviv University.
• Jonathan Fulton is an assistant professor of political science at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi and a nonresident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council's Middle East Programs and the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.

Panel 2: How a new US President will/might shape US-China relations in the Middle East

• Dawn Murphy is an associate professor of national security strategy at the U.S. National War College.
• Zhang Chuchu is an associate professor of international relations in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai and she is the deputy director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Fudan University.
• Mohammed Al Alsudairi is a lecturer in politics and international relations of the Arabic speaking world at the Australian National University in Canberra.

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There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the new "small and beautiful" doctrine that now guides China's Belt and Road Initiative. The problem is that a lot of people still do not understand what it actually means in practice.

President Xi Jinping first unveiled the concept at the Third Belt-and-Road Symposium in 2021 when he said that China's overseas development finance would focus more attention on "better connectivity" for telecommunications, energy, and financial services.

China has also had to scale down its financing of large-scale infrastructure projects because of economic challenges at home and debt sustainability issues among borrowing countries.

Lui Kanyi, a Beijing-based project finance lawyer and head of China at a large international law firm, has been closely following the transformation of the BRI for many of his Chinese clients. Kanyi joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the "small and beautiful" trend and what people should know about the future direction of the BRI.

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Even though the five countries in Central Asia are among the world's largest fossil fuel producers, the region faces chronic electricity shortages due to a lack of refining capacity. The energy crunch is further compounded by a reluctance to become overly dependent on Russian fuel.

To solve both problems, several Central Asian governments are looking to source renewable energy technology from China. While wind and solar still account for a small share of Central Asia's total energy production, that may soon change as more affordable Chinese green tech enters the market.

Yunis Sharifli, an independent Eurasia foreign policy analyst, recently explored this trend in an article published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Yunis joins Eric & Cobus to explain the geopolitics powering the green energy transition in Central Asia.

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