There is no ‘Middle East.’ There’s a Levant America loves and a Gulf China needs

Twenty years ago, in the midst of an Israel-Lebanon war triggered by a cross-border raid by Hezbollah, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously declared, “What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing — the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” She never explained what the old Middle East was nor did she…