Maybe the pay offs are late this month.......
Look at the rivals to the countries of Saudi Arabia and China. The Iranians are the direct opponents to Saudi Arabia, even now fighting a clandestine war on several fronts. And Saudi Arabia is, as much as anybody in the region, a de facto ally of Israel, and you begin to see what is going on there. Help Iran and its fundamentalist theocratic government, and keep the pot stirred in the Middle East.
China is a little less obvious, but part of the pressure is economics. The “little tigers”, i.e., South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Malaysia, are all under strong pressure from an expansionist China, also felt by Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and the largest economic competitor, Japan.
This economic pressure is also exerted through the military and naval presence in the South China Sea, a hegemony that threatens a major portion of the world trade routes. China want very much to have a “blue water” navy, more directly to challenge the superiority of the US naval presence all around the world.
But the big target for the Chinese is India, a sometimes ally of the US, and probably one of its nearest economic rivals in the East Asia sphere, ranking right up there with Japan. Like the world of the Immortals, “there can be only one”.