From his perch in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Denver-born Daniel Wagner has a different vantage of the Israel-Hamas War.
That’s not only because of his current location.
Wagner has spent his career immersed in international relations, specifically in “country risk analysis,” a specialty at the intersection of politics, finance and foreign relations.
The CEO of Country Risk Solutions, Wagner is an expert in political risk, helping businesses and governments understand the political climate of a market they are considering entering.
It’s a three-pronged approach: Pre-investment due diligence, customized country risk analysis, and acquisition of political risk insurance, which hedges a company’s bets against political developments that may risk their investment — such as the outbreak of war. His company sees the client through the three stages, something Wagner is able to offer due to his experience.
For over three decades, Wagner has been traversing the private and public spheres, working for companies like AIG and for multilateral institutions like the World Bank.
He’s also been traversing the globe, from Latin America to East and Southeast Asia to the Middle East.
A born-and-bred Denverite, Wagner graduated from South High and attended CU Boulder for the first two years of his undergraduate degree. That’s when he started straying from the beaten path — though it was all quite normal for the Wagner family, Daniel says.
His father, Abe Wagner — incidentally one of the founders of Temple Sinai — did some work for the American Institute for Foreign Study, with whom he struck an unusual barter.
“My father did something creative,” says Wagner.
The elder Wagner proposed that instead of receiving compensation for his work for the institute, it accept his college-age children on its program at no cost.
So the younger Wagner finished up his undergraduate degree at Richmond College in London, his brother went to Paris and “that sort of started us on the trajectory,” Daniel recalls.
He found his “calling” in political science during that first international foray, which was followed by graduate degrees in international relations (University of Chicago) and international business (Thunderbird School of Global Management).
He kickstarted his career in New York, working in political risk insurance, then moving overseas working on what are called guarantees. Multilateral organizations like the World Bank guarantee investments to attract private sector investment in developing countries.
Wagner not only did this for the World Bank Group itself but also worked directly with development banks, most recently with the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Along the way, Wagner has written articles for newspapers like the Sunday Guardian and South China Morning Post and published eight books
A self-confessed Asiaphile, Wagner has lived in Singapore, Manila (Philippines) and, most recently, Beijing, though being trapped there during Zero COVID “was no fun, believe me,” and when the opportunity arose to finish his assignment in the United Arab Emirates, Wagner didn’t hesitate.
That three-year assignment ended this week.
Wagner spoke with the Intermountain Jewish News about the Israel-Hamas war, how it is perceived in the Middle East and what China has to do with it all.
Texting in Hebrew in Dubai
Wagner arrived in the Middle East about a year ago. That, combined with visits throughout his career to “half a dozen Gulf States,” gives him what he calls “some pretty good familiarity with the region.”
He has seen the region before and after the Abraham Accords and wasn’t surprised by the establishment of formal relations between Israel and the UAE, as well as subsequently with Bahrain.
The commercial relationship, which is “very vibrant,” isn’t new, says Wagner. There had been “a cordial relationship prior to the Accords. The nations that joined were predisposed to be favorable toward Israel.”
Behind the scenes, he says, “the transformation of the political arena was well underway.
“The ties that bind the UAE and Israel together are still quite strong,” he says, but naturally “have been under some strain since Oct. 7.”
He relays a story that happened in the Dubai Mall, home to the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, that Wagner heard from a Jewish friend who is part of the Dubai Jewish community. An Israeli woman was texting in Hebrew. A non-Emirati woman saw the Hebrew and began berating this Israeli woman, telling her she didn’t belong in Dubai, accusing her of harming Palestinians and even filming her, which, says Wagner, is not legal in the UAE. The harasser was arrested. Though Wagner doesn’t know whether the harasser was released or deported, “I’m telling you this because this place is all about one big word — tolerance,” he says of the UAE.
“They want Israelis here, they want Jews here,” a point, Wagner says, that his friend in Dubai says was reiterated by a senior member of the government shortly after Oct. 7, when he called the Dubai rabbi to tell him that.
From the government’s point of view, “the UAE is better off because of the vibrancy, the existence of a Jewish population here. Regardless of what’s going on politically, they’re very pro-Israeli and pro Jewish.”
That doesn’t mean that support for Israel is widespread among residents of the UAE or across the Gulf countries. When asked why Gulf countries — Qatar aside — has remained relatively quiet since the war broke out, Wagner offers several reasons.
The most obvious is that formal protests are not permitted there. Were protests to be permitted, Wagner suspects there would be many anti-Israel demonstrations, not necessarily from Emiratis, but from its large foreign population — around a whopping 90% — including many Palestinians.
“My understanding,” he shares, “is that there are many people here who have silently boycotted American businesses such as McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, that kind of thing.”
The second reason why most Gulf countries do not openly support Hamas or agitate against Israel is that they value stability, “just like the Chinese value stability, just like the Singaporeans value stability.”
The UAE government “recognizes that it’s in everybody’s benefit that everybody get along.”
For a country like Saudi Arabia, which has no formal relations with Israel, the balance is more complex.
Shortly after Oct. 7 the Saudis convened a regional meeting and “the sense that I have about what came out of that is that nobody wants a regional war. Nobody wants this thing to expand.”
Of course hypocrisy is at play: Saudi Arabia saying it opposes US and UK responses to Houthi aggression, even though Saudi Arabia has been fighting a brutal war in Yemen for a decade. That hypocrisy is because Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to lose the traction it has gained in the global investment community.
“They basically just want to sort of be left alone and proceed with their grand plan,” says Wagner.
“That probably applies also to many of the countries in the region. So they’re ensuring that their people aren’t making trouble internally and they’re doing what they can to avoid an expansion of the conflict regionally.”
China’s ‘soft power’
The stability that Saudi Arabia seeks is also deeply connected to China’s expanding diplomatic role in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to “squander” its recent peace with Iran, the architect of the Hamas attack. And it was China that brokered that agreement.
“China wants to be perceived as having a larger role than it has traditionally and historically had in global affairs,” says Wagner. “One way that it’s doing it is by sucking up the oxygen in the Middle East and picking up where the US left off.”
China sees its non-alignment as placing it in a “unique position” to broker deals between countries with which the US may not have diplomatic relations, such as Iran. China is now looking to resolve the Yemeni conflict.
“Global peacemaker” is a new sphere of influence China is attempting; its primary one, however, has been commercial, the Belt and Road Initiative being the most wide-ranging.
Through the Xi Jinping global infrastructure initiative, China has deepened its role in global affairs and expanded what, in international relations, is called “soft power.” The initiative spreads across Asia in west, east and southerly directions, and reaches as far as Africa and even the Western Hemisphere.
In his book Chinese Vortex, Wagner explored the complicated relations established between China and participant countries as far reaching as Samoa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and how the initiative initially succeeded in raising these countries’ GDP.
But by China lending and not giving the funds, many of the countries now find themselves deeply indebted to China and have reverted to what is called Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC).
China’s youth unemployment at 25%
This is the complicated regional environment that Israel finds itself in. Countries like Saudi Arabia “want to have a foot in both camps.” They want the security umbrella that goes with their US relationship, “but also want to maintain and expand their relationship with the Chinese, who buy more of their oil than anybody else.”
And vice versa, “the Middle East is very opportunistic for China. They have strong relations throughout the region, and they see an opportunity to display their diplomatic and soft power in the region. They’ve done so very deftly,” Wagner says.
However, China needs to expand these relations because its youth unemployment stands at 25%, and with a population its size, China “needs 8% or 9% growth every year in order to keep plates spinning.”
The COVID pandemic created new supply chains and moved customers away from China, not least because of its business environment.
“A lot of businesses have thrown in the towel with China, which was an impossible place to operate during Zero COVID,” says Wagner, referring to the Chinese policy of totally suppressing the COVID-19 virus, which was followed during 2020-2021.
There are other factors that make China a “very unfavorable business climate,” such as requiring companies to generate their own foreign exchange and to have a Chinese joint venture partner.
“When the time comes that they have to go to some Chinese court for some issue, the cards are all stacked against them in the Chinese legal system.
“So the Chinese have enormous problems. Flexing their diplomatic and soft power muscles is countering these problems.”
That is a complicated dance, as China, like Saudi Arabia, also needs to maintain relations with warring parties. So because it has close relations with many Muslim governments throughout the world, China stokes anti-Israel sentiment through its official online accounts.
At the same time, China isn’t cutting its relationship with Israel, which Wagner describes as “very strong.”
China owns a significant portion of the Haifa Port, though the Israeli business publication Calcalist reported that the Chinese shipping company COSCO recently suspended shipments to and from the port due to the war, and has said it is severing the relationship totally.
News that Wagner may not be upset to hear, since he criticizes the decisions of Israel and European countries selling their ports to China, “handing them the keys,” in his words. He attributes this to shortsightedness and greed.
Now, Denver
As Wagner’s three-year assignment ends, he’s looking toward the next phase of his career — and life. Relocating to Denver might even be in the cards.
He’ll get to scout the area when he’s here next month for a moderated talk on Feb. 7 about his new book, The China Epiphany: How the West Can Prevail Over China, hosted by DU’s Korbel School of International Studies and the Center for China United Cooperation, and moderated by DU’s Suisheng Zhao.
As his main focus moves toward his company, and considerations of being closer to family, Wagner thinks that within a couple of years he may be “setting up shop in Denver.”
For a person who has lived the world over, Denver is “still home.”
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