Will South Korea’s ‘Goldilocks’ missile dent China’s Middle East arms ambitions?

South Korea’s combat-proven, interoperable and geopolitically accessible surface-to-air missiles could hinder China’s efforts to sell its own defence systems to the Middle East, analysts have suggested.The US-Israel war on Iran has been marked by tit-for-tat missile and drone attacks across the Persian Gulf states, driving a surge in demand for surface-to-air missiles to defend against incoming Iranian aerial threats.According to a study by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank, more than 5,000 munitions were fired in the first 96 hours of the armed conflict, including about one-third of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missiles operated by Gulf states.As the war has continued, a shortage of surface-to-air missiles has pushed Washington to relocate to the Middle East parts of its air-defence systems deployed elsewhere in the world, such as its THAAD and Patriot systems in South Korea. South Korea may see US missiles move to Middle East