The Middle Kingdom meets the Middle East
Sean Durns
In December 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia. Xi promised to “usher in a new era” in Chinese-Arab relations. Nearly a year later, it can be said that China has succeeded: Beijing’s influence in the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf, has grown considerably, with potentially dire consequences for the United States and its allies.
China has scarcely masked its ambitions to create a Sinocentric Middle East. Indeed, the Middle Kingdom has even turned to a largely imagined past in its attempts to position for the future. During Xi’s visit, for example, Chinese state media issued a press release proclaiming: “China and Saudi Arabia have admired each other and conducted friendly exchanges since ancient times. The Prophet Mohammed said, ‘Seek knowledge even if you have to go as far as China.’”
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But it isn’t knowledge or platitudes that Beijing is selling. Rather, China hopes to undermine the U.S.-led international order while harvesting both resources and allies for conflicts to come. And its efforts have already reaped rewards.
On March 6, representatives from Iran and Saudi Arabia met in Beijing for talks. Four days later, Tehran and Riyadh announced that they had decided to normalize relations, seemingly ending a decadeslong cold war between the two powers. Some commentators wondered if the Chinese-brokered rapprochement meant a “new order in the Middle East.” China, they argued, had “shattered the assumption of U.S. dominance in the Middle East.” Beijing, they noted, was flexing its muscles and illustrating that it was a global power, with reach and influence that extended far from the Indo-Pacific.
The contrast with the U.S. also seemed clear. Publicly, China was positioning itself as a mediator, seemingly capable of bringing peace between arch-foes. China has long avoided taking sides in the strife-prone region. Indeed, Beijing’s “friends to all” policy in the region exists to win friends and avoid making enemies. And China could now claim that its efforts were bearing fruit.
The Chinese-brokered agreement is a coup for Xi and his Chinese Communist Party. CCP propaganda has long depicted the U.S. as a destabilizing influence. The U.S., it argues, has only brought upheaval to the Middle East, while China offers both peace and development. The U.S. is both sanctimonious and unreliable. Washington offers lectures about human rights and is prone to turning on allies, from Cairo to Riyadh. By contrast, Beijing waits in the wings, willing to lend cash.
For its part, the Biden administration sought to downplay what was clearly a foreign policy success for China.
“In the end, if this deal can be sustained, regardless of what the impetus was or who sat down at the table … we welcome that,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “Any effort to deescalate tensions there in the region” is “in our interest.”
Other like-minded voices concurred. “The United States should see China’s mediation of a Saudi-Iran agreement as a win-win for American interests,” claimed Martin Indyk, a former Middle East envoy in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “Anything that reduces the chances of conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a good thing, regardless of who brokered it,” asserted Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Yet Beijing’s intentions in the Middle East are not benign. And far from welcoming the advances of its chief geopolitical opponent, the U.S. should be opposing them. Chinese state media might claim that “China pursues no selfish interest whatsoever in the Middle East,” but only a fool would take the CCP at its word. China views the Middle East, long a chief battleground for great power competition, as fertile soil for countering the U.S. And it has long cultivated Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
Beijing looks at Saudi Arabia and sees an opportunity, one that the U.S. has offered on a silver platter. On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden condemned the kingdom, calling the longtime U.S. ally a “pariah state.” Shortly after his inauguration, Biden ended offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and pressured it to allow Iran a victory in Yemen. The administration also removed the Houthis, an Iranian-backed proxy, from the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. And when groups funded and backed by Tehran carried out attacks on major industrial and oil centers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the administration merely offered perfunctory condemnations. Indeed, the administration continued to reach out to Iran while the regime planned and perpetrated attacks.
Riyadh received the message loud and clear. Consciously or not, Washington was revising a relationship that had existed for more than half a century.
At the dawn of the last Cold War, the U.S. forged an alliance with Saudi Arabia that was predicated largely on “oil for security.” The U.S. provided security for Saudi Arabia, which in turn provided oil. World War II had highlighted the importance of energy in geopolitics, and Washington was keenly aware of the role that oil would play in the unfolding contest with the Soviet Union for supremacy.
Unsurprisingly, at times, the alliance between an Islamist monarchy and a Western democracy was tempestuous. Saudi Arabia, custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, may have been an imperfect ally, but this is hardly an anomaly in the cutthroat world of international politics. The kingdom provided stability in a region plagued with palace coups, wars, and upheaval.
In the Cold War’s early years, attempts to court other regional superpowers such as Egypt failed, and allies such as Turkey, Israel, and Iran were not representative of the broader Arab Middle East. In 1955, the U.S. brokered a Middle East version of NATO, CENTO, but it became a shell of itself when its sole Arab member, the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, was overthrown in 1958. The U.S.-Saudi alliance endured through the Cold War and beyond.
But beginning in the Obama administration, the sentiment grew that Washington no longer needed Riyadh as much as it once did. Some argued that both America’s growing energy independence and energy transition gave the U.S. greater leverage and freedom. In his 2010 book Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future, journalist Stephen Kinzer argued that the U.S. needed to change its alliance system dramatically in the Middle East, moving away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and toward Iran and Turkey, both of which, Kinzer curiously argued, were natural democratic allies.
The Obama administration was of a similar mind, calling for “daylight” in the U.S.-Israel relationship and fervently reaching out to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocratic dictatorship that sought the destruction of Israel, the U.S., and Gulf monarchies such as the House of Saud. As Michael Doran, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and scholar at the Hudson Institute, convincingly argued at the time, then-President Barack Obama was steadfastly pursuing a realignment in the Middle East, one in which Iran would be granted greater power and influence. Unavoidably, this would be at the expense of America’s longtime allies in the region. The administration’s pursuit of the so-called Iran Deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was key to this objective.
Although billed as an attempt to thwart Tehran’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons, the very terms of the JCPOA enshrined Iran as a future nuclear power, its sunset clauses and provisions ensuring that the regime would one day have nuclear weapons. The administration predicated its entire Middle East policy on achieving this deal, even arming Tehran-approved proxies in its war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Allies from Ankara to Jerusalem to Riyadh were nonplussed. A vacuum had been created, and Beijing wasted little time in exploiting it.
When nations become global powers, their interests and appetites expand considerably. But China’s ambitions are bigger than most. Accustomed to viewing itself as the center of the world, China endured centuries of stagnation before it was carved up by foreign powers and beset by civil wars whose body counts were in the millions. Under Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, the nation was led by a madman who openly courted nuclear war and murdered millions of his countrymen in government-induced famines and disorder. China’s progress was further stunted, and only in the past few decades has the country’s power truly taken shape.
The Chinese Communist Party once led by Mao and now ruled by Xi is deeply hostile to the U.S.-led international order. China, considered by the Pentagon to be its chief “pacing challenge,” is engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history. The U.S. might believe that it won the Cold War against communism, but for Xi, the Cold War never ended. And the CCP needs the Middle East. “China’s ambition,” Hudson Institute scholar Zineb Riboua told me, “is to supplant U.S. influence in the region, which is already shrinking, and it cannot achieve it without courting the center of the Islamic and Arab world.”
China is the world’s largest oil importer. Accordingly, ties with Saudi Arabia are only natural. The kingdom is the top global supplier of crude oil to China. Beijing is Riyadh’s top trading partner, including in Saudi Arabia’s important chemical industry. Bilateral trade between the two nations has skyrocketed since diplomatic relations were established in 1990.
Several factors have played a role in bringing the two countries closer together. The kingdom’s Saudi Vision 2030 is an ambitious development plan that seeks to bolster the private sector and promote economic diversification. The Saudi government is rightfully concerned about the long-term effects of both energy diversification and a bloated bureaucracy — and investment from Beijing promises to help offset these obstacles. But China has uses for Riyadh that extend beyond trade.
For its part, China not only needs oil, but it also wants to accumulate leverage and IOUs, both of which could come in handy should the CCP invade Taiwan, a prospect that some analysts view to be increasingly likely. Countries that need China are unlikely to support sanctioning or opposing the Middle Kingdom. In short: China is effectively buying invasion insurance while working to squeeze the U.S. out of a region that remains important to many oil-poor countries, including China’s neighbors and America’s allies.
At the dawn of the Cold War, the U.S. needed Middle Eastern crude less for itself and more for its allies in Europe and Asia. America was not yet dependent on foreign oil for its domestic needs. The commodity was essential to the Marshall Plan and postwar recovery. Oil meant influence, and Washington knew that possessing it, even via proxy, could be decisive. This lesson holds true today. The U.S. might see a future in which it needs less foreign oil, but its allies and potential allies, including in China’s neighborhood, will have different needs.
To be sure, China faces formidable hurdles in its quest to supplant the U.S. Washington has deeply invested in relations with the kingdom, including military-to-military cooperation. The U.S. provides the Gulf monarchy with key defense training and technology that the Saudis are, for now at least, reliant on. Decades of close ties can’t be undone overnight.
But China holds a strong hand. Beijing’s thirst for oil and its wealth make it an attractive customer. Ditto for China’s partnership with Iran, which provides the Middle Kingdom with tremendous leverage. Iran is China’s foremost Middle Eastern ally. Ties between the two have been rapidly increasing. Both countries share an interest in overturning the U.S.-led international order. Indeed, according to a 2021 study by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Beijing “views Tehran’s opposition to the United States as augmenting China’s increasing global influence.”
Iran can act as a regional foil, capable of distracting and bogging down the U.S. and its allies. Iran can also threaten key shipping lanes — lines of commerce that are essential in the emerging global competition between the U.S. and China. And its proxy network in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza further extends its reach. In short: Iran can both distract and attack the U.S., aspects that only underline its importance to Beijing. And ties with Tehran provide the CCP with influence that it can use over other Middle Eastern nations.
Crucially, Beijing seems to understand what Washington has forgotten: The Saudis possess clout that goes far beyond their borders. Riyadh is a key mover and shaker in the Middle East, holding sway over numerous countries in the Gulf and beyond. By making inroads with the custodians of Mecca, China exponentially increases its impact in the region. As Riboua told me, “Saudi Arabia’s soft power in the area can make or break Chinese influence.”
Evidence of China’s power is becoming irrefutable. Beijing certainly isn’t hiding it. In April 2023, American intelligence detected construction at a suspected Chinese military facility in the UAE, “one year after Washington’s oil-rich ally announced it was halting the project because of U.S. concerns,” the Washington Post reported. Beijing reportedly hopes to use the port near Abu Dhabi as part of an initiative called Project 141, in which the People’s Liberation Army plans to build a global military network of at least five overseas bases and 10 logistical support sites by 2030, several of them in Africa and the Middle East.
Washington reportedly is concerned that the UAE is tilting toward Beijing, with an anonymous Biden administration official telling the Washington Post in April 2023 that the UAE’s leaders “think that China is hugely important right now and rising in the Middle East.” The U.S. is right to be concerned.
PLA personnel have also been observed at UAE military bases in the country’s interior, bases that operate drone and ballistic missile systems. And in early August, it was announced that China and the UAE would hold the “first-ever joint military drill,” which some experts warned was a “message” to the U.S. The drill, dubbed Falcon Shield 2023, will take place in Xinjiang, the part of China where the CCP has been engaged in persecuting its Muslim minority.
It is safe to assume that in selecting Xinjiang, China was flaunting an unmistakable fact: Most Muslim nations don’t seem to care that China is systemically eliminating its own Muslims. That fact speaks to a harsh reality that Washington must now reckon with. Indeed, polls have consistently shown rising support for China in the Arab world despite Beijing’s actions. According to the Arab Barometer’s 2023 survey of 23,000 interviews, China was “more popular than the U.S.” in eight of the nine countries polled.
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Power, both military and economic, matters. And so, too, does will. There are few “win-wins” in cold war contests with anti-American dictatorships.
The U.S. seems aware, if belatedly, that it is losing ground in the Middle East to Beijing. To combat Iran’s piracy on the seas, the administration reportedly is considering placing U.S. military personnel on foreign vessels. As the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan has noted, this is likely an attempt to placate Saudis and Emiratis. But to truly do so, Washington must show that it can discern friend from foe in the region. Failing that only provides the CCP with opportunities. Superpowers who reward enemies and punish allies do not remain superpowers for long. The first rule of foreign policy is stunningly simple: “First do no harm.” Instead, the U.S. has left both scars and a void that our chief enemy is exploiting with great success.
Sean Durns writer is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.