At Foreign Policy, Rabah Arezki makes the case that the balance of power is changing in the Middle East, moving toward China and away from the United States. He writes:

The coherence of that order rested on the fact that its economic and security dimensions were led by the same power. Today, that alignment is eroding as the redistribution of economic power toward China reshapes geopolitics. Whereas the United States now primarily extends influence through military power and security provision, China has expanded its reach through trade, infrastructure, economic statecraft, and increasingly by presenting itself as a predictable actor on the global stage.

The current rebalancing will likely take decades to play out, but rarely have economic dependence and security provision been so visibly concentrated in different hands. For 70 years, the U.S.-led order endured because commerce and security moved together. The Middle East is the first major arena where this coherence is dissolving. Economic and security dependence point in different directions, and the result is not a clean handoff from one hegemon to another but a potential disaggregation of hegemony itself.

Read more here.