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Since China completed its victory lap for brokering a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Middle East has fallen into chaos, and now China is nowhere to be found. Jon B. Alterman details China’s absence in Foreign Policy, writing:
Last March, it was hard to miss the sense of satisfaction on the face of Wang Yi. Having just brokered a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the former Chinese foreign minister gently nudged his two counterparts together. He stood between them and was in firm control.
There was every reason for Wang to feel satisfied. China had not only done what many considered impossible, but it was also the only country that possibly could—or so the argument went. The two countries were enemies, but each trusted China. The United States was focused on Middle East security, but China was actually providing it. Wang’s improbable success was yet another sign of China’s rising role in the Middle East.
And yet, for the past four months, the confident Chinese diplomacy of last March has been absent. As the Middle East has slid into violence, there has been no sign of Chinese mediation and little sign of actual Chinese diplomacy—despite more than a half-century of support for Palestinians, more than a decade of close ties with Israel, and tens of billions of dollars of investment in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and beyond.
Even more pointedly, as three months of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping slammed Chinese trade and began to strangle some of China’s regional partners, Beijing often has seemed either unable or unwilling to act—diplomatically, militarily, or economically—to advance its broader interests, let alone those of its partners.
China likes to advertise itself as a rising global power, and it likes to poke the United States for falling short of its global ambitions to secure peace and prosperity. Arab commentators contrasted the warmth surrounding Chinese President Xi Jinping’s December 2022 summit in Riyadh with U.S. President Joe Biden’s more strained meeting with the Saudi leadership in Jeddah five months before. Al-Riyadh newspaper cited “independent Western sources” who claimed that “the region will enter, in the medium term, a phase of moving away from dictates and hegemony and toward a phase of geostrategic balance and political justice through Chinese influence based on development, investment, peoples’ well-being, and distancing from conflicts.”
That is exactly the future that China would like these states to embrace. Not incorrectly, China sees the United States as its principal strategic challenge, and everything else pales in comparison.
What is surprising is just how much this is true. China’s actions—and inaction—over the past four months highlight that despite decades of investment in the Middle East, Beijing’s main regional focus remains undermining the United States. While China has indeed become a regional player in the Middle East, it is still playing a remarkably self-interested game.
Read more here.
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