The US is leaving, China is coming, and other overused tropes.
In April 2023 I met with a senior Chinese Middle East specialist. He hadn’t been to the region since pre-COVID and I hadn’t been to China since pre-COVID either, so it was a chance for us to catch up personally and also to get a sense of what had changed in both neighbourhoods since we’d last visited. This was about a month after the Saudi-Iran rapprochement was announced in Beijing, two months after Iran’s President Raisi visited Beijing, and five months after the Xi visit to Riyadh. It was peak China-MENA, and it seemed every day I read another op-ed with a title like ‘As US Leaves the Middle East, China Fills the Vacuum’. As my colleague and I talked about what has changed - beyond perceptions - of China in the region, I cheekily referred to it as a second-tier power in the Middle East. My Chinese friend didn’t miss a beat: “Maybe a third-tier power on a good day.”
I thought of this conversation today, as I wade through post-CASCF analysis of China’s emergence in the region and the US’s decline. Last week someone wrote an op-ed about the Saudis not renewing renew an unwritten 50-year commitment to sell oil using the US dollar; since China is Saudi’s top oil customer, they must be switching to the renminbi. Or using the mBridge CBDC. At the heart of all these stories was the Saudis see a shift in the international order with a rising China and the US in decline, and because of a wide range of political issues the Kingdom no longer sees the US as a credible security guarantor. And look at all the important things China is doing with Saudi Arabia - tech cooperation, joint naval drills, a drone factory, energy cooperation, investment conferences. The US is the past and China is the future. So many variations of this story spread around less-than-credible websites and YouTube channels.
Of course, that the Saudis are in the process of negotiating a major security agreement with the US doesn’t feature in this kind of story. Or that this agreement would include cooperation in the Kingdom’s civil nuclear program, which is considered a really important project for the Saudis. Or that the CEO of it's AI giant Alat said last month that if Washington asked it would divest all Chinese tech. To say nothing of the fact that the Saudi riyal is pegged to the US dollar so simple self-interest indicates that Riyadh has a pretty strong motivation to not undermine the strength of the dollar.
There is a massive over-emphasis on what China does in the Middle East and a massive under-emphasis on what the US does here, and it makes for weak analysis. I saw a piece last week that tried to explain the China-Bahrain comprehensive strategic partnership with a similar logic: Bahrain did this because its leaders have concerns about the US commitment to the region, because they are pursuing a multi-alignment strategy (we should all agree to dispose of the word multi-aligned, which essentially means ‘not aligned), and because they are hedging. Nothing about the enhanced US-Bahrain security deal that was signed just last September. Nothing about the significance of the US Fifth Fleet based in Manama. Nothing about the defense cooperation agreement that has been in place since 1991.
There is just so much analysis coming out that takes interesting details of China’s cooperation with Middle East countries and leaps to the conclusion that it is overtaking the US. I read an op-ed today that did this with the UAE. It looked at volume of trade, tech cooperation, contracting, a joint air force exercise from last year, the F-35 deal, and packaged it as an example of the Emiratis hedging because they think the US is leaving. A simple retort would be to say, “Read the regularly updated Congressional Research Service report, The UAE: Issues for US Policy.” The most recent one I have on my computer was published last September and it’s a 30-page overview of how the UAE features in the US’s larger interests, documenting the many, many ways the two countries work together. I just finished a chapter on China-UAE relations and there is simply no comparison between the depth and breadth of what the UAE does with the US and what it does with China. And it’s the same with almost every other country in the Middle East, to varying degrees.
I get that China-MENA is a hot topic and lots of people are jumping in without having done years of research on it, but the result is often analysis being driven by headlines, and with the war in Gaza and widespread anger and frustration with the US-centered international order, the headlines are essentially some variation of ‘the US is leaving and China is coming.’
I’ll avoid singling out specific articles or authors here, but there’s a theme that is really consistent in a series of pieces I’ve seen in the past few weeks: leaders in the Middle East, primarily the Gulf, are doing a lot with China because they have concerns about the US commitment to the region’s security. Logically, this would mean they see China as an alternative partner. I don’t believe this is true.
I think they see China as a major Asian power with aspirations of being a global great power. It is a permanent member of the UNSC. It has the world’s second-largest population and second-largest economy, and is the world’s biggest importer of energy, making it a major market for Gulf exporters. I think they see it as a country that has a lot to teach the region about development, given its own transition since the Reform Era started. And I think they see it as a country that is situating itself as an important extra-regional actor.
But at the same time, I don’t think anyone here sees it as an alternative to the US, or even on par with European countries like the UK or France that have generations of diplomatic engagement and world-class institutions specializing on the Middle East. I wrote about this tangentially in my testimony to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission earlier this year:
A point worth considering on this topic is that China is a relative newcomer to Middle East political diplomacy. As described above, it is primarily an economic actor in the region, and despite its special envoys, cooperation forums, and strategic partnerships, it does not have the depth of regional specialization that the US or European countries do, given their longstanding involvement in MENA. As China develops a deeper pool of MENA talent this will change, but it is early days. Its area studies programs in universities and think tanks are not nearly as developed as their US counterparts, making for a much shallower pool of expertise.
For decades, the Middle East has been a strategic priority for the US, and one result is nearly every senior official in the Pentagon or State or NSC have extensive knowledge about, experience in, and connections with the Middle East. That is not nearly the case in China, which until recently had very little in the way of strategic interests here. Of course, that is changing, but to develop the deep bench of Middle East expertise in China’s MOFA or PLA or MOD will take time. And I suspect that is being developed now, but like I wrote above, we’re still in early days. The idea that decisions being made in the Middle East are motivated by a perception of China replacing the US is a silly trope and a crutch for lazy analysis.