Syria & China's MENA diplomacy, Iran & Assad's downfall, Chinese investment in Egypt, Egyptian FM to China

Assad's fall in Syria exposes limits of China's Middle East diplomacy - Reuters. I spoke with one of the journalists who reported on this story. I like the tone they struck; I’ve seen other pieces with the premise that China “made the wrong bet” on Syria, which I don’t think is accurate - I don’t think they bet very much on it. Like I wrote on Monday, my take is China didn’t do very much in Syria, and what they did was premised more on their own considerations - concern over spread of revolutionary movements in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and concern over Uighur fighters in Syria’s war - rather than on any desire to work with the Assad government.

"There's been a lot of an exaggerated sense of China's ability to shape political outcomes in the region," said Jonathan Fulton, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

While the collapse of the Assad regime was seen reducing the influence in the Arab world of his main backers, Iran and Russia, it was also a blow for China's global ambitions, said Fulton.

"A lot of what (China has) been doing internationally has relied on support with those countries, and their inability to prop up their biggest partner in the Middle East says quite a lot about their ability to do much beyond the region."