Common ground
Riaz Khokhar says the US and China should work together to achieve peace in the Middle East
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting China this week and his agenda includes meeting China’s senior leadership to discuss issues such as the conflict in the Middle East. In the wake of Iran’s air strike on US ally Israel, Blinken is expected to be appreciative of Chinese efforts to engage with Iran and urge restraint.
After Iran’s retaliatory strike, Beijing’s foreign policy chief, Wang Yi, talked to his Iranian counterpart, Hossein AmirAbdollahian, on the phone, condemning Israel’s earlier attack on Iran’s consulate in Syria as a breach of international law. Abdollahian reassured Wang that Tehran had acted in self-defence and would not target any neighbouring countries.
Wang appreciated Iran’s good neighbourliness and has also reached out to Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, assuring him of China’s commitment to work with regional countries to prevent further escalation.
Beijing could similarly urge Blinken to restrain Israel from escalation by launching further strikes against Iran or its diplomatic infrastructure in the region.
Up till now, US and Chinese diplomatic efforts around the Middle East crisis have shown that they are poles apart, supporting rival camps and pursuing divergent geopolitical games. But if they think outside their geopolitical confrontation, they will find that they are working for shared interests in the region: security and stability.
For one, neither country wants an unstable Middle East. It strains US military resources and diplomatic capital in ways that goes against its strategic interests regarding containing China and Russia. It also increases pressure on Beijing to take a leadership role in both diplomatic and military terms to resolve the crises.
An unstable region would hinder China’s efforts to secure its economic interests in the Middle East and its diplomatic role in courting regional countries out of the American orbit of influence.
Secondly, neither country wants its military forces involved in the Middle East beyond what is necessary for their primary interests.
Beijing has vowed unification with Taiwan, by force if necessary, and is asserting its sovereignty over the disputed maritime areas in the South China Sea. The US has also intensified its military presence, exercises and the deployment of strategic assets in the region to deter China from changing the status quo in cross-strait relations and the South China Sea by force.
Therefore, the western Pacific is the primary theatre of their military engagement and potential war.
Three, for the above reasons, China and the United States share an interest in helping Middle Eastern states take up the charge of the region’s security. Washington’s plan is to continue to invest in and bolster the defence of Israel and the Arab partners while integrating their defence architecture with the US Central Command.
But what Arab states want is a formal security guarantee from America, like those given to Japan and South Korea. Recent attacks from Iran and its proxies showed that the US did not adequately defend its Arab partners against adversary attacks.
China has no interest in taking over America’s role as the region’s policeman, which would be against Beijing’s multilateral security engagements. China’s Global Security Initiative talks of the peaceful resolution of disputes and favours “dialogue over confrontation, partnership over alliance and win-win over zero-sum”.
That said, China sees value in increasing its defence exports to the Middle East, investing in local aircraft manufacturing, and conducting anti-terrorism and piracy exercises.
Four, Beijing and Washington have helped with reconciliation in the Middle East, although they differ in their methods and goals.
The US oversaw the Arab-Israel normalisation of ties through the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan establish diplomatic relations with Israel that year. (Egypt and Jordan already had diplomatic ties with Israel since 1979 and 1994, respectively.)
There was a likelihood of Saudi Arabia following suit. But the entire project has come to a halt since the Israel-Hamas conflict started last October. Now a twostate solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict has become the centrepiece of Riyadh’s establishment of diplomatic ties with Israel.
China also helped to broker the normalisation of ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran last year, after the two countries severed ties in 2016. From Beijing’s perspective, this Saudi-Iranian rapprochement led to the improvement of various peace and reconciliation efforts across the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia has restarted diplomatic relations with Syria, readmitting it to the Arab League last year, after over a decade. The civil war in Yemen, seen as a proxy fight between the Saudi-backed government and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, is heading for peace after eight years, as both sides agreed at the end of last year to a political solution.
Only the goals of the US vs China mediation efforts are different. As Washington was receding from the Middle East militarily, it viewed the Arab-Israel normalisation and a joint defence architecture as a way to buttress security and pit the Arab-Israel bloc against Iran and its so-called Axis of Resistance from Yemen and Syria to Lebanon.
China, on the other hand, sees ArabIran rapprochement as a source of regional stability to protect its economic interests as well as rally these countries around its ideas of international economic and security governance, in part through including them in the Brics bloc and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
All this shows that Washington and Beijing can also work together to achieve the security and stability of the Middle East – even as they compete for geopolitical influence.
Up till now, US and Chinese diplomatic efforts around the Middle East crisis have shown that they are poles apart