China will use Middle East conflict to undermine US global influence

Beijing’s desire to be everyone’s favourite neutral will come unstuck.

American and British hawks are giving themselves the vapours about yet another “axis of evil” active in our world. This one is said to consist of Russia, Iran, China and North Korea, notwithstanding obvious differences between, respectively, a rogue imperial state, a revolutionary Shiite theocracy, a vast Asian economy ruled by Communist tycoons, and an East Asian curiosity under the weird Kim dynasty.

China does not easily fit this company, despite its supportive relations with Iran and Russia, neither of which China seems very keen to invest in judging by non-disbursement of $400bn (£330bn) in a Sino-Iranian energy deal or the cold shoulder Putin got for financing his Power of Siberia gas pipeline. North Korea is merely Beijing’s chronic headache, the least worst alternative to having US troops back on the Yalu River.

Beijing’s stance towards the war in Gaza has been to advocate for a two-state solution, to condemn the excessive bombing of civilians in Gaza (though not the actions of Hamas that preceded this) and to contain a war that threatens to engulf the Middle East.

Much of that stance is common to many countries, as is the failure to see that Israel rendered Palestinian statehood impossible by playing off Hamas against the Palestinian Authority before deciding to obliterate the former while helping the latter sink into deeper desuetude.

China wants to protect massive oil imports from Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as $430bn of trade with the Arab states. The region is also crucial to China’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project now it must pass south of Russia.

To that end, in March, Beijing’s Global Security Initiative succeeded (on the back of Iraqi and Omani efforts) in warming relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia to the extent that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi discussed the crisis in Gaza a few days after it erupted. But the Gaza conflict has massively complicated China’s ambitions as a global peacemaker.

Although, since Mao, China has traditionally supported Palestinian rights, in recent years its relations with Israel have been cordial. China is interested in Israeli high tech, agronomy, biosciences, smart cities and last but not least advanced military equipment, much to the anger of the Pentagon, which fears leakage to a peer competitor.

Relative Israeli reticence at the UN regarding the Uyghurs translates into major Chinese investment in Israel’s metro systems, the ports of Ashdod and Haifa and record numbers of Chinese tourists. Israeli counterterrorism experts helped Beijing with the subsequent repression in Xinxiang. The Israelis are as agnostic as the Chinese (or the Swiss) about moral issues despite their insistent moralising.

But China is also after something other than protecting its oil supplies. Events in Gaza have drawn the US back into a region rife with potential quagmires. That will inevitably distract the US from China’s western Pacific neighbourhood. Indeed, right now Washington is trying to persuade the visiting Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi to intercede with Iran so as to rein in its proxies: the Houthi, Hamas and Hezbollah among them.

In return for that, President Xi will probably meet Biden at the Apec conference in San Francisco in November. Reviving the nuclear talks with Iran may well be on the agenda, though again China was a backseat member of these negotiations until Trump collapsed them.

Neutrality in the war in Gaza will also facilitate China’s wider pitch to be the spokesman of the Global South, in line with the stance it adopted towards Ukraine (where again China is a major trading partner with both belligerents).

The ambition is to undermine US hegemony in favour of a multipolar world order by drawing to itself countries that resent dictation by Washington or that regard China as a source of investment capital.

It helps that whereas the US squandered $6trn on its Global War on Terror and in Iraq, China has ploughed $1trn into its Belt and Road Initiative, building railways, roads and bridges, clinics and schools and boosting its trade by about $17trn as a bonus. The last place it invaded was Vietnam 44 years ago. It has but one overseas military base; the US has 750 in 80 countries.

This last fact suggests why China is not going to achieve the global clout it feels entitled to after the demise of pax Americana. It does not have a tradition of high-level diplomacy and conflict mediation, nor the might to back it with.

While wolf warrior diplomats are ferocious in defence of China’s own interests, China is far too cautious and cloudily elliptical to tackle the 24 global conflicts which the GSI identified in April 2022. One of these was the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That does not need more lyrical platitudes but the ability to exert leverage and knock heads together. Only the US can do that, and there are no signs of it doing so in an election year.

In this respect, China resembles another great power at the opposite end of Eurasia. Like China, the EU has enormous economic clout, but finds it difficult to be a global geopolitical actor. It has multiple institutional confusions, with the so-called High Representative Josep Borrell answerable to the Commission, the Council and 27 member states, maybe four of which – France, Germany, Italy and

Poland – have their own significant diplomatic, intelligence and military capabilities.

As the Gaza crisis has unfolded, the EU struggled to invent a coherent response. Nor does it want to see the ramification of the Gaza conflict. The caravanserai of illustrious European visitors to Herzog and Netanyahu is not like Joe Biden and his team of generals and diplomats being present in the war cabinet. Nor is the EU giving Israel huge sums of military aid.

China’s desire to be everyone’s favourite neutral will come unstuck as its global economic reach runs into conflicts that are not amenable to one-dimensional solutions. That will inherently limit the extent to which it will become the indispensable power in future.

This is not a recommendation for the pax Americana either. By investing so heavily in the Abraham Accords – Israel’s attempt to render the Palestinians into a legacy of irrelevance – the US has badly miscalculated at a time when many Middle Eastern states are more than prepared to flirt with Beijing to show that they have alternative options. That has created a vacuum that China is not eager or ready to fill, though it will welcome the inevitable loss of focus by the US in its own vicinity.

Whether China can sustain that stance seems debatable, but since that has served the Europeans pretty well too, why alter it, even as the Middle East plays out its historical tragedies.

Meanwhile China will make grandiose policy pronouncements, like the Global Strategic Initiative and Belt and Road, which it will wait years for others to supply the substance of.

Unlike the US, China does not have a tradition of conflict mediation, nor the might to back it with