Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
China pursues Mideast peace
U.S. approach for region hasn’t gotten job done
China has launched a major Mideast policy move that offers hope for a more peaceful world. Fair disclosure: I visited China four times between 1995-2010. I have had wonderful interactions with many Chinese physics educators, including the Communist Party’s appointed representative for physics education. Chinese companies published two editions of my college physics textbook. In my opinion, China’s history is an example of how a large, destitute nation can lift itself by its own bootstraps.
In early December, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia for three days. Despite the White House’s warning that this effort by China was “not conducive” to the international order, Xi talked with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, the crown prince and Saudi leaders about energy, oil, cooperation, the Arab Spring and more.
Many observers contrasted the Saudis’ warm welcome to President Xi with the cool treatment President Biden received during his recent visit. The visit was widely regarded as a sign that Saudi Arabia will move closer to Beijing and Moscow.
China’s Mideast diplomacy bore fruit on March 10 when diplomats from Iran and Saudi Arabia met in Beijing with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, to sign an agreement restoring ties between the longstanding enemies. The Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Iranian embassy in Riyadh will reopen within a few months. Given China’s stake in this agreement, my guess is it will have enduring positive ramifications not only for the Mideast but for the world.
The standoff between Iran, the leading Shia Muslim nation, and Saudi Arabia, the leading Sunni Muslim nation, has had deadly consequences for 1,400 years. The two nations compete for political power in the Mideast in a rivalry that has roots in a religion and continues to wield enormous power over its nearly 2 billion believers. The two sects have closely matching beliefs but they differ over who should have inherited the mantle of the Prophet Muhammad. He died in 632 A.D. leaving no male heirs and no direction as to who should succeed him. Sunnis, who today comprise 88% of all Muslims, believe the successor needed to remain in Muhammad’s bloodline, while Shiites believe Muhammad’s closest friend, Abu Bakr, was meant to be the new leader.
For a wonderful book about the modern-day fallout from all this, read “Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the forty-year rivalry that unraveled the Middle East,” by Kim Ghattas. The author is a Lebanese scholar with a deep knowledge of Mideast history.
The consequences of the rivalry include a proxy war in Yemen between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government, fighting in Lebanon involving Iranbacked Hezbollah forces, and the ongoing war in Syria between Saudi-backed Sunni rebels and the Iran-backed government. The deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia could end such wars. It could never have been brokered by America, which has only negative relations with Iran.
A more peaceful Mideast, a region that has long suffered from war and religious extremism, would be enormously helpful in our militarized and terrorized world.
The peace deal points to the rising diplomatic and peacemaking role of China in world affairs. Beijing’s global infrastructure project, the “Belt and Road Initiative,” invests in new overland transportation routes through landlocked Central Asia. It has been compared with America’s Marshall Plan, which provided foreign aid to Europe after World War Two. The project will, according to the World Bank, strengthen the economies of participating countries.
America has frequently tried to impose peace on the Mideast, using military power as its primary instrument. Bombs and bullets were our approach to the problems of Libya in 1986, Iraq in 1990, Iraq in 2001, Afghanistan during 2001-2021 and Syria since 2011. As we should have learned in Vietnam, America’s blunt military hammer causes immense suffering and solves nothing.
The United States has been trying to establish a “rules-based international order” for decades. It’s an admirable goal, but the United Nations, not the USA, is the right organization to determine and enforce such rules.
We have set ourselves up as the champion of democracy, but democracy is challenging to establish or maintain and most nations handle it poorly. America’s democratic failings are all too obvious: a high poverty rate, high incarceration rate, government by the rich, rioting in the nation’s capital, the proliferation of guns and violence, and much more.
America needs to mend its own problems, stop issuing hypocritical criticisms of everybody else, and try to help by providing constructive projects rather than U. S. military control.