In a recent meeting in Cairo with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, President Xi Jinping of China spoke briefly about the hot geopolitical issues of the moment: Palestine, the ongoing US-Iran conflict, and maritime security all got a mention. Xi’s speech also offered an, albeit vague, insight into the Chinese vision for regional order in the Middle East. Any new security framework, he argued, must be cooperative, comprehensive and sustainable. It must also oppose external influence, and provide a basis for the people of the region to become “Masters of their own affairs”.
It is a testimony to the general reticence of Chinese leaders about their involvement in the Middle East that this speech has been welcomed as a new departure in Chinese regional policy. But none of what Xi said is new. For decades, Chinese government officials have been calling on Middle Eastern actors to provide for their own security in a multilateral context. They have also long championed the traditional Chinese doctrine of “non-intervention in domestic affairs” across the Middle East.
During the Gulf Crisis of 1990-1, Beijing refused to support a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing the use of force to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. In 1997-98, it rejected US attempts to gain international backing for limited military action against Iraq. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it abstained on a Security Counil Resolution to sanction the Taliban in Afghanistan; it abstained again in both 2004 and 2006 on Security Council draft resolutions calling for Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon.
The decision not to veto the March 2011 Security Council resolution on Libya was the first time that Beijing chose not to block a Security Council-backed military action against another government on human rights or humanitarian grounds. But speculation that this marked a new beginning in China’s Middle East involvement was short-lived. The following October, China vetoed a Security Council draft resolution condemning the Syrian government that would have provided the basis for sanctions against the Assad regime.
This consistent refusal to endorse the use of force or economic sanctions in the Middle East has allowed China to highlight its non-hegemonic intentions. Similarly, its wider refusal to involve itself in controversial regional issues has enabled it to present itself as a responsible external stakeholder. Both feed into a Chinese narrative that looks to distinguish itself from other major external powers operating in the region – including Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Almost two centuries ago, Napoleon’s diplomatic troubleshooter Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, made the shrewd observation that non-intervention is a “mysterious word that signified roughly the same thing as intervention”. In these terms, one can view China’s nominally depoliticized approach as a form of intervention that can, like hard power interventions, have a real impact on regional political and social structures. To put this another way: China intervenes both when it votes for and vetoes UN resolutions.
That said, China’s particular type of intervention in the Middle East has actively avoided making ideological or political demands on its partners. In part, this is evidence of a pragmatic acceptance of Washington’s long-time strategic and military dominance of the Middle East. China, to put it simply, has had neither the capabilities nor political will to challenge the US. Instead, it has opted to be one of the biggest economic beneficiaries of the US provision over the decades of regional stability, security and order.
This suited China as long as Washington did not look to curtail its rising interests in the region. It also worked for local actors who welcomed the Chinese approach as pro-business without impinging on their independence and autonomy. But the more that the US has struggled to impose security, stability and order, the more this status quo has become unworkable. In response, China has revised both the limits and focus of its regional involvement, and local leaders have come to view China as an increasingly central external actor beyond energy and trade.
It is no surprise that the first China-Arab Cooperation Forum was held in 2005, one of the worst years for the US military in Iraq. The following year, at the second of these Forums, both sides launched a “new partnership”. The final communiqué of the 2010 Forum went further. It announced an upgrading of existing ties to the strategic level and noted a Chinese willingness to increase its direct involvement in security and political issues of concern to Arab States.
The Arab Spring of 2011 added an urgency to China’s regional involvement and subsequently one can identify three substantive changes in the Chinese approach: increased alignment with the political preferences of local actors in its public and private diplomacy; deeper bilateral engagement on security issues with key Mena partners; and a new strategy for dealing bilaterally with traditional rivals, including Israel and the Arab world, Iran and Israel, and Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Despite these Chinese efforts, recent events, culminating in the US-Iran-Israel war, have highlighted the precarious state of disequilibrium in the Middle East. While energy, trade and tech remain the main drivers of Chinese regional engagement, Beijing is finding it increasingly difficult to avoid entanglement in regional crises. For example, in his recent Cairo speech, Xi promised to work with local actors to reduce disruptions around the chokepoints of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb.
Yet the more China feels the need to contribute to regional stability the harder it is for it to present itself as nothing more than a disinterested trade partner of the region. At the same time, China’s inherent pragmatism provides it with the flexibility to adapt to new situations as they arise. How China does so, and the success of these efforts, will be crucial to how it contributes to regional stability . More than that, how China chooses to respond to Middle
East crises will also influence its own evolution as a superpower on the world stage in years to come.
- The writer is professor of International Politics and director of the Small States and Energy Studies Programs at Georgetown Univeristy in Qatar @RoryDavidMiller