When the news emerged last week of a resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, most immediate Western commentary focused nervously on how this reflected China’s growing global ambitions.
Because China had brokered the agreement, U.S. and European commentators were quick to see any putative advance for Beijing as a loss for Washington. For well over a decade already, this has been a familiar refrain about China’s relations with other parts of the world, particularly Africa. There, the common logic suggested that with Beijing solidifying its trade, investment, and political relationships on that continent, it must be because Washington’s relevance was fading.
For the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, this was only tolerable to the extent that Africa had scarcely ever ranked high in its scheme of things. News about China’s growing influence in the Middle East, though, was taken as something much more portentous because in the postwar era, the Middle East has always occupied a central place in U.S. conceptions of global power.
The Chinese-sponsored breakthrough in reestablishing ties between rivals as fierce as Riyadh and Tehran have been misread on many levels, and if U.S. security and prosperity sit on the foundation of the country’s international influence, understanding the implications of these events demands a response that is both deeper and more detached from reflex and emotion than what immediately followed last week’s surprising news out of the Middle East.
The first thing to be said is that this diplomacy was, above all, an advance for Saudi Arabia—far more even than China, which mostly had the opportunist’s good sense to jump on a train that showed inclinations of moving in a fruitful direction—no mere thing, it is true. Riyadh has been seeking ways to lower its temperature with Tehran for years, working notably—but without success—through Iraqi intermediaries.
Since the gruesome 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA concluded was personally ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the government of Saudi Arabia has been easy to loathe. Briefly forgetting the Gaullist maxim that few statesmen can realistically ignore for long—that countries don’t have friends, only interests—then-U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden pledged in 2019 that he would turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah state.
But keeping Riyadh at arm’s length or worse has proven impossible—not only because of the prodigious size of its oil exports or its large population relative to other countries in its region but also because of Mohammed bin Salman’s diplomatic creativity and doggedness. The Biden administration has thus been crawling back from that vow ever since, with Biden famously traveling to Riyadh last year to fist-bump the young Saudi ruler he had promised to banish from Washington’s good graces.
With this agreement, Riyadh seems to have understood that in a world where it might not be possible after all to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be better off having good functioning relations with its neighbor and rival. Still, this feels more like three-dimensional chess from the Saudis that goes beyond this consideration alone.
By drawing China more deeply into the geopolitical life of the region, Saudi Arabia is using one of the favorite tools of lesser powers that are presented with this opportunity: playing great powers off one another for the smaller powers’ benefit. (To be clear, Iran could be seen doing a bit of this in recent days too—participating in joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Aden with China and Russia. In doing so, Iran is seeking protection against attack by Israel and/or the United States.)
The Saudis’ main concern, though, still seems to be Iran, and diplomatic cooperation with China serves as a way of saying to the United States, “You’re not doing enough to protect us, and if this should continue, we have enough skill and imagination to look elsewhere, even to your biggest rivals.”
It was probably no accident that the Chinese diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East came right on the heels of reports that Saudi Arabia had proffered the idea of full diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for stronger security guarantees from Washington. These were said to include far fewer restrictions on weapons sales and help with building a civilian nuclear power program. China, it should be remembered, builds far more reactors than any other country in the world these days, and it would probably be happy to step in here as well.
Seen this way, Saudi Arabia holds pretty good cards, and it is Washington that is suddenly under pressure to up its game in the Middle East.
I mean no slight in calling Chinese diplomacy opportunistic. Beijing has come a long way in the last generation as a deliverer of global public goods, first through infrastructure construction in Africa and then through its sprawling, if hard to exactly define, Belt and Road Initiative. China now disburses more lending around the globe than the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—mostly, again, for things like port, highway, railroad, and airport construction projects.
Chinese political diplomacy has evolved far less over this time span, however, and Beijing’s statements still often sound timid and full of unsophisticated stock phrases—or, with regard to conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, outright cynical. With its recent Middle East efforts though, Beijing seems to be responding to a signal weakness of U.S. diplomacy in a way that could work to its benefit if it makes this new approach a consistent feature of its foreign policy.
Outside of humanitarian situations, U.S. diplomacy has been obsessed for so long with responding to threats and identifying so-called bad actors that Washington has mostly gotten out of the old-line diplomatic business of providing its good offices to lower tensions around the world. Being the ultimate arbiter of good and bad is a privilege of the extraordinary kind of power that the United States has enjoyed for longer than many readers can remember, but it can be an addictive one that corrodes and ultimately hollows out the credibility of the power that routinely employs it.
To some extent, this has become the case with Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite it being an egregious example of an invasion by a bullying Moscow hoping to engage in old-fashioned territorial aggrandizement at the expense of a much smaller neighbor. Washington—and with it, much of the West—still seems in denial about how much of the world has failed to denounce Russia and carried on with it as if its invasion of Ukraine changed nothing.
This is also the case in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Washington has been so firmly aligned with one side (the former) that it cannot find its voice to meaningfully criticize or apply pressure on it to moderate its behavior, as in the matter of building more settlements in lands claimed by the latter. This is a pattern of behavior that has ultimately deprived Washington of credibility with the Palestinians and, at least on this issue, with the Arab states that have long vowed their support to them.
Some experts would argue that the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords—which established relations between Israel and small Persian Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—were creative but not in any sense so far that points to progress on the Palestinian issue. The United States has said this normalization is not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace, but for some it has the feel of a waiting game—i.e., waiting for the Palestinians to become totally hemmed in and demoralized as well as for bigger Arab countries like Saudi Arabia to lose interest in their cause or maybe sell them out.
China doesn’t have anything like the dense network of alliances that the United States has developed around the world over decades. In fact, the closest thing it has to a real ally is not Russia—which Beijing has so far hesitated to openly provide material support to in its war in Ukraine, despite their so-called no-limits friendship—but rather China’s poor but dangerous neighbor, North Korea.
But Beijing also doesn’t generally go around the world declaring enemies or putting countries on index lists, subject to quick sanction (except where its short list of interests is at stake, such as regarding relations with Taiwan). As such, especially with its economic weight, China is now acquiring the ability to step up with its own good offices to bridge big, dangerous fault lines, such as the one between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
There is clearly a place for principled positions in great-power diplomacy, and to the uneven extent that it lives up to them, the United States has long drawn admiration for defending values like democracy and human rights. China, which has never been in that business, has now shown that there is also a place for its less judgmental, one might say “see-no-evil” approach to diplomacy, which eschews separating good guys from bad and helps establish a least common denominator on the basis of which it can help others get along.
At a few days’ distance from the news of this tentative breakthrough, the people who have busied themselves worrying about how this will reduce U.S. influence in the world mostly come off as looking churlish. They can’t quite articulate why peace between two heavily armed medium powers like this isn’t a pretty good thing in and of itself.
The real question they should be asking is how Washington can revive its own atrophied capacity for good offices in dangerous and long-running disputes too.
