Chinese leadership has a stabilizing impact

Ross, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, and Alex Vatanka, the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. “The Middle East Might Be Moving Toward Stability” June 26, 2023 dmr

China’s new diplomatic role in the Middle East is another factor that could help sustain trends of de-escalation. Beijing eschews the U.S. approach of offshore balancing against Iran via Saudi Arabia and Israel; it sees such an approach as escalatory. Rather, China is taking a more neutral approach to regional conflicts, on the premise it will calm rather than stoke tensions. Several Iranian sources have highlighted China’s emerging critical role as a regional stabilizer. Iranian state-run media reported that after Iran attacked Saudi petroleum assets in 2019, China warned Tehran that such acts undermine its interests, given Beijing’s energy security policy is based on unhindered import of Saudi and Gulf oil. Beijing is the largest trade partner for both Iran and Saudi Arabia, although Chinese-Saudi trade is about six times larger than Chinese-Iranian trade. Given that China receives half its oil from the Persian Gulf, its energy security necessitates it push for policies that reduce the likelihood of a conflict between the Iranians in Tehran and the Saudis in Riyadh. It remains to be seen whether China has the heft and political will to help Iran and Saudi Arabia pursue economic integration, the sort that the European continent saw at the end of the Second World War. This will be a big test for China. Perhaps counterintuitively, China’s diplomatic forays in the Middle East could push Washington toward diplomacy too. China’s moves might have served as the impetus for recent talk of an informal deal between Iran and the United States on the nuclear issue. Reputationally, the White House now must fight the narrative of China as a peacemaker and the United States as a warmonger that only wants to sell weapons to the Middle East. On balance and in the short term, Riyadh stands to gain the most from China’s involvement. Riyadh wins if China can press Tehran to force the Houthis in Yemen to reach a political agreement with Saudi Arabia and stop threatening to target Saudi infrastructure, trade, and economic plans. The Saudis also win if the Iranians fail to do so, as Riyadh can then showcase to Beijing that it is the Iranians who are not serious about de-escalation. The diplomatic resumption also has another benefit for Riyadh: In the event of a military conflict between Iran and the United States or Iran and Israel, the Saudis have now made it far less likely that Saudi Arabia will become a target of Iranian retaliation. The short-term win for Tehran is that this agreement with Riyadh might push Saudi Arabia away from Israel, at least for now. More importantly, at a minimum, the deal can signal a new era of “cold peace” between Tehran and Riyadh, during which both sides cease to interfere in each other’s internal affairs. Both sides consider this promise of non-interference as pivotal, a message that was repeated during the June 17 visit of Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud to Tehran.