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29 October 2023

Can China Help in the Middle East?

Walter Russell Mead

As Team Biden contemplates the ruins of its Middle East diplomacy and scrambles to throw more U.S. military assets into the region in the hope of deterring Iran, it is looking to an unlikely partner. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi will be in Washington this week for talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Mr. Wang’s visit was originally part of a diplomatic process preparing the way for a trip by President Xi Jinping to next month’s Asia-Pacific economic summit in San Francisco. But as Mr. Blinken underlined in remarks to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, America wants help from China to prevent a wider war in the Middle East.

It isn’t a totally crazy idea. China imports a lot of Middle Eastern oil, and supply shortfalls and price hikes won’t help a Chinese economy struggling with the collapse of its real-estate market and a potential financial crisis. If China does want to play a major role, it is well prepared to do so. Because of a planned handover between China’s 44th and 45th naval escort task forces in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, both forces are currently active in the Persian Gulf, making Beijing, temporarily, the leading naval presence in the strategic waterway.

On paper, Team Biden and Team Xi seem to want pretty much the same things in the Middle East. China’s envoy Zhai Jun is touring the Middle East, Chinese state media reports, to promote dialogue, achieve a cease-fire and restore peace, as well as to promote a two-state solution. That sounds a lot like what Mr. Blinken says.

The outreach to China over the Middle East comes amid other signs of a warming trend in Sino-American relations. Since Messrs. Sullivan and Wang met last spring in Vienna, the American secretaries of state, Treasury and commerce and climate envoy John Kerry have all visited Beijing. Messrs. Sullivan and Wang reunited in Malta last month. Mr. Xi himself sent a friendly message that was read at the Oct. 24 dinner in New York of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He called the U.S.-China relationship crucial to the world and expressed Chinese willingness to cooperate with the U.S. to respond to global challenges.

Turning to China for help in the Middle East would be a shift from the Biden administration’s initial foreign policy. Its early goal was to park Russia and pacify Iran to concentrate America’s economic, diplomatic and military assets on the greater threat of a rising China. Potentially, the new policy could be exactly the opposite: an attempt to park China to focus more effectively on Russia and Iran.

From the standpoint of a rattled administration frantically trying to respond to a string of unanticipated events, there’s a lot to be said for working with Beijing. China, while a more formidable potential adversary than Russia or Iran, has common interests with the U.S. that the two more radical adversaries lack. Both China and America like global economic stability and quiet in the Middle East. Both countries benefit from a world that is open to commerce and investment.

Team Biden’s experiences with a world in flames and Team Xi’s worries about China’s economic problems are probably concentrating minds in Washington and Beijing about options for at least a period of détente.

One hopes for the best, but as the Biden administration has learned, parking adversaries is harder than it looks. China doesn’t want the Middle East consumed in a regional war that causes a global energy crisis, but it does want to break American power in the region. President Obama turned to Russia to bail him out of his embarrassing predicament after he blew off his own red line against Syria’s use of chemical weapons in its civil war. Russia duly “cooperated” by collecting at least some of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile, but the price to American power and prestige was far higher than Mr. Obama understood. To this day, the position Russia gained in Syria by “helping” Mr. Obama is a major factor in the destabilization of the region and the growing danger to American allies.

The Biden administration has pursued a largely effective anti-China policy. It has fostered alignments among America’s regional allies, imposed severe constraints on China’s access to cutting-edge technologies, and pressured European allies to stiffen their posture toward Beijing.

These moves, one suspects, haven’t inspired China’s leaders with much affection for President Biden or a desire to support his re-election. And opposition to the U.S.-based world system lies deep in the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Xi seems influenced by the party’s most hard-line and totalitarian elements.

Rescuing Mr. Biden from a pickle in the Middle East may not be all that high on Mr. Xi’s priorities. More likely, China hopes that a weakened America, facing a cascade of international threats, torn by internal polarization and dissension, and heading for a contentious election is losing its ability to manage international crises.

Having seen how great a price Team Biden has been willing to pay in trying to park Russia and Iran and how slow Washington has been to grasp the adversarial nature of these relationships, the Chinese may be tempted to toy with the administration as Vladimir Putin and Iran did, pocketing more concessions for an agreement that never quite comes.

There is only one thing we can be sure of. The hungrier Team Biden looks, the more expensive China’s “help” will be.

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