The Washington Post-Chinas cautious curious Middle East game

2023-11-13T16:57:21.265Z

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When it comes to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, China is taking a back seat. President Xi Jinping’s first public comments about the course of the conflict, which has captured global attention and diverted the energies and focus of the Biden administration, came almost two weeks after it began. Xi showed more political restraint than his autocratic fellow traveler Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in a recent speech said his “fists clench and eyes tear up” when he sees the human suffering caused by Israel’s bombardments — never mind the arc of destruction unleashed by Putin’s own wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.

But as Xi goes to meet President Biden this week at a summit of Pacific rim nations in San Francisco, the war in the Middle East will shadow the deliberations. China took over the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council at the beginning of the month and has cast itself as a world power eager for peace and capable of brokering a cease-fire. It has also sparred with the United States over competing Security Council resolutions they helped put forward in recent weeks about the war, each vetoed by the other.

“Countries should uphold the moral conscience, rather than clinging on to geopolitical calculations, let alone double standards,” China’s U.N. ambassador, Zhang Jun, said last month, gesturing to the United States’ shielding of Israel from international censure. “China will continue to stand on the side of international fairness and justice, on the side of international law, and on the side of the legitimate aspirations of the Arab and Islamic world.”

Chinese diplomats have toured various Middle Eastern capitals since Oct. 7, when the Islamist group Hamas launched a brazen strike on southern Israel from Gaza that marked the bloodiest single day in the history of modern Israel. Whereas the Kremlin hosted a delegation of Hamas officials at the end of last month, China has been more circumspect. Wang Di, Beijing’s head of West Asian and North African affairs, was in Tehran over the weekend and cited an “urgent need for cease-fire” while also welcoming “consistent progress” in Sino-Iranian ties. Iran, the main foreign power backing Hamas, recently joined the BRICS bloc of non-Western nations, within which China is a key player.

China’s influence in the Middle East is growing, but it’s still somewhat lightweight. The budding superpower flexed its geopolitical muscles earlier this year when it helped broker a rapprochement between longtime rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. In August, China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, even suggested that Beijing was presiding over a “wave of reconciliation” in the Middle East, as the region’s governments prioritized their societies’ development alongside various partnerships with the Asian economic titan.

Now, though, the conflict threatens to expand along well-worn fault lines: Pro-Iranian proxies are escalating actions against U.S. and Israeli interests, while a U.S.-engineered process of Arab normalization with Israel is in deep freeze. In all this, China appears more interested in discursive posturing than actual diplomatic effort. It’s expending little to none of its leverage over Iran to curb the Islamic republic’s activities or rein in its proxies.

Instead, it’s cultivating an “anti-Western neutrality,” as Ahmed Aboudoh of Britain’s Chatham House think tank explained — that is, “neutrality that stops short of condemning any country or force that undermines Western centrality in the global order (rather than explicitly lending support to Hamas).” This has clear rhetorical ends given the groundswell of anger in the Middle East and much of the Global South over the perceived double standards in play as the West has enabled Israel’s disproportionate onslaught on Gaza.

The Biden administration, which sees competition with China as the key driving concern of its foreign policy, is aware of the backlash it faces and has quietly tried to restrain the worst impulses of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. But it’s still viewed as complicit in the soaring death toll in Gaza.

“There is a degree to which people in the Arab world and the Global South are drawing a line between Gaza destruction and the presidential embrace of Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told my colleague Michael Birnbaum. “There’s a way that the United States is hitched to what the Israelis want to do, whether the United States wants to do it or not.”

Israel presides over a new Palestinian catastrophe

China, on the other hand, is being simply opportunistic. It can play up its solidarity with the broader Muslim and Arab world, even as it carries on its persecution of countless Uyghur Muslims in the region of Xinjiang — a cause that has not engendered anywhere close to the same attention as that of the Palestinians. “That particular issue doesn’t resonate in the ‘Muslim world’ the same way that the Palestinian issue does,” Neysun Mahboubi, director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Wall Street Journal. He added that while the Biden administration courts global ire in its support of Israel, there “is an opportunity for China to shape an image of being a responsible world power, and more so than its competitors, including the United States.”

But optics can only take you so far. Beijing’s economic clout is considerable, but its capacity to actually shape major policy outcomes elsewhere is more fledgling. “The reality is that Beijing in many respects is a ‘great power lite’ in the Middle East and rest of the world, certainly outside of China’s own Asia-Pacific neighborhood,” wrote Andrew Scobell of the U.S. Institute of Peace. “Beijing is also risk averse because [Chinese Communist Party] leaders fear failure and are afraid of global overreach.”

Still, China can find benefit in an overwhelmed Washington, fighting fires on multiple fronts. “China does not aspire to replace the US position in the Middle East, but will undoubtedly be pleased to see the US again drawn into a conflict in the region,” Aboudoh wrote. “Chinese experts believe the more strategic non-East Asian theatres that require Washington’s attention, the more time and space China gains to assert its strategic domination in the Indo-Pacific.”

“No one … can watch the United States transfer huge amounts of American artillery munitions, smart bombs, missiles, and other weaponry to Ukraine and Israel without recognizing that American stockpiles are being depleted,” wrote Indian geopolitical commentator Brahma Chellaney. “For Xi, who has called Taiwan’s incorporation into the People’s Republic a ‘historic mission,’ the longer these wars continue, the better.”