Yun Sun
Since the war in Gaza broke out, China’s role in the region has raised many questions. Only a year ago, China impressed the world when it successfully brokered the Saudi-Iran peace deal. That success inflated hopes that China, lacking the historical entanglements of other great powers, could somehow magically chart a new and effective course to de-escalation and conflict resolution in the Middle East.
China has not delivered that success. China does have a vision and desire for an alternative security architecture in the Middle East and has elaborated on its plan since 2018. Instead of replacing the United States as a security guarantor, which China doesn’t want to do and doesn’t have the resources or ability to do, China’s vision for the future stability of the Middle East is aimed at creating a new system that would displace U.S. dominance without replacing it. The effectiveness of such a framework is questionable, but that is not China’s prime concern. China wants to demolish the U.S.-led security architecture, but not necessarily to build a new structure with Beijing on top.
For the last few decades, China has enjoyed the security provided and maintained by the United States in the Middle East. Chinese analysts dispute that China has been freeriding, not only because they see economic engagement as an avenue for stabilization, but also because they see U.S. policy as a source of instability. But with 53 percent of its crude oil imports coming from the region, China has an intrinsic interest in maintaining the regional peace and stability so oil production and transportation will not be disrupted. There is a clear Chinese recognition that China does not have the resources to get into the weeds of the conflicts, their origins, and their potential solutions. Nor does China want to. China has long positioned itself as a customer and a client of Middle Eastern oil, a role that is believed to give China much power but without the burden for China to provide peace.
But China does have alternative visions for the regional security architecture. In 2018, President Xi Jinping made a formal proposal to “forge a new Middle East security architecture that is common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable.” In an ideal world, the security arrangement China says it wants in the region would be based on the accommodation of security concerns of all countries, consisting of political and security dialogues, led and managed by regional countries and abiding by U.N. charters. When Xi formally introduced the concept of his Global Security Initiative—China’s grand vision for the international security system and governance—the “new security architecture in the Middle East” was quickly absorbed into it.
China’s “new” security architecture is set up in contrast to the “old” security architecture led by the United States based on the U.S. alliance system in the region. The substance of China’s proposal—focused on dialogue and accommodation—is process-oriented rather than result-oriented.
China has little interest in replacing the United States as the security guarantor in the region, but instead proposes a security architecture among regional players with China playing a critical role.
China identifies two key security challenges to the peace and stability in the Middle East: the Israel-Palestine issue and the issue of the Gulf (primarily between Iran and the rest of the Gulf countries). On both issues, Chinese visions have focused on regional security dialogues, including a broader, more authoritative and influential international peace conference on Israel-Palestine issues, as well as a Gulf Security Dialogue Platform. Beijing does not see itself playing the role of a guarantor or even embed itself as an arbitrator in the crisis. Instead, it positions itself as a convener and potentially a mediator, if the regional countries concur.
The framing is an idealistic vision for what Middle East security should or could look like, but considerations of practicality and feasibility are lacking. For China, the current security framework is not working, so there is a need for conversations about a new framework. But China hasn’t provided any details of what that framework would look like, and would leave it for the region to decide.
Although Beijing criticizes the U.S. presence for destabilizing the region, it is not aiming to substitute itself for Washington. Given China’s limited defense budget and even more limited bandwidth outside its primary theater in the West Pacific currently, replacing the United States would be far-fetched. And Beijing does not believe that the United States would actually withdraw from a strategically important region such as the Middle East either, which makes challenging and criticizing U.S. policy relatively cost-free.
A genuinely absent Washington might create the very instability China fears, raising oil prices and disrupting existing relationships, but Beijing doesn’t think that will happen. More importantly, although China is not aiming to replace the United States, it will not miss the opportunity to bleed U.S. leadership or credibility, or to capitalize on the resentment regional countries feel toward the hegemon.
The most comparable case might be Afghanistan. Before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, China had been critical of the U.S. war and role in Afghanistan for decades. While enjoying the security provided by the United States for its own dealings in Afghanistan, China was happy to take every opportunity to blame the U.S. presence for the chaos and instability inside the country. But when the United States did decide to leave, China was as concerned as it was infuriated because it was left to deal with an inferno of potential security threats, and it immediately turned to attacking the “irresponsible withdrawal.”
China did not pick up in Afghanistan where the United States left off it. In fact, China opted for a regional, multilateral approach to Afghanistan as a challenge rather than a unilateral one to assume responsibilities. It set up a regional framework—the Foreign Ministers Meeting of Afghanistan’s Neighbors (plus Russia)—to collectively approach the security and development challenges of Afghanistan. The meeting is also one of the primary channels China uses to deal with the Taliban regime. It has produced few concrete results so far, but the goal is more about damage control rather than expanding opportunities. China might well do the same in the Middle East, should a power vacuum ever actually emerge there.
China has plenty of appeal in a region often unhappy with the U.S. approach. Instead of abandoning the United States for China for security, the region looks to Beijing for leverage to counterbalance. For the vigorous players in the region, great power competition means agency and power, rather than dismay or despair. While there is appetite for China’s engagement, especially among like-minded countries that share China’s authoritarian conviction, the confidence and interest in China as a key security player is much less evident. As such, they might as well show interest in China’s proposals—while ending up disillusioned by the reality.
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