Growing US-China rivalry risks stability in Middle East

This is the last of a two-part article written by Dr. James M. Dorsey, a Middle East expert, about the rivalry in the Middle East between the U.S. and China. ― ED.

By Dr. James M. Dorsey

China's conflict management diplomacy may not go down well with the Gulf Arabs, notably Saudi Arabia, judging by what for Saudi media was a blunt and rare recent critique of the People's Republic.

In a game of shadow-boxing in which intellectuals and journalists front for officials who prefer the luxury of plausible deniability, Saudi Arabia responded bluntly in a column authored by Baria Alamuddin, a Lebanese journalist who regularly writes columns for Saudi media.

Blunt rebuke

Alamuddin warned that China was being lured to financially bankrupt Lebanon by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia militia. She suggested in a column published by Arab News, the kingdom's primary English-language newspaper, that Hezbollah's seduction of China was occurring against the backdrop of a potential massive 25-year cooperation agreement between the People's Republic and Iran.

“Chinese business and investment are welcome, but Beijing has a record of partnering with avaricious African and Asian elites willing to sell out their sovereignty. Chinese diplomacy is ruthless, mercantile and self-interested, with none of the West's lip service to human rights, rule of law or cultural interchange,” Alamuddin charged.

She quoted a Middle East expert from a conservative U.S. think tank as warning that “vultures from Beijing are circling, eyeing tasty infrastructure assets like ports and airports as well as soft power influence through Lebanon's universities.”

Abandoning Saudi official and media support for some of the worst manifestations of Chinese autocratic behavior, including the brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang and the repression of democratic expression and dissident, Alamuddin did not mince words.

Alamuddin went on to assert that “witnessing how dissident voices have been mercilessly throttled in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, Lebanese citizens are justifiably fearful that their freedoms and culture would be crushed under heavy-handed, authoritarian Chinese and Iranian dominance, amid the miserable, monolithic atmosphere Hezbollah seeks to impose.”

Hair in the soup

Further complicating Chinese efforts to nudge the Middle East toward some degree of stabilization are China's technology and military sales with no constraints on their use or regard for the potential geopolitical fallout.

The sales include drone and ballistic missile technology as well as the building blocks for a civilian nuclear program for Saudi Arabia, which would significantly enhance the kingdom's ability to develop nuclear weapons should it decide to do so at some point in future.

These sales have fueled fears, for different reasons, in Jerusalem and Tehran of a new regional arms race in the region. Israel's concerns are heightened by the Trump administration's efforts to limit Israeli dealings with China that involve sensitive technologies while remaining silent about Chinese military assistance to Saudi Arabia.

Washington's indifference may be set to change, assuming that the recent rejection by the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi of an offer by the UAE to donate hundreds of COVID-19 test kits for screening of its staff was a shot across the Gulf's bow. A U.S. official said the tests were rejected because they were either Chinese-made or involved BGI Genomics, a Chinese company active in the Gulf, which raised concerns about patient privacy.

The American snub was designed to put a dent in China's “Silk Road” health diplomacy centered on its experience with the pandemic and predominance in the manufacturing of personal protective and medical equipment as well as pharmaceutics.

Major battlefield

Digital and satellite technology in which Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei's 5G cellular technology rollout is but one component seems set to be a major battlefield.

U.S. officials have warned that the inclusion of Huawei in Gulf networks could jeopardize sensitive communications, particularly given the multiple U.S. bases in the region, including the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and the forward headquarters of the U.S. military's Central Command, or Centcom, in Qatar.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker said the United States had advised its Middle Eastern partners in the region to take “a careful look at investment, major contracts and infrastructure projects.” He warned that certain engagements with China could “come at the expense of the region's prosperity, stability, fiscal viability and longstanding relationship with the United States.”

Schenker cautioned further that agreements with Huawei meant that “basically all the information and your data is going to Huawei, property of the Chinese Communist Party.” The same, he said, was true for Chinese health technology. “When you take a COVID kit from a Chinese genomics company, your DNA is property of the Chinese Communist Party, and all the implications that go with that.”

The rollout of China's BeiDou Satellite Navigation System (BDS), which competes with the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia's GLONASS and Europe's Galileo, sets the stage for battle, with countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Turkey having signed up for what is known as China's Digital Silk Road Initiative.

So far, Pakistan is the only country known to have been granted access to BeiDou's military applications, which provide more precise guidance for missiles, ships and aircraft.

Promoting “the development of the digital service sector, such as cross-border e-commerce, smart cities, telemedicine, and internet finance (and) … technological progress including computing, big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and quantum computing,” the initiative will enable China to enhance its regional influence and leverage in economics as well as security.

China's state-owned international broadcaster, China Global Television Network (CGTN), implicitly anticipated U.S. resistance to its Middle Eastern partners being roped into a Chinese digital world when it declared that “a navigation system is like a gold key of your home that should be kept only in your own hands, not others.”

The successful launch in July of a mission to Mars, the Arab world's first interplanetary initiative, suggested that the UAE was seeking to balance its engagement with the United States and China in an effort not to get caught in the growing divergence between the two powers.

The mission, dubbed Hope Probe, was coordinated with U.S. rather than Chinese institutions, including the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and NASA's Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG). It launched from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center.

You can run, but you can't hide

A continuously deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and China is a worst-case scenario for Middle Eastern states. It would progressively reduce their ability to walk a fine line between the two major powers. That would be particularly true if U.S. efforts to force its partners to limit their ties to the People's Republic compel China into defiance by adopting a more geopolitically assertive posture in the region.

Ironically, the U.S. desire to recalibrate its engagement with the Middle East and a realization on the part of Saudi Arabia and Iran that their interests are best served by a reduction of tension rooted in an arrangement based on a nonaggression agreement could serve as a catalyst for a new Gulf security architecture. This could involve embedding the U.S. defense umbrella, geared to protect Gulf states against Iran, into a multilateral structure that would include rather than exclude Iran and involve Russia, China and India.

A more multilateral security arrangement potentially could reduce pressure on the Gulf states to pick sides between the United States and China and would include China in ways that it can manage its greater engagement without being drawn into the region's conflicts in ways that have frustrated the U.S. for decades.

None of the parties are at a point where they are willing to publicly entertain the possibility of such a collective security architecture. Even if they were, negotiating a new arrangement is likely to be a tedious and tortuous process.

Nonetheless, such a multilateral security architecture would ultimately serve all parties' interests and may be the only way of reducing tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran and managing their differences, which would in turn help China secure its energy and economic interests in the region.

This reality enhances the likelihood that the glass is half full in terms of China ultimately participating in such a multilateral security arrangement, rather than half empty, with China refraining from participation.

Dr. James M. Dorsey (jmd@jmdonline.org), an award-winning journalist, is a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He is also a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.