China thinks it can avoid Middle Eastern traps that caught America

CHINA’S LEADERS are trying to reinvent how great powers operate in the Middle East. They have busied themselves in recent years signing trade deals and co-operation agreements with regional powers that are, most of the time, rivals or foes of each other. China talks of its warm ties with Israel and Palestine, and has invited both to send envoys to Beijing for peace talks. In the Middle East, a region where trust is hard to find, China is hailed as a reliable supplier of covid-19 vaccines and surveillance technology to Arabs and non-Arabs alike. The world’s largest oil importer, China is an irreplaceable trade partner both for Iran, the would-be leader of the Shia world, and for Saudi Arabia, its Sunni nemesis. More than once, Chinese warships have conducted separate exercises with the Iranian and Saudi navies, a few weeks apart.

Chinese leaders sound sure that their country’s distinctive approach to geopolitics—one that stresses interests over values, and assumes that most foreigners can be bought for a price—will help them avoid the quagmires into which other outsiders in the Middle East have so often stumbled, from America to the colonial powers of old Europe. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, while visiting six Middle Eastern countries in late March, deplored “the bad consequences inflicted on the region by external interference”. In Iran Mr Wang signed a 25-year co-operation agreement. Its details remain murky, but the deal is thought to involve the exchange of cheap Iranian oil for help building telecommunications networks, hospitals, underground railways and, it is rumoured, ports on some of the world’s most strategic waterways.