China, the United States, and the Reconfiguration of Middle East Geopolitics: New Possibilities for Conflict and Order

This article first appeared in the SiC Report “The Global South in an Era of Great Power Competition. Click here to access the introduction and a full pdf download of the Report.

By Waleed Hazbun

Abstract: In the past two decades China has expanded its influence in the Middle East, working towards what I call “soft integration,” focused on building economic ties through trade and infrastructure development. In contrast, the United States has continued to prioritize what I call “hard integration,” focused on strategic alliances with security commitments, basing of military assets, and the integration of regional defense systems. An ongoing challenge is that the two integration processes are increasingly encountering points of conflict leading to stresses in regional geopolitics. A pressing question for the future is how the United States and China will adapt to these stresses. I argue that a U.S. role as a regional security provider and an expanding Chinese role fostering economic connectivity could coexist productively. Doing so, however, will require the development of a new set of norms for geopolitical competition and mutual embracing of a more pluralist vision for global order. Failure to do so risks increased instability in the Middle East and heightens the possibilities for great power conflict. 

Introduction

Some initial reporting of the announcement in March 2023 that China had helped broker the normalization of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggested the event signaled a shift in the regional geopolitical order. Chinese officials could represent the agreement as a product of its recently launched “Global Security Initiative” and claim that China was a “force for peace, stability, and multipolarity.”¹ Measured against the United States’ strategic posture in the region, however, China’s regional geopolitical influence remained limited. The United States publicly welcomed the agreement and efforts to de-escalate regional tensions while continuing to make clear that the U.S. remains the only significant security provider for states in the region. In the months following, the United States worked hard to bring about a normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, two of Iran’s longstanding regional rivals. Such an agreement, U.S. officials contend, would mark a major geopolitical shift: consolidating Israel’s central role in the region’s security architecture, while anchoring an anti-Iran coalition, most likely, with U.S. security guarantees to Saudi Arabia.

While efforts towards Israeli-Saudi normalization were interrupted by the Gaza-Israel conflict in October 2023, current U.S. fears about China’s role in the Middle East risk sustaining excessive U.S. security commitments in the region while facilitating a slide towards great power conflict. In contrast, this essay offers an alternative framework to envision possible dynamics towards a more stable regional order.

This approach begins by highlighting the contrasting approaches the United States and China have taken towards the region. Having had a limited role in the Middle East for most of the 20^th century, in the past two decades China has expanded its influence, working towards what I call “soft integration” that focuses on economic ties including trade, infrastructure development, and relationship networks.² In contrast, the United States has continued to prioritize what I call “hard integration,” focused on strategic alliances with security commitments, basing of military assets, and the integration of regional defense systems. While soft integration allows regional states to maintain diverse interactions with multiple parties, hard integration seeks closer and more exclusive ties: hard integration can offer military security, soft integration can address aspects of human security needs like poverty reduction, economic development and knowledge transfers. 

Viewed along these multiple registers, I argue that a U.S. role as a regional security provider and an expanding Chinese role fostering economic connectivity could coexist productively. Strategic competition between the United States and China could continue with these external powers offering different but complementary services to states in the region. Such an approach might be the best way to accommodate the efforts of regional states to seek increased strategic autonomy while preferring strategic hedging over commitment to exclusive alignments. 

An ongoing challenge, however, is that the two integration processes are increasingly encountering points of conflict leading to stresses and fractures in regional geopolitics. A pressing question for the future of the region is how the United States and China will adapt to these stresses in the Middle East as they increasingly run into conflict elsewhere and offer rival visions for global order. The United States has come to view China’s expanding soft integration in the Middle East as a threat to its expanding hard integration and seeks to contain China’s regional as well as global role. At the same time, China may be working to counter U.S. hard integration by driving a wedge between regional states and the United States, while slowly expanding its own, albeit limited, forms of hard integration. The failure to develop a new set of norms for global geopolitical competition and a more pluralist vision for global order will likely risk increased instability in the Middle East and heighten the possibilities for future great power conflict. 

The Limits of Hard Integration in an Era of Turbulence 

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has repeatedly sought to use its unrivaled power position in the Middle East to establish a near-hegemonic regional order. In the 1990s, within the context of a global strategy of enlargement and integration of a U.S.-led liberal international order, U.S. policy makers understood hard and soft integration as deeply interconnected. The consolidation of the European Union as an integrated economic space would not have been possible had it not overlapped with NATO’s goal of collective security. Once the Cold War ended, the United States was able to expand its global military posture while also promoting neoliberal policies and global economic integration. 

Across the Middle East, in the 1990s the United States envisioned the Arab-Israeli peace process at the center of processes expanding the scope of hard and soft integration. It was a flawed process, but the United States’ approach sought to define the parameters and boundaries for both hard and soft integration across the region. The multilateral working groups established by the Madrid Peace Conference were followed by the MENA Summits that would build from the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace treaty. These efforts were challenged by the anti-normalization movements in Egypt and Jordan and then derailed by the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000 and the rise of the second intifada. The United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the broader strategy of regional transformation promoted by the George W. Bush administration made a second effort at forging a hegemonic regional order beginning with regime change in Iraq and programs of free trade and economic reform across the region.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, shattered the post-Cold War era vision for regional order through U.S.-led hard and soft integration. Political order in Iraq broke down and U.S. forces battled both an insurgency and transnational jihadists. Meanwhile, Iran and its regional allies sought to contest the United States’ presence in the region and mobilized its own network of hard integration between Iran, Syria, Hizballah and other non-state actors across the region. With increasing regional conflicts in the wake of the Arab uprisings, many regional states became torn between rival configurations of hard integration involving regional states, non-state actors, and external powers. As a result, in the past decade many areas of conflict have been fragmented into zones controlled by rival networks of hard integration within a turbulent regional system.

Under President Biden, the focus of U.S. policy in the region has sought to consolidate several rival networks managed by states that retain close ties to the United States, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel. The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy states that in the Middle East the United States will “eschew grand designs in favor of more practical steps” and the Coordinator for the Middle East at the National Security Council, Brett McGurk, has explained Biden’s approach as going “back to basics,” focused on rebuilding traditional alliances and strengthening those partnerships.³ The “Back to Basics” approach seeks to reassure U.S. allies with military aid, training, and a strong posture of continued U.S. force in the region. While the United States continues to offer aid, it no longer offers ambitious visions for soft integration as capital from the Arab Gulf states and commercial ties to China have come to drive economic change more than U.S.-backed neoliberal economic policies. Rather, the United States’ focus has been to sustain its traditional alliances and strengthen the military capacity of allies through their hard integration with U.S. forces and regional partners. At the center of this effort, McGurk explains, is the building of “an integrated air and maritime defense architecture in the region.”⁴

U.S. officials have advanced this integration in the political realm through agreements such as the Abraham Accords and the Negev Forum, which have accelerated Israeli cooperation with other U.S. partners, such as the UAE. Military cooperation has also been developed through joint exercises, efforts to promote interoperability, and collaborative operations such as the Combined Maritime Forces. More broadly, McGurk states that the United States envisions an “interconnected, prosperous, and stable region over the medium and longer term.”⁵ The United States is counting on more militarily capable allies to help deter rivals such as Iran and avoid the need for future U.S. interventions. 

One challenge of the “Back to Basics” approach, however, is that the Middle East is no longer embedded in a bi-polar Cold War or unipolar post-Cold War framework. Rather, the region is an emerging multipolar system at the regional and global levels. Even if the United States remains by far the most powerful state and the main (if not exclusive) external security provider, it no longer serves as the exclusive and dominant architect for regional order. Not only are Russia and China seeking more influence globally, in the past decade across the Middle East we have seen the rise of regional powers – such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar and Iran – which are vying to reshape the dynamics of regional order to advance their own interests.⁶ The Middle East regional system has become shaped by how rival states across the region’s multiple geopolitical divides each seek to influence and control state and non-state actors; resulting in a turbulent regional system in which state interests are often hard to discern and shift in complex ways. The United States still might be the most powerful global and regional actor, but these systems do not operate under a system of U.S. hegemony as regional states seek strategic autonomy and prefer to maintain ties with multiple external powers to increase their leverage in these relationships and meet their diverse strategic needs. 

Moreover, the U.S. approach still requires the backing of mostly authoritarian, often interventionist, regimes which often fail to alleviate declining economic and social conditions that threaten human security across the region. The United States’ reliance on regimes such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as Israel with its own human rights challenges, does not align with a grand strategy defined by a U.S.-led struggle of democracies against autocracies. While policy makers and think tanks in Washington have for the past decade debated how the United States might rebalance its military posture in the Middle East, those efforts have been derailed by a growing concern for great power rivalry and fear of leaving a security vacuum to be filled by Russia and China.⁷ These often-exaggerated fears, however, risk pushing the United States towards unnecessary conflict. 

China in the Middle East: From Connectivity to Security 

Over the past decade, just as the United States was seeking to “rightsize” its role in the region, Chinese economic interests and trade with the Middle East have been growing, especially in the energy sector. China has developed an elaborate strategy for promoting soft integration. During an era when Middle East geopolitics became fractured along multiple axes and regional rivalries, China’s soft integration approach has allowed it to expand its economic and diplomatic ties across these divides and sharply contrasts with the United States’ role in the region. 

One of the most prominent features of China’s efforts has been the Belt and Road Initiative introduced in 2013. China set out to develop a network of infrastructure construction and investment projects that can connect China to Western Asia, East Africa and Europe with a series of economic corridors based on land and across the seas. Concurrently, China has developed a series of “strategic partnerships” with most major economies across the region.⁸ Rather than bilateral alliances, these “goal driven” relationships are focused on fostering soft integration that can promote economic ties and a denser set of relations between governments and economies. Along with these agreements that have included billions of dollars in loans, aid, and investments, China has articulated regional policies such as the “Industrial Park – Port Interconnectivity, Two Wings and Two Wheels Approach” announced in 2018. This approach outlines a set of commercial projects that direct Chinese investments into industrial parks and ports “connecting supply chains and building business clusters” across the region.⁹

While the economic impact of China’s loans, aid, and investments differs across the economies of the region, geopolitically China’s approach is based on maintaining cordial relations with states across the region and avoiding the need to “pick sides” in the region’s numerous conflicts. As such, China’s approach has generally avoided intensifying regional geopolitical divides. While many U.S.-based observers reacted with alarm to China’s “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Iran, they failed to notice how China has similar, if not more robust (due to the larger size of their economies), partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.¹⁰

China’s goal has never been to “replace” the United States’ role in the region or simply seek to back its rivals. In fact, China’s approach depends upon regional stability and the free flow of commerce: both stated regional goals of the United States. In this regard, China shares common interests with the United States. Chinese officials, as well as some informed observers, suggest that China’s role can be viewed as “providing public goods that can contribute to Middle Eastern development and stability.”¹¹

In 2023, China signaled an interest in expanding its regional role by announcing a set of new initiatives including a “Global Security Initiative” (GSI). This initiative, however, does not seek to establish China as a regional or global security provider along the U.S. model. China has instead begun offering proposals for addressing conflicts in the Middle East and a new regional security architecture. These proposals have been mostly ignored or dismissed by U.S. officials as non-starters. China’s proposals often counter U.S. preferences and U.S. officials view China as lacking the political and military leverage to enact them. The irony of the Saudi-Iranian normalization agreement is that it does not reflect Chinese regional leverage or a new regional order but rather, in the absence of the United States' ability to play such a role, it signals China’s ability to “put its great power stamp” on a deal Iraq and Oman helped broker.¹²

Nevertheless, China’s security initiatives suggest alternative ways to address security issues across the whole region. China refers to a vision of “shared security” and its proposals recognize how Middle East states are connected with interlinked fates. These proposals suggest that no state can seek to ensure their own security without considering the security of others. The principles outlined in the “Global Security Initiative” include “advocating mutual respect, upholding equity and justice, realizing non-proliferation, jointly fostering collective security, and accelerating development cooperation.” China has declared that the GSI can offer a framework for regional countries to “strengthen dialogue and improve their relations, accommodate the reasonable security concerns of all parties.”¹³ Overall, China offers a “vision of a multipolar order in the Middle East” based on non-interference, state sovereignty, and “developmental peace.”¹⁴

At the same time, it is unclear that China has the commitment and capacity to help establish such a revised security architecture for the Middle East. Its standoffish approach to the 2023-24 Gaza conflict and the threat to shipping in the Red Sea has only exposed these limits. As recognized by U.S. officials, China lacks the leverage needed to help define the regional security architecture. Moreover, for a state that imports much of its energy needs from the region, China is unlikely to risk its more critical economic interests and open up new vulnerabilities. 

The Stresses and Fractures of US-China Strategic Competition in the Middle East 

Just as China was articulating a vision for expanded economic engagement in the Middle East, the United States published its 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy that defined a new era of strategic competition with China and Russia, which asserted the two nations sought to export “their authoritarian models and erode the U.S.-led international order to gain economic, political, and military influence over other countries.”¹⁵ The rise of great power competition was confirmed by Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy and Secretary of State Blinken’s warning that China is “a country with the intent and, increasingly, the capability to challenge our vision for a free, open, secure, and prosperous international order.”¹⁶

The rise of great power competition has come to redefine the United States’ global strategy and goals in the Middle East. While the United States can organize efforts to promote regional security integration in the Middle East around shared security interests, such as the need to contain Iran and protect the free flow of commerce, it faces challenges as some of its regional interests and approaches diverge from those of its regional partners. Most U.S. regional partners view economic ties with China as a means to advance their broader goals of economic transformation and global integration. Several Arab Gulf States with ambitious future “visions” for economic transformation are particularly interested in cooperating with China’s soft integration initiatives.

In contrast, the United States currently views China’s efforts to build economic ties and infrastructure under its Belt and Road Initiative as “a strategic lever to supplant U.S. leadership in the region under the guise of benign economic initiatives and broadening security relationships.”¹⁷ U.S. military commanders have come to focus on China’s expanding economic ties as a pressing security threat. CENTCOM Commander Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla argues, “We are in a race to integrate our partners before China and Russia can deeply penetrate the region.”¹⁸

This race, however, is generating stresses and conflicts. Even with its robust military posture in the region and efforts towards security integration, the United States has struggled to maintain leverage over regional actors. These tensions were made clear when Russia invaded Ukraine and key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel refused to strongly counter and sanction Russia. Saudi Arabia even maintained interest in coordinating its oil policy with Russia to keep oil prices from declining (in opposition to stated U.S. desires). More critically, states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to value economic ties with and investment from China and China-Middle East economic ties remain robust. Still, the United States views China’s soft integration as a threat to its hard integration. According to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara A. Leaf, China’s “economic engagement is not always solely economic. It often brings with it a security concern, for the United States and for our partners.”¹⁹ She highlights concerns with China’s “intellectual property theft, technology transfer, and data harvesting” and notes “we’ve cautioned our partners about the risks inherent in accepting such investment.”²⁰

Several recent incidents have highlighted how these concerns can lead to conflict. U.S. officials strongly objected to a Chinese firm taking over management of Israel’s Haifa port viewing it as a threat to the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean.²¹ While China retains a limited military footprint in the region (its only overseas military base is in Djibouti), U.S. officials were suspicious of Chinese state-owned firms working in a port near Abu Dhabi, and accused them of developing a Chinese miliary base. Most notably, the United States has worked across the region to persuade partner states to reject adopting Huawei’s 5G systems fearing that the Chinese government could use access to the state-own network for surveillance and intelligence purposes. The commander of CENTCOM Air Forces warns of the security risks: "If that kind of infrastructure comes in and it starts to touch networks, you start to see a risk to U.S. forces and U.S. technical capabilities because of the collection capabilities that might come with that.”²²

Leaf also warns of the long-term consequences of China’s economic ties to the region, stating: “Beijing might use those relationships for political and even coercive advantage.” While the commander of CENTCOM Air Forces observes, "where economic interests start, military interests will follow to protect those economic interests," noting “Over time, … there is a risk of Chinese expansion into the region militarily.” For example, growing Chinese influence could eventually impact “U.S. access, basing and overflight in the region.”²⁴

To a large degree, U.S. officials frame their perception of the threats that accompany Chinese soft integration in terms of potential future Chinese efforts to leverage economic ties to challenge U.S. security interests in the region and build their own hard integration. Such fears suggest that China would replicate the United States’ approach to the region, which has been defined by highly problematic concerns about “energy security,” and led the United States to establish a massive military presence in the oil rich Gulf region. The legacy of this approach is that the United States maintains high and likely expanding security commitments to the region, increasingly rationalized in terms of great power competition. This approach has led the Biden Administration to seek to bind the economic and security interests of states like Saudi Arabia to the United States, likely at great cost including extended security commitments. 

In response to the U.S. approach, China has increasingly taken issue with what it calls the United States’ “Cold War mindset.”²⁵ As the United States increasingly seeks to challenge China’s regional economic interests, China has moved to exploit U.S. tensions with its regional partners in ways that “differentiate itself from the United States and to create friction between Washington and its regional partners.”²⁶ These efforts have included increased arms sales to both U.S. rivals and allies in the Middle East. This so-called “wedge strategy” reduces the compatibility of rival approaches of soft and hard integration risking increased regional fractures. 

Meanwhile, the United States directly competes with China’s programs with its own expansions of integration and cooperation, focusing on states that view the rising power of China as a threat, such as India. For example, the United States has proposed to “close the global infrastructure gap” and announced at a recent G20 meeting the plans for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). 

Is Building a Multiplex Global System Possible?

One of the most pressing issues for global diplomacy today, along with addressing climate change and the expansion of the global arms trade, should be seeking to avoid great power conflict between the United States and China. Such conflict would be disastrous and have long lasting implications globally.

Following the release of the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy, U.S.-China tensions increased, although President Biden and other U.S. officials have since visited China in attempts to avoid further escalation. A long-term strategy, however, must establish rules and norms for competition rather than conflict. The Biden’s administration’s approach defines rules for competition within the context of the current U.S. global strategy and its understanding of a “rules-based international order.” Such an approach that explicitly rejects a global order that accommodates China’s national security and global strategic interests risks future conflict. 

In the Middle East, at least, there is room for the possibility that U.S. hard integration and Chinese soft interaction could co-exist. As Jennifer Kavanagh and Frederic Wehrey argue, the United States “should accept the more positive aspects of China’s growing presence in the Middle East and encourage—rather than try to contain— Beijing’s contributions to regional development and stability.”²⁷ They suggest the United States should adopt an approach that accepts “mutlialignment.” U.S. officials often deny asking Middle East states to choose sides,  and emphasize that they only want to convey the risks of working with China. Such an approach, however, is a mirror of China’s “wedge strategy” and likewise challenges the efforts of regional states to seek to build closer, beneficial relationships with both.

In contrast, the U.S. could endorse mutlialignment while maintaining it ongoing status as the dominant military power in the Middle East (even if the United States was to shift to an “offshore balancing” posture). Also, the risks of economic ties to China need to be evaluated in terms of the needs and interests of regional allies rather than based on a U.S.-focused zero-sum approach. Rather than combating all forms of China’s regional influence, the United States could focus on making that influence more productive and supportive of the needs of regional actors so they can benefit the most from it and avoid possible downsides, such as “debt traps.” By desecuritizing U.S. policy towards China’s economic role in the Middle East, the U.S. might be able to limit the Chinese need to securitize its economic ties (such as using those ties as leverage against U.S. hard integration) and expand forms of hard integration. Such an approach might even lead China to value cooperation with the United States over its ties to Russia, which in the Middle East do little to support China’s expanding economic ties.

To enable such an approach to U.S.-China relations in the Middle East, the U.S., other actors, and international institutions should consider how to design and manage what Amitav Acharya refers to as a multiplex world order “in which elements of the liberal order survive, but are subsumed in a complex of multiple, crosscutting international orders.”²⁸ Such an approach might accommodate China’s goal of eroding U.S. dominance of the rules of global order, while avoiding an effort by China to impose rules defined exclusively around its own strategic interests and domestic security (as often feared by U.S. officials). At the same time, while relenting on its (overly ambitious) goals of enforcing its visions of a liberal international order globally, the United States could focus on maintaining its broad and dense network of global ties and alliances to serve its core global security interests. While China and the United States are likely to face conflict over issues such as Taiwanese sovereignty, the Middle East is a region that could serve as a testing ground for expressions of mutual-accommodation and pluralism where China’s economic interests and U.S. security interests need not run into head-to-head conflict. While such an approach might not work in regions and issue areas where the U.S. and China have more intensive rival interests, multialignment could motivate the United States and China to look for areas of common interest, like climate change, which would be to the benefit of all in the Middle East and elsewhere.²⁹

Footnotes:

1: William Figueroa, “Iran-Saudi Normalization: A Regional Process with Chinese Characteristics,” Foreign Policy Research Institute (March 24, 2023), https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/03/iran-saudi-normalization-a-regional-process-with-chinese-characteristics/

2: This approach was inspired by my prior work on the geopolitics of international tourism as well as a preliminary reading of Lina Benabdallah’s Shaping the Future of Power (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).

3: Joseph Biden, National Security Strategy (Washington DC: The White House, 2022), 42. Brett McGurk, “Remarks at the IISS Manama Dialogue,” November 21, 2021.

4: Brett McGurk, “Remarks at the Atlantic Council Rafik Hariri Awards,” Atlantic Council, February 14, 2023.

5: McGurk, “Remarks at the Atlantic Council Rafik Hariri Awards.”

6: See Waleed Hazbun, “Regional Powers and the Production of Insecurity in the Middle East,” Middle East and North Africa Regional Architecture (MENARA) Working Papers No. 11 (September 2018), https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/menara_wp_11.pdf.

7: See Waleed Hazbun, “U.S. Military Strategy in the Middle East and the Challenge of Demilitarization,” in Imad K. Harb (ed.), A U.S. Pivot Away from the Middle East: Fact or Fiction? (Washington D.C.: Arab Center Washington DC, 2023), pp. 23-32.

8: Jonathan Fulton, “Friends with Benefits: China’s Partnership Diplomacy in the Gulf,” Project on Middle East Political Science Studies no. 32 (2019), pp. 33-38.

9: Jonathan Fulton, "China’s emergence as a Middle East power," in Jonathan Fulton (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of China–Middle East Relations (New York: Routledge, 2022), 5.

10: Jonathan Fulton, “China between Iran and the Gulf Monarchies,” Middle East Policy 28 (2021): 203-216..

11: Camille Lons, Jonathan Fulton, Degang Sun, and Naser Al-Tamimi, “China’s great game in the Middle East,” European Council on Foreign Relations Policy Brief, October 2019, p. 5.

12: Jonathan Fulton, “China doesn’t have as much leverage in the Middle East as one thinks—at least when it comes to Iran,” The Atlantic Council MENASource (Feb 1, 2024), https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/china-mena-leverage-iran-houthis-yemen/

13: Mordechai Chaziza, “The Global Security Initiative: China’s New Security Architecture for the Gulf,” The Diplomat May 05, 2023.

14: Lons, et al, “China’s great game in the Middle East.”

15: Becca Wasser, et al, Crossroads of Competition: China, Russia, and the United States in the Middle East (Santa Monica: RAND, 2022), ix

16: Cited in Barbara A. Leaf, “Statement for the Record,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism, May 31, 2023.

17: Statement of General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla on the Posture of U.S. Central Command - SASC Hearing Mar 16, 2023,” U.S. Central Command, March 16, 2023.

18: “Statement of General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla.”

19: Leaf, “Statement for the Record.”

20: Leaf, “Statement for the Record.”

21: Becca Wasser, et al, Crossroads of Competition, 32.

22: Cited in Jim Garamone, "General Says Middle East is a Theater for Strategic Competition,” DOD News, Oct. 4, 2023.

23: Leaf, “Statement for the Record.”

24: Jim Garamone, "General Says Middle East is a Theater for Strategic Competition.”

25: Wasser, et al., Crossroads of Competition, 11.

26: Jonathan Fulton, “China is trying to create a wedge between the United States and Gulf allies. Washington should take note,” The Atlantic Council MENASource (Jan. 27, 2022), https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/china-is-trying-to-create-a-wedge-between-the-us-and-gulf-allies-washington-should-take-note/.

27: Jennifer Kavanagh and Frederic Wehrey, “The Multialigned Middle East: How America Should Adapt to China’s Growing Influence in the Region,” Foreign Affairs, July 17, 2023. See also Barbara Slavin, “China Does Not Have to Be a U.S. Adversary in the Middle East," Just Security, June 16, 2023.

28: Amitav Acharya, “After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order,” Ethics & International Affairs Vol. 31, No. 3 (2017): 271-285.

29: On a different approach to the Middle East that avoids conflict with China, see also Dalia Dassa Kaye, “America’s Role in a Post-American Middle East,” The Washington Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2022): 7–24.

Waleed Hazbun is Richard L. Chambers Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alabama where he teaches international relations of the Middle East. His current research addresses the politics of insecurity in the Eastern Mediterranean and efforts to reimagine the possibilities for US policy in the Middle East.