by Julia Roknifard
Despite the U.S. attempts to downplay the significance of the reconciliation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran under the auspices of China, the new reality of Beijing's productive diplomatic involvement in the Middle East is staring everyone in the face -- the one to be the final playground for the deal to be reached was China.
It is true that several rounds of negotiations took place in Iraq since 2021 and at some point saw the involvement of Oman, but the one to seize momentum was China. This moment is no coincidence in the long period of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The meeting of the chiefs of national security from both sides -- Ali Shamkhani of Iran and Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban of Saudi Arabia facilitated by China's Wang Yi, a seasoned and mature diplomat, concluded with an agreement to reopen diplomatic missions that have been closed since 2016 and continue with security cooperation and other bilateral cooperation based on prior agreements of 2001 and 1998, while committing to non-interference into each other's affairs.
While China understands the need to return stability in the region from which it draws 30 percent of its oil supplies -- it being the number one trade partner for both Saudi Arabia and Iran, it has also created tremendous leverage in its diplomatic undertakings.
For the Saudis, the idea of providing peace and stability in the region as a precondition to sustainable economic growth, as promoted by China for a long time, is as appealing as ever. The grand idea of diversifying the Saudi economy from a hydrocarbon-based one still needs peace and quiet over its oil facilities.
The major pleasure that all three are now taking from the announcement of the deal is demonstrating that a different reality for international relations is possible. In that reality unilateralism and U.S. hegemony are rejected, while multilateralism and cooperation between Asian states are brought to the center.
For China, its relationship with the United States has been about balancing between bad and worse and it is the moment that Beijing found a suitable opportunity to transform its economic influence into a diplomatic power, proving it is not Washington alone that can broker large-scale deals in the Middle East.
For Saudi Arabia, tensions with the United States which is its major arms supplier, have been simmering for a while, in the light of Riyadh's refusal to increase the oil supply in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Biden administration's constant harping of the Jamal Khashoggi's case.
Iran has been seeking a way to mitigate tensions at least on the outside. It gets a pleasant bonus of demonstrating U.S. containment efforts have failed to the extent that it can negotiate even with the American allies in the region.
The ideological framing of such a deal suits China's agenda of proving that the world disorder is a consequence of multiple U.S. interventions in the region, while demonstrating that Asian countries alone are capable of restoring peace and stability.
However, Beijing needs to be aware of several challenges that might come. Seemingly more peace might turn into drawing more pronounced fault lines in the region. It is not a promise by Saudi Arabia to make colleagues in the U.S. reimagine their political line on the Gulf. Especially, if for Saudi this move is also a way to balance out its other proposal on regional security to normalize ties with Israel, over which it made serious demands from the former's extra-regional ally -- the United States.
The United States, in turn, is looking warily at how China's foreign policy is becoming more effective and wondering if economic influence that spilled over into the diplomatic engagement will further entail political and intelligence cooperation. Washington is clearly worried that this deal is not going to be the only non-economic initiative that China will succeed in, which, in turn, would undermine trust in the United States as the guarantor of stability in the Middle East.
Once the celebration of the deal is over, China needs to plan for its next move by looking for answers to these strategic questions. It might be not a new era that we just stepped into, with China's more active political engagement in the Middle East, but it would be foolish to downplay the significance of the moment when two West Asian competitors were brought together by the rising giant of the East.
Editor's note: Julia Roknifard is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of silubaba News Agency.
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