Top diplomats from Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have recently been top rivals in the region, met Thursday in Beijing to confirm the reopening relations after a seven-year hiatus in a historic Chinese-brokered deal.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan was pictured smiling next to his Chinese and Iranian counterparts Qin Gan and Hossein Amir Abdollahian.
Remarkably, the photo of the slightly awkward three-way handshake above shows the absence of any US official.
For most of the 21st century, Washington has been the main broker in the Middle East, but today Beijing has intervened, even as the United States seeks to pull out of a region that has occupied its diplomats and military for decades.
For example, in 2010 When the US tried to convince China to support sanctions against Iran, they thought that Saudi Arabia might hold the key.
During a 2010 meeting between the US Secretary of Defense and the French Foreign Minister to discuss this, Robert Gates told Bernard Kouchner that the Saudis always want to «fight the Iranians to the last American,» according to a memorandum of the meeting later released by WikiLeaks. , but it's time for them to «get in the game».
Thirteen years later, the world has changed and new alliances are rapidly forming.
Riyadh no longer relies on Washington as a bulwark against Tehran. In an increasingly multipolar world, Saudi Arabia is looking for other security partners less prone to the vagaries of electoral cycles and less prone to ranting on human rights issues.
Mohammed bin Salman rolled out a purple carpet for Xi Jinping during the Chinese President's visit to Riyadh last year Photo: Anadolu Agency
Meanwhile, a resurgent China is pursuing a tougher foreign policy under President Xi Jinping. Today, Beijing is not pushing to support sanctions against Iran as it was in 2010, today it is looking to change the Middle East with a major reconciliation deal between Riyadh and Tehran.
The irony here is that just as just as US President Joe Biden makes his vaunted turn away from the Middle East to confront China over its military and economic influence in the Asia-Pacific region, Beijing has noticed a gap in the Persian Gulf.
America's move away from the Middle East was more than a decade away.
In the first decade of the 21st century, this region has been a critical territory for the United States and, to a lesser extent, for Great Britain. Washington was heavily dependent on Saudi oil, and in return, Riyadh could count on a stable supply of American weapons and a reliable security partner ready to contain Iran, its main rival in the region. Critics have argued that oil has been at the center of Washington's policy in the Middle East, even during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Foreign policy has been slow to catch up
However, over the past 15 years, America's dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf has decreased significantly. The shale revolution boosted US domestic energy production through the introduction of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Today, the US imports less than six percent of its oil from Saudi Arabia.
American foreign policy has been slowly catching up as successive administrations have puzzled over how to get the US out of the ever-costly wars against «terrorism» with vague goals and exit strategies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Administrations Obama, Trump, and Biden have taken steps to downplay the strategic importance of the Middle East, even as Washington continued to lead regional diplomatic efforts, such as the push for normalization that saw the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recognize Israel in 2020.
Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have agreed to normalize relations in 2020. Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP
Most recently, Mr. Biden campaigned to make Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, a «rogue» after the CIA concluded that the Crown Prince ordered the assassination of the columnist in 2018 Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi at the consulate of the kingdom in Istanbul.
Moving out of Afghanistan and out of the Middle East, President Biden hoped to turn around to counter China and its growing military and economic influence in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
Losing a once-reliable security partner and increasing numbers lectures on human rights, obviously, aroused the indignation of the Saudi leadership and the search for protection of their interests elsewhere. At that time, China sought to play a more active role in world affairs.
Joe Biden hoped that moving away from the Middle East would help the US confront China. Photo: DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP
After a decade in office, in March 2023, President Xi unveiled a new 24-character slogan spelling out what could become the new foreign policy mantra “xyplomacy.”
Entering an unprecedented third term, Mr Xi said China must be resolute, proactive and dare to fight. It was a much more active formulation than former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's 24-character strategy published in 1990. It came amid anxiety in Beijing over the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and stressed the importance of maintaining China's position, waiting and keeping a low profile.
A major showcase of Beijing's new influence came in February when China revealed it had struck a deal with Iran and Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic ties in a diplomatic coup that took Washington by surprise.
Then this week, Saudi Arabia announced partnership with the Chinese-led security bloc, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In Washington, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel downplayed the decision, saying it was long overdue. “Every country has its own relationship,” he said on Wednesday.
China probably looks bigger than the US. Riyadh's deepening ties with Beijing reflect changing markets for oil exports. China has become a major importer of Saudi oil, buying 1.75 million barrels a day in 2022. Strengthening relations, oil giant Saudi Aramco increased its multi-billion dollar investment in China on Tuesday with two deals that are the largest announced since Xi Jinping. visited the kingdom in December.
Saudi crude oil imports
With their recent moves toward China, Saudi Arabia is signaling that «they will act to protect their national interests as the region and the world around them change,» said Christian Ulrichsen, Middle East Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute.
«Mohammed bin Salman is thinking long-term and evaluating the world that Saudi Arabia will navigate in the middle of the century, and in this world, China will probably in every sense be larger than the United States,» he said.< /p>
This calculation is very different from 2010, when Gates attempted to play down the damage done to American foreign policy by the infamous WikiLeaks revelations.
“Governments deal with the United States because it is in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets,” he said.
“We are still, as mentioned earlier, an irreplaceable nation. So other countries will continue to do business with us.”
However, today the US is no longer an indispensable nation, at least not for Riyadh.
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