On Narratives and Possible Futures

In The American People and Foreign Policy, Gabriel Almond identified four types of groups that make up the foreign policy elites of a state: the political elites (elected leaders); the administrative or bureaucratic elites (the professional corps of the executive establishment); the interest elites (the representatives of private and policy-oriented organisations); and, finally, the communication elites (academic experts and journalists).Footnote ²¹ Together, these groups generate a discursive field that provides an explanatory coherence to a state’s foreign policy choices and actions – something approaching a shared worldview and common vocabulary.Footnote ²² For our purposes in this Element, we tweak these categories and focus on the narratives produced by the political (autocratic leaders), the bureaucratic (the cadres and officials of the diplomatic corps), and the communication elites (scholars and journalists). The former two’s role in conveying state priorities and stances is clear, but the latter necessitates some clarification with respect to their relevance and ability to reproduce the inner logic of foreign policymaking in the three countries selected: the PRC, Saudi Arabia, and Assadist Syria.

International relations experts, especially in the PRC, are treated in some strands of scholarship as mirrors reflecting their country’s foreign policy conventions and preferences.Footnote ²³ This assumption is mostly based upon how authoritarian environments like that of China structure the discursive output of this segment of the elites: seeking funding, access, and prestige, experts (often embedded within state-controlled institutions) publish opinions and submit policy proposals that are aligned with the perceived preferences of the executive; if they do seek to challenge current choices, they do so in a manner consistent with national interests and the official line, at least from a rhetorical perspective.Footnote ²⁴

In Saudi Arabia and Assadist Syria, where experts are less important and foreign policy-linked, knowledge-producing infrastructure is under-developed, media workers assume greater salience.Footnote ²⁵ Entrusted with a propagandistic role aimed at explicating state foreign policy decisions to both domestic and foreign audiences, influential journalists and media commentators often function as conduits for reinforcing state narratives as well as signalling, and even testing, public receptivity to new foreign policy shifts and initiatives. In that sense, they act, much like their journalistic counterparts in the PRC, as the ‘ears, eyes, throat and tongue of the Party’ (dǎng de ěr mù hóu shé) – they speak within the parameters and interest-conceptions of the state.

By studying the narratives of the Chinese, Saudi, and Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites, we can obtain clues as to how their respective states locate and evaluate each other.Footnote ²⁶ As we are specifically interested in those narratives generated from 2010 to 2023, a period coinciding, as already alluded to, with heightened perceptions of extensive change in the Middle East regional order, any investigation into these worldviews, as well as their synchroneities and disjunctions, could tell us much about where the region is potentially headed, and the PRC’s evolving and anticipated role in this. That being said, we agree with Gary Sick’s view:

It is worth underscoring that this point is applicable not only to the distant and scholarly observers of the region but also to the elites in question, who have been blindsided by unexpected turns of events such as the overthrow of the Assadist regime by Hayʾat Tahrīr al-Shām (HTS) in under two weeks. There are always omissions and missed variables in espoused worldviews, but regardless of the degree to which they miss or approximate grounded realities (with sometimes existentially costly results, as the Assadist regime learned), we can still get a sense of how the relevant actors understand their positionalities within the balance of power, what compels or constrains them, and their potential behaviour moving ahead. Put differently, narratives are like a cognitive map that can reveal to us the horizons of what is actionable (and likely) in minds of the elites – including whether the foreign policy elites of a Middle Eastern state (as an example) believe that an alliance with the PRC is desirable and within the realm of possibility, and whether their counterparts in Beijing, who are equally or more significant for such an outcome, would agree to such a proposal or not.

Our overall approach in this Element is inspired by Alexander Wendt’s ‘thin’ constructivism, which recognises that ‘brute material forces like biological needs, the physical environment, and technological artifacts do have intrinsic causal powers’, whilst also acknowledging that it is only by considering the role of ideas, particularly those shared across purposive actors, that we can truly understand social life and the ways in which systems (or sub-systems) organise themselves.Footnote ²⁸ For example, Chinese, Saudi, and Assadist Syrian elites all perceive the US as the most powerful actor in the Middle East due to its unbridled economic, technological, and military strength. Yet the specific role that is ascribed to Washington within the regional order, and thus how Beijing, Riyadh, and Damascus approach it (and in turn each other), varies depending on how these elites position themselves towards it, not only on geopolitical terms, but ideological ones as well.

Our attention to narratives deviates somewhat from the conventional approach that dominates the existing literature on Sino-Middle Eastern relations, and which mainly looks at the PRC’s presence in the region through a realist (and often a reductionist and material-centric) lens ultimately concerned with US national interests (as broadly conceived) in the region. By centring the narratives of the relevant actors in our analysis, we provide new insights into how Chinese and local state actors conceive and debate their relationships on their own terms, free from the distortive prism of what Evan Feigenbaum has described as the ‘strategic narcissism’ of the great powers (in our case, the US).Footnote ²⁹ A comparison of their worldviews can provide a more holistic view of where the divergences and convergences lie between them, and what future for the Middle East has a greater likelihood of materialising as a result.Footnote ³⁰ Put differently, what does the region actually look like from the vantage point of Beijing, and what does faraway China look like from regional capitals?

Our aim with this exercise is not to contest the findings of the existing scholarship per se but to complement and refine its interpretations of Sino-Middle East dynamics through an adjusted focus – that is, on the local, and within a comparative framework. This approach in and of itself is not novel and has been applied elsewhere with some success, whether in appraising PRC’s entanglements in specific sectors in Africa and the Middle East, or in sketching (and anticipating) national trajectories, regional dynamics, and bilateral rivalries in other regions.Footnote ³¹

We expect that a scrutinisation of these elites’ narratives over the course of a decade will yield three possible scenarios on the nature and future of Sino-Middle Eastern relations.Footnote ³² Under the first scenario, we would find that PRC, Saudi, and Assadist Syrian narratives, notwithstanding minor differences, share in a circumspect and reserved depiction of Chinese involvement in regional governance and security. This would mean that the future of Sino-Middle Eastern ties is likely to be more of a stable continuation of what had existed since the late 1990s, with China being an important economic partner but little beyond that. The region might indeed be in the midst of a spasmic transition, and relations could very well continue to develop in strategic and sensitive sectors, but the PRC is neither expected by local state actors nor willing itself to assume a radically new role in that context.Footnote ³³

In the second scenario, Chinese, Saudi, and Assadist Syrian narratives have co-evolved towards a new consensus wherein they all anticipate greater and unprecedented PRC engagement in regional governance and security issues. Such a discursive shift and alignment would therefore confirm that the 2010s does indeed mark the beginnings of unprecedented Chinese ‘embedding’ in the Middle East. The PRC’s actions, encompassing the establishment of a support base (bǎozhàng jīdì) in Djibouti in 2017, the launching of the Middle East Security Forum (2019–), and its mediational brokerage of the Saudi–Iranian détente in 2023, could therefore be re-interpreted as concrete expressions of a new era of Chinese hegemony that will only become more apparent as the years progress.

The third and final scenario would feature narratives out of synch with one another, with discordant perceptions of the regional order and China’s place within it. While the old patterns of behaviour are no longer sustainable or desirable, new ones have yet to emerge, meaning that a high degree of uncertainty and fluidity continues to hover over Sino-Middle Eastern relations. In such a scenario, and depending on the narrational compositions of the different foreign policy elites, the PRC might be attempting to carve a ‘sphere of influence’ in a resistant and unwilling region, or regional actors are engaged in playing the ‘China card’ against one another or in order to gain leverage vis-à-vis other external great powers, laying diplomatic traps in turn for a reluctant Beijing. In the words of neo-institutionalist scholars, the 2010s would be the beginning of a long and ongoing temporal separation between two different eras – an interregnum with no end in sight, and where the terrain of possibility is constantly shifting.Footnote ³⁴

On the Case Studies

What underpins our case selections? While the raison d’être for examining PRC narratives is obvious, focusing on those of Saudi Arabia and Assadist Syria out of many other important players in the Middle East, such as Algeria, Egypt, Türkiye, Iran, and Israel, is less clear. It would have certainly been ideal to incorporate more case studies, but an Element of this length has forced us to be more discerning. We took two variables into account when selecting for the case studies: the inherent tangible and intangible capabilities of a state on the one hand; and the relations it maintains with the current regional hegemon – the US – on the other. The logic for this is quite straightforward: the sum of the economic, diplomatic, and military capacities of a given state informs the options of a foreign policy elite vis-à-vis the regional order and the extent to which it can engage and play the external powers against one another. Close alignment with (or distance from) the US structures the positionalities of nearly all states in the Middle East and has multi-scalar implications for their domestic and foreign policies. The confluence of these two variables functions as a material force that moulds the narratives justifying and guiding foreign policy elite perspectives on the regional order and the PRC’s potential place within it, now and into the future.

In terms of capabilities, Saudi Arabia can be described as a historical middle power in the Middle East, a status accrued from its custodial control (and thus religious soft power) of the sacred sites of Islam (Makkah and Madinah) and its possession of the region’s largest economy (at USD $1.07 trillion as of 2023).Footnote ³⁵ Much of this has been due to the Kingdom being one of the world’s largest hydrocarbon producers, providing it with immense wealth and leverage. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (2017–), the nature of Saudi power has changed in the 2010s. Considerable resources have been channelled to support wide-ranging economic and social reforms under the National Transformation Plan and the forging of a new Saudi nationalism – all geared towards changing the rentierist political economy of the country.Footnote ³⁶ Concurrently, Saudi elites have embraced an activist foreign policy that has oscillated between aggressive (and unprecedented) military intervention to the more recent pursuit of détentes with erstwhile rivals. The departure from a longstanding conservative modality of governance and diplomacy, and the perceived increase in the country’s influence, has led some regional observers to proclaim that the Saudi leadership is inaugurating the ‘fourth Saudi state’ (al-dawla al-suʿudiyya al-rābiʿa) and spearheading, to quote the Emirati scholar Abdullah Abdulkhaleq, the ‘Gulf’s (ascendant) moment in Arab history’.Footnote ³⁷ Accordingly, and with an eye towards the decade-long span we are interested in, the Kingdom emerges as an ambitious actor with significant political and financial resources to affect not only regional events but also the contours of its relationship with the PRC.

Assadist Syria’s situation was, up to its demise, the complete opposite in every sense possible. During its heyday under Hafiz al-Assad (1971–2000), the country was akin to an aspirational middle power in Middle East that relied on shrewd pragmatic diplomacy to balance against different actors and to even exercise some degree of hegemony over neighbouring Lebanon.Footnote ³⁸ Since 2011, it experienced a loss of popular support, territorial fragmentation, intervention by foreign actors and proxies, and near-catastrophic economic and demographic collapse under an all-out civil war and predatory economic behaviour by its ruling elites – effectively rendering Syria a failed state.Footnote ³⁹ Though the regime appeared to have weathered the harrowing challenge of the past decade, and was until recently undergoing a slow process of regional rehabilitation – with re-admission into the Arab League and the re-opening of the Saudi embassy in Damascus – Syria entered the 2020s as a fractured, sanctioned, devastated, and impoverished polity.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of 2022, nearly a quarter of Syria’s population (5.2 million) continued to seek asylum in neighbouring countries, and a somewhat larger figure (6.8 million) is estimated to have been internally displaced.Footnote ⁴¹ Its economy was a shambles, with World Bank estimates indicating that it had contracted since 2010 by 84 per cent, standing in 2022 at around USD $23 billion, barely half that of neighbouring Jordan.Footnote ⁴² Capabilities-wise, Assadist Syria was a shell with barely any resources to spare: it could not affect regional events in a proactive sense and was reduced primarily to an arena for different contending actors to pursue their strategic interests.

Turning to the second variable, that of relations with the US,Footnote ⁴³ Saudi Arabia and Assadist Syria have historically positioned themselves, in both the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, within diametrically opposed camps concerning the regional order.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Kingdom has long presented itself as being part of a US-leaning, status quo-supporting ‘axis of moderation’ (mihwar al-iʿtidāl) in the (Arab) Middle East comprised of the Arab monarchies and Egypt, and which together stand against a succession of de-stabilising actors ranging from Islamist Iran to the short-lived Dāʿishī Caliphate (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant; ISIL).Footnote ⁴⁵ Assadist Syria, by contrast, identified itself with an altogether different and opposing camp, the ‘axis of resistance’ (mihwar al-muqāwamah), an amalgam of excluded regimes (Iran and the Houthī in Yemen) and sub-state actors or proxies (including Hizbollah in Lebanon and an assortment of political parties and militias in Iraq) that have actively contested US and Israeli hegemony, and which also view themselves in confrontation with the axis of moderation.Footnote ⁴⁶ On a different and higher scale, but one still relevant to these positionalities, the regime has closely aligned itself with, and has drawn patronage and support from, Russia (in both its Soviet and post-Soviet iterations), placing it for all intents and purposes within an anti-American sphere of influence. The half-century-old Russian military naval base in Tartus, established in 1971, is the most concrete expression of this alignment.Footnote ⁴⁷

Considering these variables, Saudi Arabia and Assadist Syria clearly stand at opposite ends of the two spectrums. With a Wendtian perspective in mind, they have the potential to provide insights into the full range of narratives circulating in the Middle East about the future of the regional order and the PRC’s place within it. We do not claim they exhaust all possibilities, stances, and attitudes, but they do supply, as opposite poles, most of the narrational strands found elsewhere in the region. Virtually all countries in the region, we would argue, fall somewhere between their two extremes. The usefulness of the Saudi–Syria juxtaposition has been used in other works that have sought to explore issues such as threat perception and alliance-making in the region.Footnote ⁴⁸ And, indeed, this partially explains why we continue to look at Assadist Syria, despite its ‘extinction’, when thinking about Sino-Middle Eastern futures: its views about the regional order and the PRC overlap with those of other state and sub-state actors in the region that share in its variable positionalities (for instance, Houthī-ruled Yemen), though perhaps not with those of its successors(s), such as the HTS.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hence, as we indicate in the conclusion, we believe it is possible to extrapolate from the Saudi and Assadist Syrian cases to make informed speculations about Sino-Middle Eastern relations.

On the Sources

We used a diverse set of authoritative sources in examining the narratives of foreign policy elites. For political and bureaucratic elites in all three selected cases, we analysed Chinese- and Arabic-language material gathered from official portals, such as the Xinhua News Agency (XNA), the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), and the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA). We paid special attention to the statements made by political leaders, foreign ministers, and diplomats about the regional order and the PRC for 2010–2023. This is particularly true for Assadist Syria, where the leadership had been active in commenting about its relationship with the PRC (Figure 1). We supplemented these with material gathered from the websites of the three countries’ ministries of foreign affairs, as well as with interviews given by these elites to the media (local or international). Though there are problems with taking statements from official sources at face value, we firmly believe that they are important in discerning state-level signalling and interpretations of events – in sum, their worldviews.

Figure 1

Who talks about China?

Note: The figure reflects a calculation of 583 English-language SANA articles produced between 2014 and 2019. The number of articles attributed to ‘journalists’ refer to those in which no specific Syrian person was quoted commenting on the PRC.

Source: Authors.

Regarding communication elites who ‘mirror’ foreign policy thinking, we tried to be sensitive to the differences and source availability across the Chinese, Saudi, and Assadist Syrian discursive environments. For the PRC, we examined the works of scholars who were involved in the production of knowledge about the Middle East, with an eye towards supporting or fine-tuning the state’s foreign policy there.Footnote ⁵⁰ We specifically looked at publications that appeared in journals managed by major state-affiliated think tanks and research centres concerned with the Middle East, most notably Arab World Studies (ālābó shìjiè yánjiū) and West Asia and Africa (xīyǎ fēizhōu).Footnote ⁵¹ To ensure that we captured a representative slice of the debate, we included articles on the Middle East found in five top Chinese-language international relations journals: World Economics and Politics (shìjiè jīngjì yǔ zhèngzhì), Foreign Affairs Review (wàijiāo pínglùn), Contemporary International Relations (xiàndài guójì guānxì), Global Review (guójì zhǎnwàng), and International Studies (guójì wèntí yánjiū).Footnote ⁵² In addition to these academic journals, we also examined articles and interviews by Chinese experts from PRC media outlets such as the People’s Daily (rénmín rìbào), the Global Times (huánqiú shíbào), The Paper (péngpài xīnwén), and XNA’s Globe (huánqiú).

As for Saudi Arabia and Assadist Syria, we looked at a different set of sources to reconstruct the thinking among foreign policy elites.Footnote ⁵³ This is because a sizable area studies knowledge-producing infrastructure tied to policymaking circles is absent or still in the process of being built, a phenomenon that holds true for much of the Arab world.Footnote ⁵⁴ What these two cases do have are state-directed/controlled media ecosystems which, much like those of the PRC, not only disseminate official thinking on foreign policy but also serve to ‘test the waters’ on new policies and re-shape public opinion on key issues.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, there are nuanced variations and challenges, rooted in political and economic differences, between the two cases that must be taken into account. Nearly all major print and digital media in Syria, such as al-Baʿath (the ruling party’s mouthpiece), Athawra, and Tishrīn, were under the direct purview of the Ministry of Information, ensuring active censorship and monitoring of content in ways dovetailing with state interests.Footnote ⁵⁶ This control was buttressed further by tight legislation, as well as by the strict socialisation of media workers into operating within the red lines of the regime.Footnote ⁵⁷ The media in Syria for all intents and purposes followed the classic mode of being a party-state echo chamber. This creates a strong temptation to throw an undifferentiating net in approaching these sources, and as a result we decided to give more weight to the interviews and speeches of Syrian leaders themselves. This was guided by the fact that they were simply more numerous and accessible than their PRC or Saudi equivalents: the Syrian Presidency YouTube channel, for example, uploaded well over twenty interviews (each exceeding twenty minutes in length) of Bashar al-Assad with the foreign media in the 2010s. This accomplishes our objective in outlining the worldview of the foreign policy elites, at the apex of which sits leaders like al-Assad whom the media ecosystem serves.

Saudi Arabia, by comparison, has leveraged its vast resources since the 1970s to establish a pan-Arab media empire that has succeeded in heavily influencing (albeit not fully dominating) Arabosphere cultural and ideological spaces.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Saudi Research and Media Group and Middle East Broadcasting – both linked to regime-aligned networks – have played a critical role in this regard, founding several well-known outlets, such as Asharq al-Awsat and Alarabiyya. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the media’s significance has only deepened. Some of the (former) editors of these outlets have recently assumed important state positions, including ambassadorial and ministerial postings. Because of the various linkages tying these outlets to the Saudi state, many of the journalists and commentators – and especially those in editorial capacities with longstanding experiences in the field – act as explainers and advocates for national policies. In some cases, as exemplified by Abdulrahman al-Rashid and his weekly column in Asharq al-Awsat, they can provide insights into the thinking of the regime. Accordingly, we were more selective with the sources we examined for the Saudi communication elites, emphasising columns and pieces written by current and former editors at the two Saudi newspapers listed. We also draw on the works of a small grouping of scholars embedded within various Saudi think tanks and institutes which have gained newfound patronage from the state.

It is important to emphasise that we primarily focus on Chinese and Arabic language sources. This is because it is frequently the case that the content of the articles published in English by Chinese and Arab media and elites is strategically produced to be appealing to a Western readership. Key ideas and concepts that compose the worldviews of Chinese and Arab elites might be omitted because they are difficult to translate into English or because they are politically unpalatable to Western readers.

On the Breakdown of the Sections

The Element is comprised of four sections. The first three are dedicated, respectively, to examining the evolving narratives surrounding the Middle East’s regional order and China’s place within it in the PRC, Saudi Arabia, and Assadist Syria. Each section analyses the discourse generated by the foreign policy elites of these three states, highlighting recurrent themes and ideas, over the period 2010 to 2023. At times, the discussion might reference key events or developments to clarify whether changes happened only at the rhetorical level or were matched by policy actions. The final fourth section presents and generalises our findings to produce broader insights into Sino-Middle Eastern relations. It dwells upon the core question of whether the 2010s can be considered a transformative juncture in Sino-Middle Eastern relations and considers some of the variables that might impact the trajectory of these relations in the coming decades.

Looking at a Turbulent Region

Since the eruption of the Arab Spring, Chinese foreign policy elites have attributed the central causes of regional turmoil to bad governance, coupled with a neglect of economic development. According Niu Xinchun, the former director of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), who is now based at Ningxia University, many countries in the region failed to find, and embrace, a sustainable political-economic model, leading in turn to the uprisings of 2010–2011.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the words of Gong Xiaosheng, China’s Special Envoy to the Middle East (2014–2019): ‘unbalanced development has caused social turmoil or even civil strife, and civil strife and social turmoil have made development more difficult, and the exploration of new paths more challenging’.Footnote ⁶⁰ At a deeper level, these failures stem from the fractured nature of many regional governments, dominated as they are by interest groups that form a deep state preventing the normal evolution of state and societal institutions.Footnote ⁶¹ This overall situation, this line of thought goes, has severely undermined the capacity of these states to resolve popular unrest (as shown by the long-shadow of the Arab Spring) and counteract internal and external subversive influences, leading many Chinese foreign policy elites to deem the Middle East as having entered an ‘era of weak sovereignty’ (ruò zhǔquán shídài). Yang Fuchang, an expert at the China Foundation for International Studies who served as ambassador in many Middle Eastern countries and vice minister of foreign affairs in charge of that region during the early 1990s, asserts as much in his analysis.Footnote ⁶²

These problems are compounded by the imbalances of power that exist between the different states, leading to an unstable regional order.Footnote ⁶³ Among the Arab countries, the GCC member-states have significantly expanded their influence, while traditional powers such as Egypt and Iraq have declined. The relations between Arab and non-Arab countries, too, are unbalanced, with Israel, Türkiye, and Iran becoming more assertive following the US pivot away from the Middle East under the Obama administration – a phenomenon that has been dubbed American ‘strategic contraction’ (zhànlüè shōusuō) by Chinese scholars.Footnote ⁶⁴ With the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in July 2015, there was a very strong expectation in the PRC that Iran would emerge as the most prominent regional power: Hua Liming, a retired senior Chinese diplomat, made this argument, for example, in an article published in Foreign Affairs, a journal overseen by the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs.Footnote ⁶⁵ The decreasing interest, and willingness, of the US to sustain the existing regional order has likewise created an opening for extra-regional actors such as Russia to intervene, thereby drawing the Middle East into the broader global struggle between the great powers.Footnote ⁶⁶

Notwithstanding these negative assessments, Chinese foreign policy elites have expressed optimistic views of the region and its future, especially from the mid 2010s. The Arab Policy Paper published by the PRC government in 2016 emphasised that ‘currently, Arab states are independently exploring the development paths suited to their own national realities. They are committed to pursuing industrialisation, enhancing employment and improving people’s livelihood. They are active in promoting peace and stability in the region and are playing important roles in regional and international affairs.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Chinese experts have echoed similar perspectives. Feng Lulu, the vice dean of the China Institute of Arab States Studies at Ningxia University, argued in 2020 that the Middle East was now on its way to adopting the hallmarks of modernity – industrialisation, nationalism, and secularism – after decades of being an ‘anti-modernisation’ (fǎn xiàndàihuà) outlier due to Western colonialism and interventionism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such shifts, he claims, were enabled by the decreasing price of oil, the waning influence of religion, growing Arab acceptance of Israel, and the gradual withdrawal of the US. Concerning the last point, many Chinese experts perceive, and welcome, a trend among local state actors for ‘diplomatic diversification’ (wàijiāo duōyuán huà) away from the US.Footnote ⁶⁹ The latter trend has been mostly associated with the GCC member-states.Footnote ⁷⁰

There is an awareness that these developments will take time to mature, and the process will by no means be smooth or straightforward as many local state actors have to contend with many of the structural problems and region-wide imbalances mentioned earlier. There are always crises that risk flaring up at any given moment, reversing the progress made. The Palestinian–Israeli conflict, despite its marginalisation in regional politics (and signs of mounting normalisation) up until Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023, is one demonstrative example: An Huihou, a former ambassador serving as director of the Strategic Studies Centre of the China Institute of International Studies’ Foundation for International Studies, voiced this perspective in his analysis from 2017.Footnote ⁷¹ This reading could be discerned also from the response of Foreign Minister Wang Yi to a journalist from al-Jazeera during the press conference for the fifth session of the Twelfth National People’s Congress in early March that same year: he asserted that the region was ‘at a critical crossroads, where there is both the risk of increased unrest and the hope of ushering in peace’.Footnote ⁷²

From these snippets, it is clear that Chinese foreign policy elites are united in their vision of the Middle East in the 2010s as an extremely turbulent region that is still in the midst of re-ordering itself, though the endpoint of this process remains unclear. While PRC media usually attributes this regional turbulence to the negative role of foreign powers such as the US, it is evident that these elites hold a more nuanced view: instability is understood to be rooted in local failures at governance, on the one hand, and the absence of a stable balance of power at the regional level, on the other.Footnote ⁷³ The most likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the media in the PRC are not really meant to host a discussion or debate on such issues but to communicate specific political interpretations of the events to the general public. At the same time, Chinese foreign policy elites are reservedly optimistic in so far as they see a silver lining to the situation, identifying positive trends that might contribute to the emergence of a more stable regional order at some point in the future.

Core or ‘Normal’ Interests?

Chinese foreign policy elites have long debated the nature and strategic relevance of the PRC’s interests in the Middle East.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although there is little doubt that the country has proliferating interests in the region, their relative weight in comparison with those in other parts of the world has been subject to some contestation within the PRC. Niu Xinchun, who has written prolifically on this topic throughout the 2010s, concluded that the country’s overall interests in the Middle East are best conceived as ‘normal’ (yībān) when compared to elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁵ Any threats to them – arising from regional turmoil, for example – could be potentially costly in economic and political terms, but they would be unable to fundamentally undermine the national and regime security of the PRC. This interpretation is confirmed by recent analysis of the PRC’s Middle East policy and discourse carried out by Zhang Chuchu, a rising expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, who concluded that the region has long been ‘a second or third-order concern for Chinese policymakers’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Although this may come off as surprising, the Middle East – per Niu – is a somewhat marginal region in terms of the PRC’s global economic interests. Though the region was in the 1980s a crucial market for Chinese construction companies, and thus an important source of much needed hard currency for the PRC,Footnote ⁷⁷ that is no longer the case (Figure 2). Additionally, while Chinese products are increasingly popular, the Middle East is not a major destination for Chinese exports either (Figure 3). The region has been a major source of energy for the PRC since the 1990s (Figure 4), but those imports are not under threat.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other scholars have written that Chinese investment in the region could be at risk because of possible terrorist attacks or American interference.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet the data supports Niu’s basic contention: although Chinese investments in the region have increased in absolute value (Figure 5), they have decreased in relation to the PRC’s global capital footprint (Figure 6). Moreover, such investments are mostly concentrated in stable countries such as those of the GCC member-states (Figure 7). The risk of militant spillovers affecting China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), or the impact arising from the downfall of an ostensibly friendly government (and the full ramifications of the overthrow of the Assadist regime are not yet clear), cannot be ignored and could imperil certain interests in the region, but none of these have constituted a tangible threat to the PRC territorial integrity, or its political regime, and are unlikely to become so anytime soon.Footnote ⁸⁰

Figure 2

Relative value of the West Asian and North African markets for Chinese engineering and construction companies.

Note: The countries included as part of the Middle East and North Africa are: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Türkiye, the UAE, and Yemen. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau are not included in the overall total of the value of the contracts signed by Chinese companies overseas.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China.

Figure 3

Percentage of Chinese exports to the Middle East and North Africa.

Note: The countries included as part of the Middle East and North Africa are: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Türkiye, the UAE, and Yemen. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau are not included in the overall total of the value of the contracts signed by Chinese companies overseas.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the International Trade Centre.

Figure 4

Percentage of Chinese energy imports from the Middle East and North Africa.

Note: The percentages are calculated using the value of Chinese imports of goods whose HS codes are 2709 and 2711. The value of Chinese imports of Iranian energy products is likely to be lower than the real ones. See: Shirzad Azad, ‘Bargain and Barter: China’s Oil Trade with Iran’, Middle East Policy 30.1 (2023): 23–35.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the International Trade Centre.

Figure 5

Value of Chinese foreign direct investment (stock) in West Asia and North Africa.

Note: The countries included as part of the Middle East and North Africa are: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Türkiye, the UAE, and Yemen.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, China National Bureau of Statistics, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Figure 6

Percentage of Chinese foreign direct investment (stock) in the Middle East and North Africa.

Note: The countries included as part of the Middle East and North Africa are: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Türkiye, the UAE, and Yemen. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau are not included in the as part of the overall total of the value of Chinese foreign direct investment overseas.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the China National Bureau of Statistics, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Figure 7

Distribution of Chinese foreign direct investment (stock) in the Middle East and North Africa.

Note: The countries included as part of the Middle East and North Africa are: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Türkiye, the UAE, and Yemen. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau are not included in the as part of the overall total of the value of Chinese foreign direct investment overseas.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the China National Bureau of Statistics, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

What has enhanced the Middle East’s salience in the calculations of Chinese foreign policy elites is the deterioration in Sino-American relations in the mid 2010s, with different takeaways or prescriptions emerging as a result. Some, like Gao Zugui, a researcher at the Central Party School, have argued that the regional turmoil presents opportunities to cooperate and improve relations with the US at a time when security trends in Asia have generated mounting frictions between the two countries.Footnote ⁸¹ The Chinese push in support of the JCPOA negotiations is a demonstrative example of this dynamic.Footnote ⁸² The region is thus viewed by some as a potential platform for stabilising the Sino-American relationship.

Niu Xinchun and others, such as Liu Zhongmin, another prominent scholar on the Middle East, do not agree with this point of view, arguing that the US has no interest in building long-term cooperation with the PRC in the Middle East, and that American actions in the region do undermine Chinese long-term interests there.Footnote ⁸³ The 2011 NATO bombing campaign in Libya is often brought up as an example of this, leading as it did to the hasty evacuation of over 36,000 citizens from the PRC.Footnote ⁸⁴ Likewise, some consider the violence embroiling the XUAR to be a by-product of the American invasions that weakened state authority in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowing in turn all types of transnational networks and groups to operate and grow in strength.Footnote ⁸⁵ They point, moreover, to the recent US campaigns to limit Sino-Middle Eastern economic and technological cooperation: as Niu summarised in a short commentary in early 2023, ‘the US and China worry about the Middle East becoming a card in the other’s hand, forming a typical security dilemma’.Footnote ⁸⁶

What emerges from the discussions of Chinese foreign policy elites is a complex picture, and one in which the importance of the region is increasingly acknowledged. Although the PRC’s survival or the so-called ‘core interests’ (héxīn lìyì) are not at risk, there are many ‘normal’ interests that might be suddenly threatened and damaged.Footnote ⁸⁷ The intensifying competition with the US has made reluctant Chinese foreign policy elites more sensitive to that eventuality. The Middle East is therefore increasingly relevant in their eyes as a consequence of great power rivalry, but only up to a point.

Searching for the Right Approach

When considering much of the 2010–2023 debates among Chinese foreign policy elites concerning the regional order, it is worth recalling that the PRC’s diplomatic and security interactions with local state actors have evolved and deepened in tandem. Building upon institutions and processes that had been initiated in the early 2000s, the PRC has utilised a variety of diplomatic fora, such as the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, and, to a limited extent, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, to strengthen its relations with its regional counterparts; it also appointed special envoys to address hotspot issues across the greater Middle East, and has facilitated the brokerage of the Saudi–Iranian détente in 2023, among others.Footnote ⁸⁸ Its participation in peacekeeping initiatives, such as the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, antipiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden (from late 2008), as well as the opening of the military base in Djibouti, have helped the PRC add a military dimension to its presence in the region.Footnote ⁸⁹

By the mid 2010s, however, Chinese foreign policy elites were expressing doubts about whether their country’s approach to the Middle East, marked by the diplomatic and security forays set out earlier, was sufficient and up to the task of tackling the various regional challenges there. Hua Liming, for example, bluntly argued that the PRC’s Middle East policy had to be rethought:

Hua was not the only one to write that Beijing was ‘burying its head in the sand’, as it were. Niu Xinchun, described the current policy approach as ‘doing nothing [in the Middle East], reacting to something [at the UN]’, though he praised the fact that the PRC had become more active in promoting and hosting peace talks.Footnote ⁹¹ Certainly, not everyone agrees. Some have lauded the current Chinese approach, embodying Xi Jinping’s ‘great power diplomacy’ (dàguó wàijiāo), a concept unveiled at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 2012, as being more than enough.Footnote ⁹² While acknowledging that there were challenges that had to be overcome, Sun Degang, a prominent expert based at Fudan University, has written a number of articles highlighting the newly found proactiveness of the PRC’s ‘partnership diplomacy’ (huǒbàn wàijiāo), the exchanges carried out by the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party with Middle Eastern political parties, as well as the development of a new ‘soft military presence’ (róuxìng jūnshì cúnzài) in the region.Footnote ⁹³ In other words, foreign policy was re-calibrating in a way that constituted an appropriate response to the regional situation.

One reason as to why foreign policy elites have interpreted the PRC’s regional approach in different ways – as insufficient (i.e., needing to assume responsibility) or appropriate (i.e., doing enough through existing ‘great power diplomacy’) – is that there are divergent views among them over what exactly drives Chinese entanglements in the Middle East. Tian Wenlin, a researcher at CICIR, stated that Chinese experts often misinterpret the dynamics propelling Sino-Middle Eastern relations.Footnote ⁹⁴ Though many believe that Chinese initiatives, such as the four-point proposal regarding the Palestine–Israel conflict, and actions, like its stance at the UNSC, have played a crucial role in eliciting regional engagement with the PRC, Tian sees endogenous developments in the Middle East as being far more relevant. In other words, Chinese influence has only increased because there is local appetite for what the PRC has to offer, rather than because it has succeeded in making itself more attractive. Even in the case of Iran, a country that is viewed as one of the PRC’s closest partners in the region, some have repeatedly warned that policymakers should not believe that Chinese diplomatic and economic influence there would remain the same following the potential end of American-imposed sanctions.Footnote ⁹⁵

Li Weijian has likewise argued that Chinese initiatives, especially those outside the fields of trade and investment, often fail to gain traction in the region.Footnote ⁹⁶ The PRC can offer much needed economic support and a developmental experience different from that of the West, but, as Li notes, the pursuit of security dominates Middle Eastern politics, and local state actors do not see the usefulness of forums and conferences led or proposed by the PRC. Moreover, Chinese proactivity has sometimes had negative reactions. That was the case when the PRC, together with Russia, cast a series of vetoes at the UNSC between 2011 and 2012 in defence of the Assadist regime in Syria. As a result, China’s special envoy for the Middle East, Ambassador Wu Sike, had to tour the GCC member-states to explain that Beijing was protecting the principle of sovereignty in the face of Western pressure, rather than acting specifically in favour of Bashar al-Assad.Footnote ⁹⁷ Relatedly, Chinese scholars are acutely aware that the PRC stance on Syria was not positively received by Middle Eastern audiences.Footnote ⁹⁸

In weighing the future of Sino-Middle East relations, some Chinese foreign policy elites have wondered whether the current status quo, in conjunction with the prevailing conservative approach, is sustainable. Niu Xinchun has argued, in an implicit warning, that it is extremely unlikely that warm diplomatic relations between the PRC and the region could be sustained without stronger and deeper economic ties.Footnote ⁹⁹ Echoing this view somewhat, Zhang Chuchu claims that instability and economic backwardness have prevented the implementation of the vast majority of the highly publicised BRI agreements.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The PRC’s own economic slowdown as part of its ‘new normal’ (xīn chángtài), that is, the decline in economic growth, might create additional problems. These various issues were more or less implicitly recognised by most of the authors of the articles surveyed in our analysis, suggesting that an economy-centric reading of the PRC’s presence in the Middle East remains well-entrenched and pervasive.

Against this background, different perspectives have developed about how Chinese foreign policy should interact with the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The most radical position, though seemingly the minority one, is that the PRC should embrace great power competition with the US and make it the main driver of its regional approach, significantly elevating the strategic importance of this theatre in relation to its national interests. To some extent, Niu Xinchun argues, this would mean reproducing the PRC’s Middle East strategies during the Maoist era, when there were many instances of overt political and military involvement.Footnote ¹⁰² The vast majority of foreign policy experts, however, clearly advocate for continuity and keeping to the current course. Though the latter might also call for paying more attention to US moves and seizing opportunities to undermine them, such as when Iran and the other members of the so-called axis of resistance undermine American actions,Footnote ¹⁰³ they insist that the PRC should not take sides in favour of any regional or extra-regional powers. To varying degrees, they oppose any and all military commitments, including outright embeddedness in the security architecture (in terms of alliances or security provisions) as the costs and risks would be far higher than any real gain that would arise from these. While recognising some of the limits to this approach, Sun Degang writes that ‘China’s global partnership network is built on the basis of “partnerships, not alliances”, and seeking common ground while reserving differences. This is in line with China’s diplomatic philosophy and the interests of all parties.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Throughout our analysis of the Chinese sources, we could not find any clear statement advocating outright PRC alignment with any specific local state actor to the detriment of others. Hua Liming, who was quoted calling for the PRC to assume responsibility in the Middle East, warned not only against taking sides but also that any policies aimed at ‘squeezing traditional American power’ should be avoided.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This stance likely originates from an awareness, as noted by Niu in the case of Syria, that regional stability cannot be achieved ‘without the support of the international community, including the US and the European countries’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Instead, what foreign policy elites endorse is for the PRC to leverage its economic power to promote a ‘development first’ agenda, pushing local leaders to focus on economic growth, rather than expending resources on pointless regional rivalries and conflicts.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Supporting industrialisation, as well as cross-regional integration, are the key pillars of this approach.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The logic behind it is that by pursuing development, the Middle East would stabilise into a prosperous and well-governed space, limiting in turn the influence of other extra-regional great powers such as the US and Russia as local courtship for their support recedes – a win-win scenario for the PRC. More optimistically, local state actors, now economically intertwined with each other (and the PRC), would make the appropriate efforts together to create a new Middle Eastern security mechanism (and along with it, a regional order) owned and managed by themselves. This would allow the PRC in turn to maximise its interests in the region while maintaining cordial relations with all parties without any major security commitments on its part at any point in the future. This vision is tied to the expectation that the Middle East is already showing signs that it is headed in that direction, as epitomised for instance by the Saudi–Iranian détente, the (then ongoing) re-integration of Assadist Syria, and Arab–Israeli normalisation under the Abraham Accords, among others. As we discuss in the Conclusion, there are already some analyses of the conflict in Gaza that started in late 2023 suggesting that Chinese foreign policy elites feel vindicated by the soundness of this assessment.

It is important to emphasise that the articulation of an alternative, more assertive approach towards the Middle East is probably complicated by the nature of the PRC’s own policymaking processes. Some analysts have pointed out that insufficient coordination among the many domestic institutions that manage Chinese activities in the region has often transformed correct strategic choices into implementation failures, irritating regional partners or causing serious economic losses for the PRC.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Tensions in East Asia involving the US likewise limit the ‘diplomatic resources’ (wàijiāo zīyuán) that the country can allocate elsewhere, including the Middle East, to protect its interests.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Beyond that, many scholars also agree that there is not enough expertise about the region within the PRC, contributing at times to the production of shallow knowledge about the Middle East and its problems.

On the Chinese Vision

In this section, we have shed light on how Chinese foreign policy elites have understood the evolution of the situation in the Middle East over the past decade, as well as their evaluations of the PRC’s interests and approaches there. While the regional situation is uncertain and turbulent, they perceive a new order coming into being: local state actors are recalibrating their domestic and foreign policies towards regional integration and resolving their conflicts as the US undergoes ‘strategic contraction’. However, this outcome needs time to mature. In terms of their country’s interests in the Middle East, they appraise them to be normal on a global scale, though gaining some significance due to Sino-American competition. While a minority are calling for adjustments in the PRC’s approach to the region, the majority abjure any shifts in the political or security domains beyond what has already been accomplished by ‘great power diplomacy’. They all do, however, envision the PRC playing an important economic role as positive trends in the region become manifest. Based on this snapshot of the discussions among Chinese foreign policy elites, a major transformation in Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East over the short or mid-term is a highly unlikely prospect.

The Twin Sources of Regional Turbulence

Over the past decade, Saudi foreign policy elites have articulated a relatively consistent diagnosis of what they consider to be the major causes of instability in the Middle East, identifying two primary catalysts for regional disorder. The first, as touched upon in one of the earliest interviews given by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is the danger posed by a collection of ideologically driven actors that instrumentalise violent and subversive propaganda to undermine the integrity and cohesion of Arab governments and societies.Footnote ¹¹² These encompass political and militant non-state organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, ISIL, Hizbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthīs in Yemen, to major states such as Qatar, Türkiye, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Among these, the latter is construed, as ʿAdel al-Jubeir, the Saudi Foreign Minister for 2015–2018 put it, as ‘the big[gest] menace’ by far.Footnote ¹¹³

From the early 2010s, negative perceptions of Iran were widely entrenched in popular and elite discourses, not only in Saudi Arabia, but across much of the Arab world.Footnote ¹¹⁴ For many onlookers based within the Kingdom and beyond, Iran appeared, throughout the evolving events of the Arab Spring and in its intervention to support the Baʿathist regime in Syria, as an aggressive power which occupied ‘four Arab capitals’ and which aspired to control even more through the sectarian sub-state proxies it had created.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Director of the Gulf Research Centre and prominent geopolitical commentator ʿAbdulaziz bin Sager described Iran as a hegemony-seeking actor in the Middle East – a near-consensus view in the discourse.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The prioritisation of the Iranian threat among Saudi foreign policy elites is also clear. Statements from the Saudi Council of Ministers, as well as the Crown Prince, recurrently contained condemnations that depicted the Kingdom as the main target of the Islamic Republic and its allies.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In one instance, they proclaimed Iran to be violating ‘the foundational basis of international law and the principles of good neighbourliness … and [thus constituting] an extreme danger to regional and global security and peace’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of the General Intelligence Directorate (1979–2001) and current chairman of the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS), identified Iranian expansionism as a core danger to Saudi national security.Footnote ¹¹⁹

What exacerbated this danger from Iran, in the eyes of Saudi foreign policy elites, was the extreme ideological beliefs attributed to its leadership. The Crown Prince, for example, publicly questioned in 2017 the possibility of reaching an accommodation with ‘a regime … whose constitution mandates asserting control over the Muslim world and spreading Twelver Shi’ism’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Al-Jubeir similarly argued that Iran was led by a regime that had an intransigent ‘desire to export the revolution’ and displayed little respect for a Westphalian regional order in the Middle East.Footnote ¹²¹ Several Saudi analysts, most notably ʿAbdullah al-Saʿud, currently the head of research at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have elaborated on this idea, claiming that the Islamic Republic embraced a vision of the region that aimed to do away with the nation-state in favour of sub-national solidarities predicated upon narrow sectarian conceptions of identity and affiliation.Footnote ¹²²

If the first catalyst causing instability in the Middle East can be thought of as external, the second is more internal in nature, and revolves around the failure of many Arab governments to implement timely political and economic reforms. Prince Turki al-Faisal observed in one of his speeches that many regimes in the region were facing a crisis of governance involving an erosion of the social contracts binding them to their citizens.Footnote ¹²³ This neglect, and concomitant decline in overall governance, created an environment ripe for the proliferation of mostly Iranian-abetted, sub-national militias and political organisations seeking to fill the newfound vacuums arising from the withdrawal or collapse of centralised state authorities. In the case of regimes struggling with mounting popular discontent and even rebellion, as in Syria and Iraq, their elites had courted and facilitated Iranian intervention out of self-preservation – all to the detriment of the long-term well-being of their states and societies.

Accordingly, we find that Saudi foreign policy elites see a type of feedback loop at play between these two catalysts behind a dismal and broken regional order: the weakening of Arab states (or ‘non-states’ (al-lā dawla) as one commentator calls them), a by-product of the failures of rulers themselves, paved the way for a diverse of set of ideological actors, crowned by Iran, to set up alternative centres of (sectarian) authority and rule, accelerating in turn the withering away of the (Arab) states and the national communities that underpin them.Footnote ¹²⁴ Mansur Almarzuqi, an academic at the Prince Saud Al-Faisal Institute for Diplomatic Studies associated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spelled this out by asserting that the Islamic Republic intentionally sought to foment instability in many surrounding states as a way of enhancing the appeal and reach of its sectarian project across much of the Middle East.Footnote ¹²⁵ Likewise, Muhammad al-Sulami, the head of the International Institute for Iranian Studies based in Riyadh, argued that Iran intentionally blocks efforts at re-centralising and strengthening the national government in places such as Lebanon and Iraq in order to safeguard its influence there.Footnote ¹²⁶

Pathways for Stabilising the Regional Order

These twin sources of regional ailments reveal much with regards to how Saudi foreign policy elites understand the Kingdom’s positionality within the Middle East. As they imagine it, Saudi Arabia has long adhered to a pragmatic and sober foreign policy rooted in ‘moderation’ (iʿtidāl) that rejects irredentism and interference in the affairs of others, and a vision of development and modernisation that places a premium on stability.Footnote ¹²⁷ This conservatively reformist approach is viewed by many Saudi foreign policy elites, including the influential commentator Ali al-Shihabi, as one possessing an undeniable and proven record of success, standing in stark contrast to the failures of the Kingdom’s many adversaries – whether they be the Iranian-backed sectarians of the present or the pan-Arab republicans or revolutionary Marxists of earlier years.Footnote ¹²⁸ The approach approximates in fact the status of a ‘model’ (namudhaj) that offers, they would argue, a tried-and-tested, non-ideological pathway for a turbulent region that had long embraced radical and ultimately futile solutions to its problems, and one that is given further credence by the Kingdom’s status as the last remaining major Arab power in the Middle East.Footnote ¹²⁹

With this self-image of Saudi Arabia in mind, how do these foreign policy elites propose tackling the twin catalysts imperilling the region and, by extension, the country’s national security? What is, in other words, the Saudi solution to an unstable regional order? With respect to the first dilemma, the basic contours of their thinking on how to address the threat posed by ideological actors has remained relatively consistent for much of the 2010s. As they see it, the most desired and ideal outcome is for the Islamic Republic, and to a lesser extent, similar actors such as Türkiye and Israel, to forsake their regional ambitions and allow for equitable political solutions to emerge in divided polities such as Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya.Footnote ¹³⁰

Yet convincing Iran to act as a Westphalian nation-state willing to respect international law is easier said than done. Negotiations with the Iranian leadership, which is sometimes described as ‘deceitful’ and ‘malevolent’, have been frustrating, and especially so in light of the Islamic Republic’s alleged track record of reneging on past understandings and agreements.Footnote ¹³¹ As al-Jubeir declared in one talk, ‘engagement with Iran does not work, we tried for the last forty years’.Footnote ¹³² Salman al-Dowsari, the editor-in-chief of Asharq al-Awsat for 2014–2016 and current minister of media, echoed many when he stated that the notion that there were dovish reformists among Iranian elite which one could reach an accord with was a laughable one, declaring that talks with Iran were simply unrealistic.Footnote ¹³³

It should be noted that despite the severe deterioration in relations post-2016, negotiations were never off the table: Saudi leaders repeatedly signalled, notwithstanding deep mistrust towards their counterparts, that geography and a shared religious and civilisational tradition dictated the need to reach an amicable solution with the Islamic Republic.Footnote ¹³⁴ Prominent observers of Saudi–Iranian relations, such as ʿAwad al-Badi, an academic at KFCRIS and advisor to Prince Turki al-Faisal, has long expressed the need for such a dialogue.Footnote ¹³⁵ Bin Sager has similarly advocated for this position, stating in an article published in the New York Times jointly written with Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian official and diplomat, that there is an imperative need for both sides to de-escalate and talk.Footnote ¹³⁶

Though negotiations were clearly considered to be a difficult endeavour blemished by mutual suspicions, Saudi foreign policy elites have nonetheless treated the alternative scenario of compelling Iran to change through outright military confrontation as a non-option. It is worth noting in that spirit that the Saudi leadership has even cast its aggressive intervention in Yemen in 2015 as one they had been unwillingly forced into.Footnote ¹³⁷ Some, such as Abdulrahman al-Rashid, the editor-in-chief of Asharq al-Awsat for 1998–2003 and manager of Alarabiya for 2004–2014, have even argued that the war, though waged in self-defence and at the request of the legitimate government of Yemen, was a lure by the Islamic Republic, through its proxy, to bog down and distract the Kingdom from other theatres of strategic significance.Footnote ¹³⁸

With persuasion and coercion so fraught, the near-consensus voiced among the foreign policy elites leaned towards marshalling the support of the international community to impose significant pressure on Iran. However, such coordinated containment as they understood it would not be solely aimed at limiting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear or ballistic missile programmes, as had been the goal of the Obama administration and its European allies in the mid 2010s, but should include assurances and mechanisms for purposefully rolling back Iran’s interference across much of the Arab world. This was the principal criticism of the JCPOA voiced by Saudi observers.Footnote ¹³⁹ Al-Rashid claimed that the agreement, which was ‘negotiated behind closed doors’, was going to be the foundation for ‘more dangerous wars throughout the Middle East’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He noted further that those

This assessment is widely shared by the Saudi foreign policy elite: in one of his public talks, Prince Turki al-Faisal emphasised that a return to the JCPOA, countenanced by President Biden after the abrupt withdrawal of the US from it under the Trump administration in May 2018, should avoid the earlier mistake of neglecting the concerns of Arab states.Footnote ¹⁴² The current foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, offered a similar opinion on any future internationally brokered agreement with the Islamic Republic, noting the need to avoid repeating past mistakes in engagement.Footnote ¹⁴³

All this highlights an important facet of the Saudi worldview in the 2010s – namely, the emergence of a crisis of faith in the US. Mounting differences over how to manage the Arab Spring and the Iranian threat, perceptions of an irrevocable American turn to Asia and abandonment of the region (epitomised by Obama’s scathing call for Saudi Arabia to ‘share the Middle East’ with Iran), and a sense that there existed a sustained American media and political campaign (by ‘leftist’ (yasārī) elements) attacking the Saudi leadership following the Khashoggi incident, have all fed into this disillusionment.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ When coupled with the attack against the oil-processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019, and which took place under the watch of the ostensibly friendly Trump administration, it is possible to say that Saudi foreign policy elites, traditionally pro-American in alignment, have soured on the dependability of the US as a security provider. While continuing to affirm the strategic necessity of Saudi–American relations for the country’s long-term stability and security (in the words of Bin Sager, ‘Riyadh is fully aware that there no realistic alternative’ to the US), there is a deep apprehension that galvanises this elites’ attempt (still ongoing, as of the time of writing) to procure a formalised defence treaty with the US.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Only an ironclad agreement could, the logic goes, affirm Saudi Arabia’s status as an American allied state.

As a result of all these factors, ranging from regional disorder to American ‘abandonment’, Saudi foreign policy elites have gradually come to see that the responsibility for resolving these problems would be shouldered by the Kingdom, the Middle East’s last major Arab power still standing. Writing as early as January 2015, Bin Sager indeed anticipated that King Salman’s reign would be consumed with a task of

Parsing the discourse, two simultaneous and complementary strategies are often brought up: stabilising an Arab core and engendering region-wide holistic development. The first is defined by fostering greater coordination and unity among the ‘last standing’ Arab states, particularly those of the GCC. In this regard, the tensions with Qatar, and their resolution through the al-Ula reconciliation summit, have been conceptualised as bringing ‘order to the [Gulf] house’, a critical and powerful part of the Arab world.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Al-Sulami has argued that the ‘Arab Gulf state system, which leads the Arab states economically, militarily, and politically must articulate an Arab project that the Arab nation can gather around in order to … confront these three projects [the Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli], which aim to swallow the Arab region, albeit at different levels and degrees.’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Within this framework, the Saudi state, at the self-perceived head of the Gulf collective, would endeavour to build a security coalition capable of resisting the encroachments of others – be they Iranian or otherwise – and offering a new vision for the wider Arab world.

This brings us to the second strategy, that of development, which itself is entangled with Vision 2030. As indicated by the Crown Prince from his very first public appearance, the national transformation of the Kingdom overrides all other issues and priorities.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Faisal bin Farhan – prior to his appointment at the top of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but during his assumption of an advisory role at the royal court – also argued that internal development was now the focus of the Saudi leadership, and that this would have foreign policy repercussions, reinforcing, for instance, the pursuit of non-confrontational options.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ By enhancing the resilience and sustainability of the Saudi state and political economy, as well as harnessing some degree of self-sufficiency in military and technological production, the purpose of Vision 2030, as Alghannam puts it, is purposefully that of ‘strengthening the internal front in a region thronged by failed states’.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Saudi foreign policy elites see internal development as breaking the deadlock across the wider Middle East, and in creating a pathway for stabilisation. Alghannam noted in the same commentary that ‘there is a deep and pragmatic Saudi conviction of the connection between prosperity and the reinforcement of security, as a region that is more stable and prosperous will be more capable of reigning in, and diminishing, the threat posed by Iran’.Footnote ¹⁵² Some elites have gone even further, contrasting the renaissance being experienced in the Kingdom with the Islamic Republic’s descent into stagnation and turmoil in recent years, an asymmetry that they believe has diminished Iranian capacity to compete with Saudi soft power.Footnote ¹⁵³ Some even suggest, as did Faisal bin Farhan, that Iran could be offered an opportunity to partake in the fruits of Saudi Arabia’s economic rise if its leadership renounces its hostile foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ ʿAziz Alghashiʿan, a Saudi analyst, has opined along similar lines, arguing that Vision 2030 is a de-escalatory instrument of Saudi foreign policy that has the potential to create new incentives for problematic regional players such as Iran and Israel.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The twin strategies are defensive responses to an unstable regional environment and are suggestive of the limitations – in power projection, resilience, and in the range of security and diplomatic options available – that Saudi Arabia confronts. At their heart is the aspirational idea that by shoring up and amplifying what remains of Arab power, as embodied by the Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the GCC, and relying on development, the catalysts of turbulence in the Middle East could be tackled and, consequently, a new regional order based on respect for the sovereignty and integrity of all its constituent nation-state actors might be brought into being.

China in the Saudi Worldview

Saudi foreign policy elites traditionally espoused a broad range of views regarding the PRC, including those of a critical and negative nature, in the early decades immediately following the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1990.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Some of these represented continuities with past criticisms of the PRC harkening back to the narratives of the Cold War, but others also reflected a tone of dissatisfaction with (what was then) unfamiliar Chinese foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Influential commentators such as al-Rashid – a royal court whisperer well known for his pro-American stance – either dismissed or attacked Beijing’s actions (or inaction) with regards to different regional issues, such as the Darfur crisis in Sudan and regime change in Syria.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

By the mid 2010s, the spectrum of opinions on the PRC shifted towards a more positive direction as Sino-Saudi ties strengthened and new domestic and regional imperatives came to the fore. Saudi foreign policy elites have increasingly toned down their negative treatments of Chinese foreign policy, with criticisms on sensitive topics (such as Chinese policies in XUAR) mostly disappearing in turn. Recent scholarship on media and popular coverage of the PRC in Saudi Arabia confirms this overall development.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Instead, the elites have come to stress the fundamental overlaps in perspectives – such as an abiding respect for Westphalian sovereignty and a focus on economic development – that exist between the two sides. In an address given at Peking University in 2016, al-Jubeir declared such alignments in value as part of a ‘common philosophy’ shared by the Kingdom and the PRC.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Within the Saudi foreign policy elite discourse, the PRC is imagined to exercise a positive influence, though principally through its economic heft.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Domestically, economic relations have consistently been viewed as a vital element in sustaining Vision 2030, an unsurprising claim if one considers the value of Chinese energy imports from Saudi Arabia and, with the PRC being the largest market for Saudi oil since 2011, how much policymakers in Riyadh depend on the revenues accrued from them (Figure 8).Footnote ¹⁶² Regionally, the PRC is, to borrow from al-Jubeir, envisioned as a ‘force of stability’ – an actor that trades with everyone and adheres to a predictable state- and business-centric approach in dealing not only with the Kingdom but the Middle East more broadly.Footnote ¹⁶³ The Riyadh Declaration issued at the conclusion of the first Sino-Arab summit in December 2022 called for greater Chinese and regional coordination in addressing lingering conflicts while also stressing the need for continued economic cooperation.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Capturing the essence of the Saudi and Chinese approaches to the dilemmas of the Middle East, it stated that ‘there is no peace without sustainable development, and no development and prosperity without security’ – the latter being achieved through mediational resolutions that are tied to greater economic integrationist projects, whether that of the BRI or Vision 2030.

Figure 8

Sino-Saudi energy relations and the Saudi economy.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the World Bank and from the International Trade Centre.

A demonstrative example of the PRC’s stabilising role through the power of economics is the widespread narrative among the Saudi elites that their acceptance of a détente with Iran was predicated upon the view that Beijing, by virtue of its extensive political and economic ties with Tehran, could not only pressure them to comply but also had a real stake in guaranteeing its realisation that any violation of the agreement would put its economic interests in the Gulf on the line.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Figure 9 clearly shows the foundation of this thinking, with the Kingdom, for example, recently catching up with the Islamic Republic in attracting Chinese capital after lagging behind for many years. Whether the PRC, as an untested diplomatic power, is actually able to deliver on the guarantees of the détente is an open question for some commentators like al-Rashid, but the Chinese-brokered agreement is worth a serious attempt, he would argue, as ‘[the Saudis] are realists, but at the same time, optimists’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ If it holds, it would partially address one of the principal causes of instability in the Middle East (Iranian expansionism) or at least its specific threat to the Kingdom, while also allowing the PRC to continue facilitating region-wide economic integration through the BRI – all of which are outcomes that dovetail with Saudi Arabia’s strategies to refashion the regional order.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Figure 9

Chinese foreign direct investment (stock) in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, China National Bureau of Statistics, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Notwithstanding the great emphasis placed in the discourse on the PRC as an economic power, what is absent is any serious discussion of it playing a security role, with military power as a key component, akin to that of the role that the US plays. At best, as the ever-sceptical al-Rashid notes, the PRC’s embrace of a more active security role could come about in the far future, with the Chinese, in response to their ever-growing interests, following in the footsteps of their Portuguese, British, and American imperial predecessors.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ However, it is clear that Saudi commentators are cognisant that the PRC has little appetite for such responsibilities, with some, like al-Dowsari, opining that any large-scale Chinese involvement in the region’s security affairs would only come about as part of a Saudi-led multilateral initiative, and would thus be distinct from traditional US patterns of security engagement in the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ They do not see this as a tenable scenario now or in the future, and appear to be aware of the limits of what the PRC could realistically do in the region.

That said, outright alignment with the PRC, entailing an alliance or adoption of the Chinese yuan, is sometimes brought up in the discourse of Saudi foreign policy elites, though rather opaquely and almost always exclusively in discussions surrounding Saudi–American relations. The statements of the Crown Prince, in his 2018 and 2022 interviews with The Atlantic, or that of Turki al-Dakhil (the current Saudi ambassador to the United Arab Emirates), in an infamous and bombastic editorial threatening a radical turn towards Russia and the PRC, are illustrative in that regard.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Such commentary can only be read against the backdrop of the deterioration in American-Saudi (and Sino-American) relations: Saudi foreign policy elites are consciously leveraging concerns in Washington about great power competition with the PRC in the Middle East for their own purposes,Footnote ¹⁷¹ a strategy that is certainly not new in previous periods of strain.Footnote ¹⁷² By raising the spectre of a possible Saudi dash to Beijing, they aim not only to arrest the tensions in Saudi–American ties but also to breathe new strategic life into their security partnership: the Kingdom, after all, is seeking a defence treaty with the US, not the PRC. This confirms the primacy of the US in the thinking of Saudi foreign policy elites, an appraisal that will likely endure even if the current round of treaty-negotiations fails to bear fruit. What emerges then is a bifurcated allotment of roles as far as the great powers are concerned, with the US for security and the PRC for the economy.

On the Saudi Vision

In this section, we have examined how Saudi foreign policy elites understand the situation in the Middle East, as well as their evaluations of the PRC’s role there. Across the board, they see a collapsed regional order brought about by the subversive activities of ideologically driven (state and non-state) actors, on the one hand, and the governance and developmental failures of Arab elites, on the other. As the last remaining Arab power of consequence, and with a perception of US withdrawal, many of them had come to the conclusion in the 2010s that Saudi Arabia should adopt a robust strategy of reformational self-strengthening coupled with an activist foreign policy that places a premium on fostering cooperation and economic integration across the Middle East. The story they have come to embrace is one in which the Kingdom is increasingly at the centre of reconstituting the Middle East after a drawn-out period of chaos and instability, reasserting in some ways a natural position of leadership in this environment.

Within this remedial vision, the PRC is valued for its stabilising role, particularly in the economic domain, an appraisal that interestingly displays parallels with that of Chinese foreign policy elites and confirms the claim (irrespective of its propagandistic import) of a common philosophy existing between the two sides. At the same time, there is clearly no expectation that the PRC will take on a security role. The US remains, to all intents and purposes, and as a matter of consensus, the only real alternative, despite all the tensions that mar Saudi–American relations. The significance of all this is that Saudi foreign policy elites, though adhering to the vision that the region is undergoing great change that has necessitated the wholesale reformation of the Kingdom itself, do not anticipate any major departures in Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East over the short or mid-term and are seemingly satisfied and content with it so far. It should be noted that the PRC’s tangible economic importance for Saudi foreign policy elites is supplemented by its political function as a ‘scarecrow’ in the context of the Kingdom’s relationship with the US, inadvertently breathing new life into the latter while also providing space for further strategic manoeuvrings by Riyadh as it charts a new course for itself within the regional order. In that sense, Saudi foreign policy elites are seeking to forestall a post-American Middle East, but are preparing for such a scenario nevertheless.

Syria as Victim, the Region as Battleground

Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites have voiced a relatively consistent worldview throughout the 2010s. A unifying feature of their discourse is the envisioning of Syria, drawing on classical Baʿthist language, as the ‘beating heart of Arabism’ (qalb al-ʿuruba al-nābidh). The values of independence and sovereignty (for the Syrian and Arab peoples) meant that Syria could only but embrace a foreign policy defined by ‘rejectionism’ (mumānaʿa) of American hegemony in the Middle East and ‘confrontation’ (muwājaha) with Israeli occupation (in the Golan Heights, Palestine proper, and elsewhere).Footnote ¹⁷³ For these elites, Syria had not capitulated to the spirit of ‘defeatism’ (inhizāmiyya) that had afflicted its Arab surroundings. Because of its honourable and unwavering ‘stances’ (mawāqif) on behalf of the Syrian (and Arab) peoples, and its refusal to accept US diktats, the country was subject to immense punishment that rendered it, in the conception of Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites, a martyr and victim.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

This does not mean that the Assadist leadership viewed itself as being driven by anti-American obscurantism, but rather that it was willing to reach an accommodation with the US without sacrificing its core national interests (and those of the wider Arab nation). We can discern this from how Syrian–American negotiations in the 1980s–1990s were depicted and commemorated: Buthayna Shaʿban,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ the longstanding political and media adviser to the presidency and principal mouthpiece of the regime, who has now fled the country with the fall of Bashar al-Assad, published three Arabic and English books that emphasised Hafiz al-Assad’s identity as a peacemaker who had been ultimately frustrated by American disregard for the legitimate and sovereign rights of Syria and Palestine.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Because of these stances, regime change in Syria – and the consequent abdication of core Arab causes – is linked to the triumph of foreign (namely, American) interests. As recently as 2023, Bashar al-Assad repeated a common talking point that while yielding to the US might have brought peace to the land, it would have extracted ‘a greater price we [in Syria] would have had to pay later on’ due to the inherent injustice of its demands.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ This high cost has meant that calls for regime change, especially in the form of democratisation, could never have emanated from genuinely patriotic Syrian elements, but rather fifth-columnists that sought to serve Washington and its allies.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Accordingly, the civil war that raged for much of the 2010s could only be interpreted as foreign perfidy and conspiratorial machination: during al-Assad’s infamous address at the National Assembly in 2011 – his first public appearance after the outbreak of popular demonstrations against his rule – he attributed the unrest to the instigation of outsiders who wanted ‘strife’ (fitna) and the end of Baʿath Party rule.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Though the US is identified by Syrian foreign policy elites as the main culprit, the attack on Syria had taken on ‘universal’ (kawniyya) proportions, involving Israel, other regional ‘comprador-allies’ (Türkiye, Egypt, and the Gulf monarchies) of the West, as well as an assortment of extremist Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIL.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Spearheaded by ‘a vile and terroristic excommunicatory aggression backed by the fake democracies and medieval sheikdoms’, this coalition, to borrow from the assistant to the foreign minister, Ayman Sawsan, has sought to destroy Syria and breach the last standing stronghold of Arabism.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Using similar language, Faysal al-Miqdad, a long-serving Syrian diplomat and one-time foreign minister, has claimed that a core Israeli–Saudi alliance, with US backing, has endeavoured to punish Syria and compel it to join a regional order that has largely accepted US diktats.Footnote ¹⁸²

As can be gleaned from the discourse espoused by Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites, the main predicament facing the regional order was the US bid to establish uncontested hegemony over it. According to this worldview, the Americans embraced a strategy of ‘creative chaos’ (fawdha khalāqa) since the late 1990s and early 2000s, entailing the use of terrorism, so-called democracy promotion, and even outright war (as was the case with Baʿathist Iraq), all of which were purposed towards pre-empting any improvements in Arab or regional affairs.Footnote ¹⁸³ As would be expected, this strategy was not used solely against Syria but targeted many other revisionist forces in the Middle East, including Iran, post-Saddam Iraq, Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Houthīs in Yemen, and various Palestinian factions, such as Hamas. In the words of Hizbollah cadre-officials (reproduced in SANA), the American threat brought all of these actors together in the shared cause of ‘resistance’ (muqāwamah) to the imposition of an ‘American-Israeli project’ (al-mashru’ al-amrīkī al-israilī) in the Middle East – namely, that of eviscerating any challengers to American hegemony and the Zionist settler-colonial enterprise in Palestine.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ As al-Assad puts it, the project is about ensuring the formation of fragmented, weak, and compliant states that cannot be concerned with whatever happens beyond their borders.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ For al-Miqdad, what the US wants for the region is simply ‘evil’ (al-sharr).Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Though the enemy is conceived as all-powerful and cruel, the Manichean discourse of the Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites treated Syria and its allies, due to their righteousness and tenacity, as an inevitably victorious cohort. With quasi-spiritual certainty, they viewed their country’s continued survival as a rebuke to American unipolarity, placing limits on its imperial reach and ensuring that parts of the Middle East remained free of its control.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Indeed, it is Syria and its allies who protected the rest of the region from total destruction (especially from US-backed terrorism, typified by Dāʿish expansionism in the mid 2010s).Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In the longue durée of history, this is nothing new. In an interview with CCTV, al-Assad stated that Syria had been on the path of many foreign invasions in the past (alluding to the Crusaders and Mongols) but that it always prevailed in the end.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Elsewhere both he and Sha’ban asserted that Syria had effectively triumphed in the ‘long war’ being waged against it: the US project of vassalising the country had floundered.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

This inherent optimism about Syria’s present and future ability to resist the pressures of being incorporated into an American imperium was replicated with respect to the regional order, and particularly those segments of it that had traditionally been seen to lie within the US sphere of influence. In the Arab League summit held in May 2023, al-Assad gave a short address, the first in such a forum in more than a decade since Syria’s expulsion, that struck such a note.Footnote ¹⁹¹ He argued that while Arab states still faced many threats, including neo-Ottoman expansionism and chronic under-development, recent Arab- and regional-level reconciliations, as well as renewed commitments to non-interference and sovereignty, meant that the Arab collective could begin to seriously (and advantageously) capitalise on an increasingly multipolar (mutʿadid al-aqtāb) global landscape. An Arab recovery no longer subject to the will of the US was now a realistic possibility. Saudi Arabia, criticised in the 2010s as one of the most benighted and destructive of those ‘following the US agenda’, was now praised for its independent foreign policy and re-engagement with the axis of resistance (typified by the Saudi–Iranian détente), a development indicative of the decline of American power throughout the region.Footnote ¹⁹²

As is clear, the notion of multipolarity – with Russia and the PRC (and to a lesser extent, Iran) at the helm – is central to Assadist Syrian foreign policy discourse in so far as it is understood to be the principal factor that had enabled Syria’s survival, on the one hand, and the catalyst behind the transformations taking place within the regional order, on the other.Footnote ¹⁹³ Much like the way in which the US in the Middle East brought disparate actors together in resistance, the world-spanning scope of the American imperial project, extending from Latin America to East Asia, tied the axis of the region with likeminded (and increasingly powerful) actors from other faraway places who themselves were free of ‘Western colonial thinking’ (al-tafkīr al-isti’mārī al-gharbī).Footnote ¹⁹⁴ As al-Assad readily noted in his interview with the Tishrīn newspaper, non-Western alternatives and blocs were not seriously considered until the full weight of the American challenge was felt by Syria as it descended into civil war.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites have accordingly moved to interpret and justify the interventions of external actors on their country’s behalf as signs of a shared anti-imperialist struggle that belies the wider systemic changes brought into motion by great powers such as Russia and the PRC. They viewed this as is an unstoppable trend and one that strengthened, and drew strength from, Syria’s own victory on the domestic battlefront. In an interview with Russia Today (reproduced in SANA), al-Assad commented that ‘we have always believed that whenever Russia is stronger – and I do not just speak with Syria in mind, but all the small countries of the world – whenever it is stronger, and China continues to rise, we feel a greater sense of security’.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ This is because both Russia and the PRC, which make up ‘a pole that believes in justice, sovereignty, and an international relations of parity and equality’, have empowered Syria to survive US aggression.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ This, in turn, has allowed Damascus (as a bulwark and lightening rod) to sap Washington’s attention, pulling it away from the theatres of utmost importance to Moscow and Beijing, and thus confirming the Syrian leadership’s celebration of their country as a critical force behind the transition to a post-hegemonic ‘new world’ and, by extension, a post-American regional order.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

There is therefore a dialectical dynamic that emerges from the multi-layered arenas of resistance – domestic, regional, and global – that are, eschatologically, contributing to the termination of US power and its replacement with a superior multipolar order. Enduring and waiting for these developments to fully come to fruition is what has guided Syrian foreign policy under the Assad regime. As Sha’ban wrote in an editorial for al-Mayadeen entitled ‘Farewell to the International Family’:

China in the Syrian Worldview

Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites have generally espoused a positive view of the PRC, which was consistently depicted as a ‘friend-state’ (dawla sadiqa), if not an outright ally, the term used to describe Russia and Iran.Footnote ²⁰⁰ This representation is partially predicated on the recognition that both states are ruled by Leninist parties adopting similar socialist frameworks and anti-imperialist discourses.Footnote ²⁰¹ More significant, however, is the shared sense of victimisation by the US due to their nodal function as strongholds of anti-American resistance: Syria for its role as a lynchpin of the resistance in West Asia, and the PRC as an ascendant challenger to American hegemony in East Asia and beyond. The evidence of American perfidy is, according to the narrative, extensive, beginning with regime change plots. Al-Assad identified the origin of the unrest that was wrecking Syria at present, and had wrecked the PRC many decades before (a likely allusion to the Tiananmen student-led demonstrations), as being one and the same: Western interference.Footnote ²⁰² In tandem, the militancy in the XUAR was not viewed as purely a domestic problem for the PRC, but affected Syria in the form of transnational militants.Footnote ²⁰³ On an altogether different level, Assadist Syrian high-ranking officials such as (the late) Foreign Minister Walid al-Muʿalim, against the backdrop of an intensifying Sino-American trade war in the late 2010s, argued that the PRC and Syria were both subject to ‘economic terrorism’ (irhāb iqtisādī) in the form of unjust sanctions (most notably the Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act) and the monopolisation of key technologies.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Although shared victimisation sets the tone, the discourse on the PRC is refracted primarily through appreciation for the tangible actions it was perceived to have undertaken in support of Syria throughout the 2010s. Considerable stress is placed, for instance, on how Western diplomatic double standards and abuses of international law within the halls of the United Nations were decisively countered by Russia and the PRC with sixteen and ten vetoes, respectively, in total in 2011–2020.Footnote ²⁰⁵ These stances, al-Assad claimed on Phoenix TV, were driven not by any personal commitment to his person by the Chinese leadership but by their genuine belief in the principles of sovereignty and non-interference.Footnote ²⁰⁶ This points to the normative characterisation of PRC diplomacy in Assadist Syrian foreign policy elite discourse. In contrast to the morally depraved and colonially minded US (or more broadly, ‘the West’),Footnote ²⁰⁷ the PRC is envisioned as an anti-imperial power that fosters peace, civilisational dialogue, and win-win outcomes. Its mediation efforts in bringing about the Saudi–Iranian détente, with its de-escalatory consequences on the regional order, were assessed in similar terms.Footnote ²⁰⁸

Other Chinese contributions, of a military or economic nature, have a more complicated place in the discourse. Unlike Russia or the Islamic Republic, the PRC has neither had a record of military intervention in Syria nor an expectation of it in the discourse (whether at the national or regional scales), a situation which may explain its qualified designation as a friend-state rather than an outright ally. The (then) Syrian ambassador to China, ‘Imad Mustapha, in a televised panel on the pro-Syrian al-Mayadeen TV channel covering the Chinese People’s Liberation Army high-profile delegation visit to Damascus in mid August 2016, insisted that it was a routine event in the context of nearly thirty years of regular exchange between the two sides: he saw the PRC’s vetoes as being of far greater import to Syria.Footnote ²⁰⁹ In a similar vein, al-Assad was consistently circumspect about the extent of military cooperation in the Sino-Syrian relationship, emphasising that it had been limited to intelligence gathering and supporting Russia’s counter-terrorism operations in the country.Footnote ²¹⁰

By comparison, the PRC’s economic contributions to Syria were much desired and sought after. Tied closely to a vision of Chinese power – as an economic behemoth – the discourse aspirationally viewed the PRC as playing a vital role in stabilising and reconstructing war-torn Syria. The BRI was central to this understanding, though ‘Syria is not yet on any of the lines’ forming the initiative, as al-Assad noted.Footnote ²¹¹ This inclusion would not just benefit the country alone, but would, as al-Miqdad claimed in a reiteration of the themes of common victimhood and mutual support, enable the PRC to break Western economic encirclement of Asia.Footnote ²¹² What is notable in the discussions of Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites is how wide the gap is between the PRC’s anticipated (and exaggerated) economic role and the mundane (and limited) reality of its actual economic presence on the ground: impediments to investment and trade caused by the security situation, lack of market reciprocity, visa issuance difficulties for businessmen, and the absence of financial channels circumventing Western-imposed sanctions are constantly brought up by the highest echelons of the Syrian leaderships.Footnote ²¹³

There are, in fact, signs that the previous prevailing vision of Chinese economic promise moderated in the final years of the regime: in an interview from 2023, al-Assad admitted that the PRC’s economic activity was far below what was expected, but he believed that this was due to Syria’s insecure domestic circumstances.Footnote ²¹⁴ As Figures 10–12 illustrate, Sino-Syrian economic relations did not recover in the 2010s and early 2020s, suggesting that the PRC’s role as an economic saviour, though often spoken about within and outside Syria, remained very much out of reach.Footnote ²¹⁵

Figure 10

Chinese investment in Syria.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, China National Bureau of Statistics, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Figure 11

Value of contracts signed by Chinese engineering and construction companies in Syria.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China.

Figure 12

China’s trade relations with Syria.

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the International Trade Centre.

Whatever might be the exact nature of the PRC’s contributions to Syria, it was its image as a great power on the verge of replacing the US and reconstituting the international order along more equitable lines that was most significant in this discourse. In the eyes of the Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites, the PRC’s aggregation of power could only be a net benefit to their country, offering Syria the prospect of a post-American geopolitical environment. Sha’ban thus proclaimed that ‘the future lies with those new alliances in East Asia, China, and Iran’, explaining in turn the country’s earnest embrace of an ‘eastward policy’ (siyasat al-itijah sharqan).Footnote ²¹⁶ Likewise, al-Assad, who was in the habit of boasting how his son Karim was studying Mandarin to many Chinese media-linked journalists, connected this choice with the PRC’s coming dominance on the global stage.Footnote ²¹⁷ The BRI was viewed as an important instrument in accelerating Chinese ascendancy and multipolarisation: al-Assad called the initiative a harbinger of a re-distributary shift from (Western) zero-sum to (non-Western) cooperative modes of global politics, while Sha’ban described it as a ‘fundamental solution’ (hal jathrī) to the problems of mankind.Footnote ²¹⁸

On the Syrian Vision

In this section we probed how Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites viewed the regional order and the PRC’s role in that. We find that they articulated a campist vision of the Middle East defined primarily by one’s relationality towards American imperial hegemony. They see this division (and the influence exerted by the US) as underpinning not only the lack of regional integration (given the polarisation of local state actors along pro- and anti-US lines) but also the instability within Syria itself. Connected to this, they saw the regime’s principled safeguarding of the country’s sovereignty and national interests – antithetical to US ambitions in the region – as the primary reason behind the tribulations Syria had experienced. At the same time, they held to an optimistic and even messianic reading of the future: their country and its regional allies were posed to ultimately triumph and free the Middle East from the shackles of US control. This assessment stemmed not only from their very survival over the course of a decade but also from what they perceived as an ongoing and irreversible redistribution of global power that reinforced region-wide resistance.

Within this framework, the PRC was understood to play an important role, facilitating broader multipolarisation and extending vital aid to Syria. Beyond instances of diplomatic support, however, Sino-Syrian relations – especially in the military and economic domains – remained limited, though there was much more hope placed on the latter than the former. Taking all this into consideration, it is clear that the PRC was conceived as one (important) variable among many that contributed to the birth of a post-American regional order, though how and when this might happen was left unsaid. While there was an abiding belief that the Middle East was undergoing positive change and would continue to do so over the short and medium terms, Syria had no option but to ‘wait’ (or endure and resist) until US power was sufficiently degraded and constrained. Notably, there was no discernible anticipation among Assadist Syrian foreign policy elites of any major change in Chinese foreign policy. In addition, they did not seem to expect that the PRC would embed itself in the regional security architecture or take on a role akin to that of the US.