By Michael Singh
By the end of the 2010s, two points of broad foreign policy consensus prevailed among Republicans and Democrats: The United States should not fight any more wars like Iraq, and the United States must shift to a focus on the Indo-Pacific given the threatening implications of China’s rise and demonstrated desire for hegemony in Asia. Both points seemed to imply a diminished U.S. commitment to the Middle East.
Now, however, this consensus has evolved. American policymakers have arrived at the conclusion that strategic competition with China and Russia is global in scope, and the Middle East has a key role to play in it. That great power competition should draw the United States into— rather than out of—the Middle East is no historical anomaly. America was deeply engaged in the Middle East long before the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror. This engagement came not despite but because of the need to counter our great power competitor, the Soviet Union, which American policymakers worried might dominate the region’s resources and exert undue influence over its governance.
Today, America’s competitors are once again contending for Middle Eastern influence. What’s more, unlike during the Cold War, the Middle East in turn is influencing events well beyond its boundaries. In 2015, Russia engaged in its most significant intervention abroad since the end of the Soviet Union, fortifying the regime of Syrian President Bashar al- Assad in an effort to thwart stated U.S. aims there and prove Russia’s value and fidelity to its regional partners. While Russia has had to pull back to an extent due to its misbegotten war in Ukraine, the investment it made a decade ago continues to pay off, as its regional partnerships have offered key relief from Western efforts to squeeze Moscow economically and politically.
China, for its part, has continued to increase its engagement in the Middle East. Whereas for many years China’s interest in the Middle East was primarily economic, Beijing’s ambitions there have mounted in lockstep with its global aspirations. While China continues its energetic economic diplomacy in the region, it no longer views the Middle East primarily through the lens of parochial interests or even the connectivity-focused “Belt and Road Initiative,” the primary vehicle for the westward expansion of Chinese economic, political, and military influence. Today, China views the Middle East primarily through the lens of U.S.-China competition, prioritizing actions that undermine the United States and reinforce its own global prestige. Of particular concern in Washington is China’s increasing security engagement in the region, consisting of arms sales, an expanding military footprint, technology cooperation, and investment in dual-use critical infrastructure (such as ports)—actions which have put relations with key U.S. partners such as Israel, Turkey, and the UAE under strain.2
Beijing has long sought to supplement its economic and security influence in the region with diplomatic sway to safeguard its investments, to compete with the United States, and to project an image of China as a global power capable of the sort of diplomacy that had long been the province of other powers. That diplomacy—consisting of convening conferences and summits, dispatching special envoys, and marketing regional membership in organizations such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—for many years amounted to little actual influence. However, in March 2023, Beijing helped to broker the resumption of diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which it touted as a triumph and as a sign that China was poised to eclipse the United States as a regional mediator. While Beijing’s actual role in that agreement does not seem to have extended beyond serving as host, and while it has struggled to follow up with further accomplishments, this event should serve as a signal to Washington of China’s determination to wield political influence in the Middle East and its ability to leverage its relationships to do so.
For several years now, U.S. partners have responded to the rekindling of great power competition in the Middle East by hedging their bets. This appears to derive from three motivations: first, a desire to maintain good relations with Russia and China and to advance in areas, such as the development of clean energy technology, where Beijing and Moscow simply offer more attractive capabilities than does Washington; second, a genuine concern regarding U.S. diffidence; and third, a desire to play great powers off of one another to maximize benefits. Regional powers have resisted decisive alignment with either Washington or Beijing, choosing “omni-alignment” instead. They are affiliating both with U.S.- dominated regional and international groupings as well as those led by China, such as BRICS, SCO, and others. Indeed, several of them see themselves as rising global powers in their own right—Saudi Arabia in particular.
While Western capitals have paid more attention to Russian and Chinese designs in the Middle East in recent years, few anticipated the influence the Middle East would have beyond its borders. Regional states have played a pivotal role in the Ukraine conflict. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other regional oil producers have coordinated their oil production with Russia via the OPEC-Plus grouping, helping to shield Moscow from the effects of international sanctions. Dubai and other locales have provided a safe haven for Russian nationals and capital amid a Western campaign of isolation. Turkey has played a vital role in adjudicating access to the Black Sea and has sold arms to Ukraine, even as it has maintained cordial relations with Moscow.
The other Mideast state that has played a key and altogether negative role in Ukraine is Iran, through the sale of drones that have helped Moscow to wreak havoc across Ukraine, and possible pending sale of ballistic missiles. This is just one way in which Iran has increasingly aligned itself with Russia and China, abandoning its long-held aspiration to reengage with the West and instead becoming a dependent of and junior partner to Moscow and Beijing in confronting Western pressure and seeking to overturn the U.S.-led international order. The full implications of Iran’s strategic machinations have yet to be realized: it is unclear, for example, what Tehran might receive from Moscow and Beijing as reward, or how Iran’s regional rivals will change their views of Russia and China as a result.
The Middle East has proven that it is not simply a destination, but that it is a key player in global events. There is every reason to believe that this would hold just as true during a conflict over Taiwan. Such a conflict will involve not just ships, aircraft, and missiles, but energy supplies—which flow in massive volumes from the Middle East to both China and U.S. allies such as Taiwan and Japan—maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, and financial markets, where Gulf energy giants like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE have far more influence than most partners elsewhere. Such a conflict would also play out in the meeting chambers of international and multilateral institutions and in the court of global public opinion, which Beijing has of late invested significant effort to winning over.
Fortunately, American policy has yielded progress in the past decade. After years of efforts to convince them, U.S. partners in the region are beginning to apprehend the threat posed by Chinese aspirations and methods of doing business, though they continue to view U.S.-China competition, rather than China itself, as the bigger challenge. Israel’s previously cozy relationship with Beijing has been undermined, likely irretrievably, by Beijing’s cynical anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic behavior during the Gaza conflict. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other U.S. partners increasingly accept that while Washington is not asking them to broadly choose between the United States and China, in certain key domains such as defense and critical technology, a choice must indeed be made. And for the most part, they have made their preference for the United States clear. This is surely the result in part of Russia and China’s own behavior, with the former exhausting itself in Ukraine and the latter demonstrating its fickleness and unreliability by, for example, abdicating any responsibility for safeguarding Red Sea shipping lanes amid Houthi bombardment.
However, the progress the United States has made in adapting its partnerships for a new strategic environment is also partially the result of resisting the siren song of regional withdrawal. Whatever its superficial charms, a policy of withdrawal would run counter to American self-interest. The United States is no declining great power like the Soviet Union in the 1980s or the United Kingdom in the 1950s; if we retreat, it will be mere abdication, not strategic necessity. Key U.S. interests remain at stake in the region. Foremost among these remains the flow of energy. The United States may no longer depend on Middle Eastern supplies, but it remains vital to U.S. allies, especially those in the Indo-Pacific. These allies’ dependence on just a few sources of oil has in fact increased as a result of Western policy toward Iran and Russia, in turn more deeply commingling their security with that of U.S. partners in the Gulf.
Furthermore, the region remains a major source of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation threats. And when it comes to terrorism—the national security issue that U.S. citizens continue to care most about, even if U.S. strategists would prefer to move on from it—the Middle East remains central. While America’s chief terrorist threat, both purportedly Islamic and otherwise, is domestic, Middle East-based groups continue to plot attacks on the United States and inspire or guide domestic actors to do the same.
Finally, it is not just energy that flows through the Middle East; a significant portion of global commerce passes through regional waterways, which, as recent events demonstrate, are subject to belligerent closure. While the Houthis’ effective closure of the Red Sea to commercial shipping has not yet dramatically affected global commerce, it has increased the risk of regional conflict, negatively affected regional economies, undermined the credibility of Western leadership, and should serve as a warning of the ease with which hostile actors could close other maritime chokepoints. Beijing’s absence from the international effort to reopen this waterway, and its apparent contentment to safeguard only its own vessels, should serve as a warning to Washington and others. Just as in the previous decade Russia cynically used refugee flows from Syria to roil Europe, American policymakers should expect that China will use increased influence in the Middle East first and foremost to undercut U.S. interests rather than to advance shared or communal aims.
The Way Forward
The relevant debate about U.S. strategy in the Middle East is not whether we should stay or go. While this question worries our partners and preoccupies grand strategists divorced from the daily realities of policymaking, there is no question that the United States will remain engaged in the Middle East, and indeed will continue to be the foremost external power in the region. Nor is the broad outline of an American strategy in the Middle East in an era of great power competition a matter of great controversy—successive administrations have now pursued a policy that aims to advance U.S. interests at a lower level of resources by building partner capacity and strengthening links between those partners, while maintaining a sustainable forward-deployed troop presence to stabilize the region and aid in global power projection.
The key challenge the United States faces in the Middle East is how to balance these efforts with the need to address lingering and emerging regional threats, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the multifaceted challenge posed by Iran but especially its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the ever-present risk of the reemergence of ISIS. Managing these threats is inextricably linked to successfully pursuing the agenda laid out above, insofar as doing so affects our partners’ willingness and ability to engage with us on other matters, and insofar as these threats are amplified by our rivals, who have an interest in ensuring that Washington is not left free to pursue our aims unfettered. This underscores a vital point that the current U.S. administration has neglected: strategies are competitive and must anticipate our adversaries seeking to obstruct our plans.
Finally, Washington must view states of the region as partners in addressing both regional and global challenges, rather than simply as the objects of U.S. policy. Perhaps the most important pillar of U.S. policy in the Middle East in recent years has been to enlist regional partners—especially wealthy Gulf Arab states who have a capacity to invest nimbly around the world in a way the United States does not—in tackling global challenges. And we should look to coordinate with and enlist the help of partners outside the region, including India, Japan, South Korea, and Europe, both to shoulder a greater share of the burden of confronting regional challenges, but also to better counter rivals and offer greater value to regional states of an alignment with a U.S.-led global bloc. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that we should not adopt regional strategies at all, but whenever possible organize U.S. policy around discrete challenges and opportunities, assembling international coalitions as needed and acting across geographies as required. U.S. military facilities in the Gulf are closer to Taiwan than are U.S. bases in Hawaii, and any future conflict is unlikely to respect either our bureaucratic silos or preexisting notions of the world’s regional divisions.
1 Note: This paper updates the author’s 2019 paper for the Reagan Institute Strategy Group, “US Policy in the Middle East Amid Great Power Competition.”
2 Note: For more on China’s military engagement in the Middle East, see Grant Rumley, “China’s Security Presence in the Middle East: Redlines and Guidelines
for the United States,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, October 2022; PolicyNote123Rumley.pdf (washingtoninstitute.org)
