Toward Well-Oiled Relations?

China's Presence in the Middle East following the Arab Spring

Niv Horesh, Niv Horesh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137539793
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

With China replacing the United States as the world's leading energy user and net oil importer, its relations with the Middle East is becoming a major issue with global implications. Horesh and his contributors set out to analyse the implications of China's growing presence in the Middle East.

1

Sino-American Crosscurrents in the Middle East: Perceptions and Realities

Yitzhak Shichor

Introduction

With few exceptions, all recent analyses and commentaries that link the US and China to the Middle East share similar conclusions, pointing to two main inter-related phenomena reflecting one fundamental assumption: that the US and China are engaged in a competition (or even rivalry) in the Middle East. Many seem to believe that the US is losing ground in the region because of its crippled commitment to its allies, its policy of “rebalancing” or “pivoting” to the Asia-Pacific region, and its expected withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Also, the US has allegedly become more self-reliant in terms of oil production and no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. Consequently, the conventional wisdom argues that the US is planning to gradually divest itself from the region. According to these views, Beijing will fill the vacuum created by the US withdrawal; indeed, it already seems to be ramping up its presence there. Reportedly, CCP media often hinted that if US redeployment in East Asia is implemented, China will seek to more visibly corner the US in the Middle East. Is Beijing interested in or capable of doing it? This chapter tries to challenge these conclusions and to offer alternative ones.

To a great extent, these conclusions originated in the Cold War era when Beijing regarded the US (and also later the Soviet Union) as its main adversary in the Middle East. Indeed, much of China’s Middle East (mostly rhetorical) offensive up to the late 1960s had been directed against the US. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the legacies of Sino-US relations in the Middle East. The second part shows how legacies of the past are still affecting Sino-American relations in the Middle East. To a certain extent this is true, though not everywhere, not all the time and not in all spheres. The third and final part of the chapter looks at perceptions of Sino-American animosity and rivalry in the Middle East and suggests why they should be modified. It deals with the large degree of convergence of Beijing’s and Washington’s policies and behavior in the Middle East, which is contrary to conventional wisdom. Still, convergence by no means implies collaboration. Finally, I try to suggest ways to overcome the divergence between China and the US in the Middle East and to facilitate greater cooperation between the two.

Legacies

Mao’s China regarded the US presence in the Middle East as a link in a ring that encircled China and as a base for denying Chinese access into the region. There was little Beijing could have done to diminish US influence in the Middle East, let alone drive it away. Mao’s China was a marginal player in the Middle East, at best, and by no means a challenge to the US.¹ This asymmetry has gradually modified since the 1980s as the PRC acquired more political, economic, and military capabilities. By the early 1990s China had established diplomatic relations with all Middle Eastern countries and had launched new activities including arms sales, increased trade, labor export, construction projects and, later on, loans and investments.²

Initially, most of these activities hardly affected US interests in the Middle East. In fact, the 1980s were the best period in Sino-US relations and their effects were also felt by other countries with interests in the Middle East. For example, to neutralize an expected negative Soviet response to its own military transactions with China, Washington tacitly approved (if not initiated) Israeli arms sales to the PRC.³ Beijing’s unprecedented intrusion into the Middle Eastern arms markets was by and large tolerated by Washington. Chinese arms supplies to Iran and Iraq, engaged in brutal fighting throughout the 1980s, had failed to raise US alarm until 1987, when US tankers were hit by Iran’s Chinese-made Silkworm missiles.⁴ It was only then that Washington began leaning on the two sides to end the hostilities leading to the termination of the war in 1988. In hindsight, 1988 may have signaled the beginning of a turnabout in Sino-US collaboration in the Middle East and the end of the honeymoon phase. It happened in Saudi Arabia.

Revealed in March 1988, Beijing’s sale of DF-3 IRBMs to Saudi Arabia apparently came as a surprise to Washington. This deal, the first of its kind, had been facilitated following a US refusal to provide advanced weapon systems to Saudi Arabia, which pushed it toward China. This pattern was repeated later (e.g., in the case of Turkey). While Washington must have been aware of the Sino-Saudi negotiations, supposedly conducted in secret, it had the power to block the deal, but did not. While in retrospect the missile deal proved to be of no more than symbolic value, it had paved the ground for the establishment of Saudi-Chinese diplomatic relations and, even more important, it indicated China’s growing role in the Middle East and the erosion of US assets in the region⁵ – long before becoming an international issue by the end of the first decade of the 21^st century. Indeed, by the end of the 1980s, Beijing had already begun to tread on US toes in the Middle East, and elsewhere.⁶

Sino-US friction, which had nothing to do with the Middle East, was an outcome of the Tiananmen massacre and the Soviet collapse. Washington’s disillusionment about China’s alleged free-market “democratic” orientation and fundamental upholding of hard-core CCP authoritarianism has been underlined by the Soviet disintegration. Beijing now lost its value as a US partner against Moscow since Sino-Russian relations have been improving quickly and substantially, primarily in military terms and on global issues including the Middle East. As the Moscow challenge diminished, Washington began to consider Beijing as the new “threat.” Although the subsequent deterioration in Sino-US relations had little to do with the Middle East, it still determined US-China relations in this region; and Sino-Israeli relations were immediately affected.

Tolerated if not welcomed throughout the 1980s, Israeli military transfers to China had begun to attract US fire since the early 1990s. Accused of transferring US military technologies to China, Israel was forced to cancel some deals, to pay Beijing a hefty compensation to establish a new Department of Defense Export Control in its Ministry of Defense, and to enact laws regarding arms export supervision. In 2005 Washington forced Israel to stop upgrading Israeli-made Harpy UAVs, sold to Beijing in the mid-1990s, and to return them to China. Firm US opposition also made it difficult for Israeli security companies to offer their services at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. In late 2013 the director of the newly created Department of Defense Export Control in Israel’s Ministry of Defense had to resign after apologizing to the US because a sensitive military component sold to a European company ended up in China.⁷ Washington’s close monitoring of Israel’s arms sales to China – whether direct or indirect – indicates clearly that its concern about China was growing.

Yet China’s higher profile in the world, and in the Middle East, is not unconnected to US policies. Beijing has been able to increase its role mainly because of the withdrawal of the US and other Western governments from the Greater Middle East. Quick to seize the opportunity, China stepped in, occasionally by invitation, to fill the vacuum. This scenario occurred in Sudan, an Arab League member, which has become China’s first solid base in Africa. China also expanded its interests in Libya and Iraq, becoming the dominant player in their energy sector. Likewise, Washington’s refusal to sell missiles to Turkey opened the door for the Chinese, whose FD-2000 air defense system was commissioned by Ankara in a deal worth US $4 billion, though not yet final at the time of writing.⁸ Washington continues to fight hard to abort the deal.⁹ Although China’s military transactions with Turkey are still marginal, and by no means threaten US predominance, they are nevertheless significant as Turkey is a NATO member.¹⁰ For the first time since its admission to NATO, Turkey appears to have a choice: China.

Needless to say, China has become a major economic player in the Middle East, increasingly at the expense of the US.¹¹ In Saudi Arabia, a close US ally, China is becoming the top trading partner – overtaking the US and Japan, something inconceivable twenty years ago. Late in 2009, China’s oil imports from Saudi Arabia had for the first time surpassed those of the US, thus turning Saudi Arabia into China’s leading oil supplier.¹² In May 2010, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company Aramco (Arabian-American Oil Company, partly controlled – until 1980 – by several US oil companies) held its board of directors meeting – for the first time ever – in Shanghai. Symbolically, if not (yet) practically, it reflected America’s decline and China’s rise.

Thus, despite a Sino-US “honeymoon” in the Middle East that lasted through the 1980s and that offers a precedent for future collaboration and partnership, the fundamental Sino-US legacy demonstrates mutual hostility, competition, and rivalry until the early 1970s and once again from the early 1990s on. It is this legacy of friction that shapes common perceptions of US-China relations today, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Perceptions

Most interpretations of Sino-US relations in the Middle East reflect their perceived and inherited mutual hostility. Beijing, a relative newcomer in the Middle East and a rising global power, is perceived as trying to encroach on US assets and win friends by blocking or diluting Washington’s attempts to impose sanctions on “axis of evil” countries such as Sudan, Iran, and Syria. Moreover, upholding their “non-intervention” policy, the Chinese are perceived as trying to avoid becoming actively involved in Middle Eastern affairs not only in the region but also in the UN and the Security Council votes, where they initially tended to abstain or even to be absent. Regarded as a declining superpower, the US has criticized Beijing’s behavior of supporting “rogue” regimes that abuse human rights, oppose democracy, and nurture terrorism and expect Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder”. At the same time, the Chinese fail to hide their concern about Washington’s alleged relocation to East Asia.

This alleged US forthcoming withdrawal from the Middle East is based on a number of signals. Conventional wisdom argues that its new “rebalancing” and “pivoting” policy will lead the US to turn to the Asia-Pacific region, at the expense of the Middle East. Apparently linked to the belief that China has become the main threat to the US, and following the planned US evacuation of Iraq and Afghanistan, American troops and military bases would shift from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, leaving the Middle East less protected. There are also hints that Washington has become fed up with the Middle East conflicts, primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian one, and may try to retire from its attempts to bring the parties together. However, the most important reason commonly given for the alleged US withdrawal from the Middle East is the so-called “shale oil revolution.” According to this argument, the US is not only going to become self-sufficient in oil but an oil and gas exporter that would overtake the world’s leading oil and gas exporters. Under these circumstances, the US would no longer need the Middle East to provide its energy needs and, consequently, could give up its presence (primarily mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Sino-American Crosscurrents in the Middle East: Perceptions and Realities
• 2  An Alternative Partner to the West? Chinas Growing Relations with Turkey
• 3  A New Eurasian Embrace: Turkey Pivots East While China Marches West
• 4  The Perception of the 2009rmqi Conflict across the Islamic World
• 5  Chinas Dual Diplomacy: Arab Iraq and the Kurdistan Region
• 6  An Analysis of the Evolution of Sino-Egyptian Economic Relations
• 7  Chinese and US Energy Policy in the Middle East
• 8  Does Likud Have a Look East Option?
• 9  China and the Gulf Co-operation Council: The Rebound Relationship
• 10  Chinese Policy in the Middle East in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings
• 11  China and Iran: Expanding Cooperation under Conditions of US Domination
• 12  The Future of Sino-Iran Relations
• Conclusions: Chinas Growing Presence in the Middle East
• Index