Earlier this month the Chinese president Xi Jinping paid a three-day visit to Riyadh, where he participated in a summit with representatives of several Arab governments, as well as additional meetings with the leaders of the Persian Gulf monarchies. The visit, Mohammed Alyahya writes, is a sign of an emerging arrangement where China buys Saudi oil and sells Saudi Arabia its weapons, perhaps even usurping the role traditionally played by the U.S. Alyahya explains the motivations behind Riyadh’s pivot to Asia, while cautioning against it.
During both the Obama and Biden administrations, Iranian aggression via its terrorist proxies in Yemen has been met with U.S. calls for de-escalation, frequently blaming Saudi Arabia for a conflict it did not seek. In Syria, the United States saddled us with the horrifying and threatening specter of a neighboring country controlled by Iranian troops and Russian bombers. As part of the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration sent tens of billions of dollars flowing into Iranian coffers—money that was used to demolish Iraq, crush Syria, create chaos in Lebanon, and support Houthi attacks against Saudi territory. It was the Obama administration that decided to give the Russian president Vladimir Putin a strategic foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, which the administration sold to the American people as a way to . . . de-escalate the civil war in Syria.
Against this background, it should be abundantly clear why many Saudis are beginning to shift their gaze eastward. But I would counsel them that their hopes of China replacing the United States as a partner for Saudi Arabia are naïve.
Conflating U.S. miscalculation with U.S. incapability is foolish. The world order created and long sustained by the United States can’t be destroyed by any global actor, including China. It can only be destroyed by the United States itself. For good and for ill, our two countries’ fates remain inescapably intertwined. . . . Hopefully, a hard look at the future the United States is creating might help dispel the ghosts that are haunting the Middle East.
Read more on Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/16/saudi-arabia-china-xi-bin-salman-biden-oil-opec-geopolitics-security-middle-east/