Did the Israel-Iran war expose China’s Middle East policy?

Did the Israel-Iran war expose China’s Middle East policy?

Atlantic Council -Aug 6th2025

By Andrea Ghiselli

In the aftermath of the Twelve Day War between Israel, the United States, and Iran, many experts have argued that the weaknesses of China’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) strategy have been exposed. These comments come despite China appearing to have, in recent years, started to make its mark in the region.

For example, in 2023, Beijing hosted Saudi Arabia and Iranian officials to announce the normalization of ties between Riyadh and Tehran. That same year, it invited now-ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to Hangzhou and welcomed a special delegation on Gaza from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Indonesia. Just months later, representatives of Palestinian factions met in Beijing to issue the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity.

While not as involved as Russia, China bolstered its role in the region and did not seem a distant or secondary player anymore.

Yet, today Gaza remains starved and occupied, there is no unity among the Palestinians, and, especially, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” composed of Iran and its regional proxies hardly exists anymore after the Israeli multifront campaign which led to the direct bombing of Iran, as well as the sudden collapse of Syria’s Assad regime in December 2024.

Ultimately, the volatility of Chinese gains can largely be traced back to the fact that the MENA region’s importance in Beijing’s foreign policy is limited and, thus, not much energy and resources are invested in long-term planning. This results in a low-commitment approach that allows China to pick low-hanging fruit while placing it in a passive and reactive position in times of crisis and regional change.

Hence, China’s fortunes in the MENA region are far more dependent on trends there than sophisticated strategizing.

Priorities

Similar to other countries, China’s leadership spends most of its time on domestic issues, from figuring out how to turn the country into a “mega-sized consumer powerhouse” to managing the gigantic Chinese Communist Party machine. If one takes the Politburo study sessions (i.e., meetings in which the country’s twenty-odd most powerful people meet to listen and interact with one or two experts on topics picked by Xi for about two hours) as a proxy of Beijing’s priorities, foreign policy’s relatively low priority ranking becomes evident. It only stood out during Xi’s first term as China’s top leader. After that, the number of relevant meetings evidently declined to the same level as, or an even lower level than, during the years of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, and was far lower than the number devoted to economic, social, and party affairs. Even in Xi’s “new era,” foreign policy ambitions do not displace domestic preoccupations.

With foreign policy taking up a fraction of the leadership’s working time, China’s relations with certain countries and regions are more important than others. In the classic China’s Search for Security, Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell point out that “China’s immediate periphery has a good claim to be the most challenging geopolitical environment in the world for a major power” due to the presence of nuclear-armed neighbors and unresolved disputes that involve extra-regional powers. Hence, unsurprisingly, relations with neighboring countries and the United States have long been the focus of Chinese foreign policy. The patterns of overseas visits made by Chinese leaders show this well. The same holds true when looking at how being assigned to work on those countries or regions shapes the chances of rising through the ranks of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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