What does the Saudi-Iran deal mean for Israel?
The Middle East has always been an arena in which you can assess the changing dynamics of the Great Powers. When the sun never set on Britain’s empire, that was the region where it did some of its most extensive — some would say destructive — work. When the mantle of world dominance passed to the United States, that was where we saw sustained intervention.
Now, with Washington turning its colossal tanker toward Asia, another power — ironically, the one the Americans most fear — may be stepping into what is starting to look like a void. Jerusalem has long been concerned about a US retreat from the region, and it seems such fears are in danger of being realised.
Last week, Riyadh, the Sunni Lion, and Tehran, the world’s largest and most powerful Shia state, signed a deal negotiated by China. A joint statement declared that the two countries had agreed “to resume diplomatic relations and reopen their embassies” within two months, promising not to interfere in each other’s “internal affairs”.
The story here is both a macro and micro one. At the macro level, it is about China’s changing view of itself in the world. Under the country’s previous leader, Hu Jintao, among Beijing’s key foreign policy principles were “building and accepting a world where countries diverge in their paths of national development and political systems”, rejecting “unilateralism and hegemonic ambitions.”
Xi Jinping has different ideas. Throughout the first 20-odd years of turbulence in the region, China has, legally speaking, been a passive player. It has economic interests, not least as a consumer of both Iranian and Saudi oil. A sustained flow from the Gulf to Asia is key to its strategic interests. Otherwise, its involvement has been relatively limited, particularly in the political sphere.
Now, though, it is stepping up to play a more muscular role. According to the analyst Jonathan Spyer, the most notable aspect of this deal is that it represents the arrival of China to the Middle East diplomacy stage…
