The so-called unipolar moment is over. A new Cold War is dawning, and the world is bifurcating, tearing itself into new blocs. One is led by the United States. The other by China, ruled by a communist dictatorship.
Beijing seeks initially to become the preponderant power in the Indo-Pacific, the region that will soon account for the majority of the world’s GDP. Long before the U.S. won the previous Cold War — indeed, long before it won World War II — it was the preeminent power in the Pacific, briefly challenged only by the Empire of Japan. But if Beijing has its way, that era is coming to an end.
Importantly, Sino-American competition is not confined to the Indo-Pacific. Beijing is engaged in a military buildup unprecedented in modern history, seeking, and rapidly acquiring, the means to project power across the globe. A 2021 Pentagon assessment of China’s military power concluded that the Chinese Communist Party seeks to “project and sustain military power at greater distances … not just within immediate environments … but throughout the Indo-Pacific region and indeed, around the world.”
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Like the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, this new contest will be a worldwide battle for influence. But in a key region, the Middle East, the U.S. is making all the wrong moves.
Popular thinking has it that the U.S. is done with the Middle East. From the viewpoint of many Americans, the region has meant a loss of blood and treasure with little reward. Yet the Middle East remains key to U.S. strategy for many of the same reasons that underpinned its importance at the beginning of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War in the late 1940s.
When that Cold War dawned, the U.S. was not dependent on foreign oil for its domestic needs. But many of its allies, and prospective allies, were. Oil meant influence. And in a global contest against the Soviet Union, oil was a coveted prize.
As the historian David Painter has documented, in the immediate decades after World War II, both Western Europe and Japan became increasingly reliant on oil. The commodity was essential to the Marshall Plan and postwar recovery. But it was also essential in keeping them out of communist reach, forever changing U.S. defense plans. “Soviet expansionism,” Daniel Yergin noted in his 1991 book The Prize, “brought the Middle East to center stage.”
The growing importance of oil led the U.S. to forge key alliances and partnerships, including with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Relations between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. government date back to February 1945 and a secret meeting aboard the USS Quincy between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the kingdom’s founder.
The two rulers got on well. Ibn Saud even joked that they were “twins.” The famously loquacious Roosevelt refrained from drinking and smoking in Ibn Saud’s presence, and both chatted about mutual interests, including farming.
Roosevelt was eager to placate his guest. The U.S., he knew, would need oil in the postwar world to come. And Ibn Saud knew that his country needed security. The U.S., having forsworn the colonialism and meddling associated with France and Great Britain, seemed a promising ally. It is only a small exaggeration to say that the U.S.-Saudi alliance was founded on oil for security. Eventually, a shared hostility to communism would help nurture the relationship, with the Saudis playing a key role in opposing the Soviet-supported proxies such as Nasser’s Egypt, Ba’athist Iraq, and Syria.
Ups and downs are inevitable in any long-term alliance, much less one between an austere and deeply religious Muslim monarchy and a young and bustling Western democracy. Nonetheless, the relationship thrived for decades. Among other things, the Saudis offered stability in a volatile region.
In the two decades after the meeting aboard the Quincy, the monarchies in Egypt and Iraq would be toppled and Syria would witness more than half a dozen coups. This instability is a feature, not a bug. “In more recent times,” the former U.S. diplomat David Rundell noted, “many Arab countries have suffered from coups, revolutions, or civil wars.” By contrast, the kingdom has been able to “peacefully transfer political power on no fewer than six occasions.”
The U.S. has deeply invested in relations with the Gulf monarchy, including in military-to-military cooperation, offering key defense training and technology. Yet now, some in the West foolishly seek to sacrifice what has been one of the most enduring partnerships in a part of the world that is prone to upheaval and war.
Several members of Congress have called for America to end weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, citing, among other things, the war in Yemen between a consortium of Gulf monarchies and the Houthis, an Iranian-backed proxy whose motto is “Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse the Jews. Victory to Islam.” As part of a Cold War in the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran seeks both to topple the Gulf monarchies and use its terrorist proxies to attack U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, among others.
Many of these same members of Congress, such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Ro Khanna (D-CA), have also called to limit or end ties with the Saudi monarchy due to the death of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who was murdered in a Saudi Consulate by members of the Saudi government. This voting bloc, comprised largely but not exclusively of self-styled progressive Democrats, has used the outrage of Khashoggi’s death to attack the U.S.-Saudi relationship on human rights grounds.
But such pretensions ring hollow when one considers that many of these same people have advocated rapprochement with the Iranian regime. This regime, lest we forget, is both the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and a preeminent human rights offender and for months has been slaughtering its own people in the streets.
Many, including Omar and Tlaib, have also been notably reticent to criticize the human rights abuses of Iran’s various allies and proxies, including Qatar and terrorist groups such as Hamas. Indeed, when Hamas was murdering protesters during the so-called hunger revolution in Gaza in 2019, both Omar and Tlaib were silent. Their concern for human rights is, at best, highly selective.
Importantly, this same bloc has also called to limit weapons sales to the UAE, effectively ceding Yemen to Iranian proxies who seek to use the country as a base to launch terrorist attacks on U.S. allies. Others, such as Tlaib and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have also sought to end or condition arms sales to Israel. What they seek has less to do with human rights and more with discarding traditional allies in the vain hope of conciliating the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nonetheless, this bloc lobbied the Biden administration. Several members of the new administration were retreads from the Obama years and had themselves advocated rapprochement with Tehran and “more daylight” between America and its long-standing allies.
During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden famously called Saudi Arabia a “pariah state.” The language foreshadowed what was to come. Less than three weeks after his inauguration, Biden ended offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and applied pressure for it to allow Iran a victory in Yemen. The Biden administration also removed the Houthis from the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. When Iranian proxies carried out attacks on major industrial and oil centers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the administration was seemingly unperturbed, offering milquetoast condemnations while continuing to reach out to Tehran. The era of “oil for security” had seemingly come to an end.
All these efforts were meant not only to placate the American far Left but also to appease Iran. The Biden administration sought a return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran nuclear deal, which then-President Donald Trump exited in May 2018. To achieve this objective, it effectively ended sanctions enforcement and restored sanctions waivers on key Iranian officials and entities.
To paraphrase the 18th century French diplomat and wit Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, such policies are worse than a crime — they’re a mistake. Iran is more than just an anti-American dictatorship. It is also Beijing’s foremost ally in the region.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has correctly observed that China “is the most serious long-term challenge to the international order.” A 2022 Pentagon report on Chinese military power found that Beijing poses “the most consequential and systemic challenge” to U.S. security. Yet the administration’s strategy in the Middle East is incongruent with its stated aims of countering and deterring the Chinese Communist Party. If anything, it provides the CCP with an opening.
China and Iran have shared interests. Both seek to overturn the U.S.-dominated international order. A 2021 study by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission argued that Beijing “views Tehran’s opposition to the United States as augmenting China’s increasing global influence.” In recognition of this, the two regimes have reportedly shared surveillance and defense technology, even cooperating on dismantling spy networks.
Beijing is Iran’s “top economic partner” and has steadfastly continued to purchase oil from Tehran, according to the USCC. All of this is to say that appeasing Iran only aids Beijing. The costs extend beyond that, however.
The trajectory of U.S. policy in the Middle East doesn’t just embolden enemies. It alienates friends, placing undue strain on alliances that have been carefully built and maintained over the course of decades. The ruling theocrats in Tehran call for Israel’s destruction and arm and support terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas that seek to turn that dream into a reality. Israel, a major non-NATO ally, does not want to see its chief ally, the U.S., reaching out to Iran. Nor, understandably, does Saudi Arabia. A global power that accommodates its enemies at the expense of its friends is ill-prepared for a new Cold War.
The effort to discard longtime allies couldn’t come at a worse time — or with a worse enemy. If the U.S. is to focus on the Indo-Pacific, it will need regional bulwarks to ensure order and, if need be, project power. In the last Cold War, President Richard Nixon chose Saudi Arabia and the shah’s Iran as part of his “twin pillars” strategy. He did so at a time of U.S. retrenchment, burgeoning inflation, and growing concern with energy security and a rising Soviet Union. In 2022, the U.S. should look for a similar strategy, and it will not find the answers by attempted rapprochement with Iran.
While the Soviet Union was itself an energy powerhouse, China is dependent on imports. It is, in fact, the world’s largest oil importer. On one hand, this limits Beijing’s options, ensuring that it is less self-reliant than its Soviet forefather. But there’s a downside, too. Beijing’s predicament makes it a more attractive partner for oil-producing nations that need a market and look at the U.S., with its own domestic energy potential and fixation with renewables, as a less safe bet in the long term.
From the vantage point of many Middle Eastern countries, Beijing is also an attractive customer. China has long had a “friends to all” policy in the region, preferring open doors to closed ones. By flashing dollars and promising development, Beijing has made steady inroads with several developing nations in Africa. There is every reason to expect that it intends to replicate that strategy in the Middle East.
By July 2022, with gas prices rising and an economy racked by inflation, Biden visited Saudi Arabia in what one analyst called a “bow to reality.” But a true reckoning with reality seems far off. The U.S. has continued to reach out to Tehran despite it openly supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine. Iranian drones have been used to attack Ukraine — drones that country was likely able to supply thanks to the U.S.-supported decision to end an arms embargo to get a new “deal.” Russia, like Iran, is part of Beijing’s axis. If China is playing chess, the U.S. is playing “Go Fish.”
History also offers a stark warning. For much of the 19th century, Great Britain and czarist Russia faced off in a competition for Middle Eastern and Central Asian influence and power, popularly known as the “Great Game.” The Ottoman Empire was a key, if imperfect, British ally. Yet the famed Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, avowedly anti-Ottoman, shredded the alliance, calling the sultan’s regime a “bottomless pit of fraud and falsehood.” The Ottoman Turks looked for another superpower patron, choosing Imperial Germany, which had eschewed military intervention in the region. Gladstone’s successor, Lord Salisbury, lamented what had become of Anglo-Ottoman relations. “They have just thrown it away into the sea without getting anything whatever in exchange,” he said. A few decades later, when World War I erupted, Britain paid a high price for this folly.
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The Middle East has long been subject to the delusions of foreign powers, and on the verge of a new Cold War, the U.S. has continued to alienate key allies. Some U.S. policymakers have yet to catch up with a new bifurcating world. A dose of reality is much needed.
The Middle East, Winston Churchill once remarked, “is one of the hardest-hearted areas of the world. It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it would maintain its will. Your friends must be supported with every vigor, and if necessary, they must be avenged. Force or perhaps force and bribery are the only things that will be respected. It is very sad, but we had all better recognize it.” The great statesman added: “At present, our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared.”
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
