Iran and Beijing’s Neo-Middle East Strategy

China is a “good man” in the Middle East, being friendly almost to everyone there, including the arch enemies of Iran and Israel. For a long time until recently it has kept a relatively passive involvement, following Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy guidance that China should avoid leading world affairs, especially over conflictual issues that bear no immediate significance to its core national interests. There are other reasons why China was reluctant to play a proactive role in Middle East politics. First it realizes that it could offer no practical solution to the permanent conflicts between Arabs and Israelis. More importantly, the US has always regarded the Middle East as its sphere of influence and guarded it jealously. At its peak, the United States maintained a troop size of more than 200,000 people in the Middle East. Any deep entanglement could pit China against US preference, which was both costly and unnecessary. Therefore, Beijing’s protracted strategy towards the Middle East has been a low profile positive engagement, characterized by helping the conflicting parties escrow escalation of armed conflict where it could, and by a focus on securing the critical sea-lanes of communications (SLOCs) and protecting its oil import