Taken in context, China brokering a truce/peace between Saudi Arabia and Tehran may impact wider political geography, including India. If nothing else, it may ensure that much of West Asia/Middle East proclaims neutrality in any future geopolitical standoff between China and the US, and also between China and India. It may not be good from a historic Indian socio-political perspective, whatever be the geo-strategic benefits accruing from the relatively recent geostrategic overtures between India and the US, whose limitations the Ukraine War has already exposed.
Going beyond the provocative American behaviour over the ‘Khashoggi affair’ in 2018, China’s twin Saudi-centric initiatives were waiting to happen. Unlike the US and its Western allies, China does not concern itself with human rights issues in third nations. Over the past decades, Gulf-Arab sheikdoms have been perturbed by the region-wide fallouts of the anti-establishment ‘Iranian Revolution’ of 1979-80.
To them all, the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda combo in Afghanistan and then Pakistan, both before and after 9/11, were unwelcome. Even more so was the ‘Arab Spring’ kind of ‘orchestrated’ anti-establishment mass protests, where they saw a hidden American hand, for instance, in the dehumanised death of Libya’s Gaddafi. In between, the second American war against the purported ‘Axis of Evil’ on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the name of non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) opened their eyes to possibilities. They needed a new ally in the new century/millennia, and China with its non-interference political policy and mutually supportive economic outreach suits them fine. Like the US in the Cold War era, but not anymore, China sees it all as a political investment for the future.
From a Chinese perspective, Beijing might have neutralised the overwhelming US presence in inter- and intra- Gulf policy, without actually expecting them to take its side in any future face-off with the US. Though still dependent on the US in the UN fora, Israel, on the other side of the Gulf’s socio-political gulf, too has been striking it on its own for a few years now.
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