China Power | Diplomacy | East Asia

After the Iran War, China’s Middle East Strategy Will Prioritize the Gulf

China’s top priority is now keeping the Gulf states, and above all Saudi Arabia and the UAE, from drawing closer to Washington.

On June 17, U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian signed an interim deal to end the war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the oil sanctions that had crippled Iran’s economy. As the Iran war moves into the final stages of negotiation, the episode has surfaced the strategic calculations of every actor drawn into it. Those calculations carry consequences well beyond the Middle East, reshaping diplomatic relationships and the terms on which governments choose to align. 

For China, its Middle East strategy has now narrowed to keeping the Gulf states, and above all Saudi Arabia and the UAE, from drawing closer to Washington.

Beijing had already started reordering its priorities well before the war. In April 2025, leadership recast China’s diplomatic hierarchy at the Central Conference on Work Related to Neighboring Countries, the first gathering of its kind in 12 years. Notably, the conference moved China’s own neighborhood to the foremost place in its external strategy – by implication, placing the Middle East below it. 

Now the Iran-U.S. war is forcing China to define what it wants from a part of the world that no longer sits near the top of its agenda.

The war has redrawn the Middle East’s alignment, drawing some states closer to the United States and pushing others further away. Israel sits unambiguously within the U.S. camp. 

Iran, obviously, is further estranged from Washington, with little prospect of repair. Tehran and the United States will almost certainly remain at odds for the foreseeable future. For Beijing, this means that even if China commits nothing further to Tehran it can count on Iranian dependence. Tehran simply has no other potential partners of comparable weight to turn. 

What remains unsettled is the Gulf, the set of swing states on which China’s regional position now rests. Beijing’s task in the Middle East now is to prevent the Gulf monarchies from leaning to the U.S. side, a concern that centers on the region’s two heavyweights, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

China backs Iran in concrete ways, purchasing the overwhelming majority of Iranian oil exports and abstaining from condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf states over the course of the fighting. This year’s conflict, however, marked the outer limit of what Beijing is willing to do for Tehran. With noninterference in the affairs of other states being a stated principle of Chinese foreign policy, direct military support, or any Chinese military presence on Iranian soil, would cross thresholds Beijing has shown no intention of approaching. Iran, as noted above, has little choice but to accept that limit. China’s relationship with Iran is therefore durable and inexpensive to sustain, and it requires little further investment from Beijing.

From China’s point of view, the danger is that both Gulf heavyweights end where Israel now sits, fully inside the American system, leaving Beijing with commercial ties but little diplomatic influence. But China’s ability to prevent such an outcome will be limited by the resources it is prepared to commit. 

Beijing has long sorted the world into tiers that rank its diplomatic priorities, treating relations among the major powers as the decisive arena, the neighboring and periphery countries as the priority, the developing world as the foundation, and multilateral institutions as the stage on which influence is performed. 

The April 2025 Central Conference moved China’s immediate neighborhood to the top of that order, displacing major power diplomacy, and Xi Jinping described the periphery as the foremost consideration in managing China’s overall diplomatic situation. The official message indicates that China’s neighborhood now stands above every other theater, and it will absorb the bulk of Beijing’s diplomatic attention and resources.

The Middle East, by contrast, falls within the third priority category. The region is valuable to China as a source of energy and a market for its goods, but it is not an arena where Beijing intends to spend the same amount of political and military........

© The Diplomat