On June 17, US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed an interim agreement to end the warthe reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of oil sanctions which had paralyzed the Iranian economy. As the war in Iran enters the final stages of negotiations, this episode has exposed the strategic calculations of all players involved. These calculations have consequences far beyond the Middle East, reshaping diplomatic relations and the terms on which governments choose to align themselves.
For China, its strategy in the Middle East is now limited to preventing the Gulf States, and especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, from getting closer to Washington.
Beijing had already begun to reorganize its priorities well before the war. In April 2025, leaders reshuffled China’s diplomatic hierarchy in Central Conference on Works Related to Neighboring Countriesthe first gathering of its kind in 12 years. The conference notably placed China’s neighborhood at the forefront of its foreign strategy – and implicitly, placing the Middle East below it.
Today, the war between Iran and the United States is forcing China to define what it expects from a part of the world that is no longer at the top of its agenda.
The war reshaped the alignment of the Middle East, bringing some states closer to the United States and further away from others. Israel is unambiguously in the American camp.
Iran, by all accounts, is further removed from Washington, with little prospect of redress. Tehran and the United States will almost certainly remain at odds for the foreseeable future. For Beijing, this means that even if China is no longer committed to Tehran, it can count on Iranian dependence. Tehran simply has no other potential partners of comparable weight to turn to.
What remains unresolved is the situation in the Gulf, the set of pivotal states on which China’s regional position now rests. Beijing’s task in the Middle East now is to prevent Gulf monarchies from tilting toward the US side, a concern that centers on the region’s two heavyweights, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
China supports Iran in concrete ways, purchasing the overwhelming majority of Iranian oil exports and refraining from condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf states during the fighting. This year’s conflict, however, marked the limit of what Beijing is willing to do for Tehran. With non-interference in the affairs of other states a stated principle of Chinese foreign policy, direct military support or any Chinese military presence on Iranian soil would cross thresholds that Beijing has shown no intention of approaching. Iran, as noted above, has little choice but to accept this limit. Relations between China and Iran are therefore durable and inexpensive to maintain, and they require little additional investment from Beijing.
From China’s perspective, the danger is that the two Gulf heavyweights end up where Israel now is, entirely inside the US system, leaving Beijing with trade ties but little diplomatic influence. But China’s ability to prevent such an outcome will be limited by the resources it is willing to commit.
Beijing has long divided the world into tiers that rank its diplomatic priorities, treating great-power relations as the decisive arena, neighboring and peripheral countries as the priority, the developing world as the foundation, and multilateral institutions as the priority. scene on which influence is exercised.
The April 2025 Central Conference placed China’s immediate neighborhood at the top of this order, thereby shifting major power diplomacy, and Xi Jinping described the periphery as the primary consideration in managing China’s overall diplomatic situation. The official message indicates that China’s neighborhood now stands above all other theaters and will absorb the bulk of Beijing’s diplomatic attention and resources.
The Middle East, on the other hand, falls into the third priority category. The region is valuable to China as a source of energy and a market for its products, but it is not an area where Beijing intends to spend the same amount of political and military capital that it concentrates closer to home. This order traces the lines of Chinese strategy in the Gulf.
Beijing is neither willing nor able to match the security guarantees the United States provides to its partners in the region, and it has no plans to try. Its objective in the Gulf is therefore modest: to maintain its position at lower cost and prevent the large Arab states from sliding completely into the American camp, where the possibility of working with China would disappear.
Of the two Gulf heavyweights, it is the United Arab Emirates that has moved furthest away from China – and closer to the United States. During the war, it saw U.S.-supplied systems intercept hundreds of ballistic missiles and thousands of drones targeting its territory. The lesson that Abu Dhabi has learned is that only Washington can guarantee its defense. Anwar Gargash, diplomatic advisor to the President of the United Arab Emirates, say it clearly in Aprilcalling the United States the country’s “primary security partner” and pledging to “redouble our efforts” in that relationship.
Saudi Arabia presents the most open case in favor of China. In March 2023, Beijing negotiated the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, establishing itself as the only external power capable of simultaneously maintaining open lines with both governments. China supported the diplomacy that resulted in the June settlement, with Iran’s foreign minister openly recognizing Beijing for its active role to reach the Iran-United States agreement. China’s ability to shape Iranian conduct relies on economic dependence rather than force, an advantage Washington cannot match.
Saudi Arabia has maintained a relative distance from the two powers. They have never sought to establish a permanent US base on their territory, nor enter into a formal defense treaty with Washington, and they have maintained a greater structural distance from the US security architecture than the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain. It was the first Gulf state to acquire Chinese ballistic missilesand it remains one of only two, with Qatar, to have done so. Saudi Arabia has since conducted joint exercises with the People’s Liberation Army Navy, and it has remained outside of Pax Silica, the US silicon supply chain initiative and the development of Stargate AI. This distance constitutes the space in which Beijing is capable of operating.
Abu Dhabi, on the other hand, has taken the other route by closely aligning itself with the US security and AI infrastructure. The UAE has signed on to both Pax Silica and the Stargate project. When U.S. officials made it clear that Chinese G42 partnerships were incompatible with continued access to American chips, the AI champion removed Huawei hardware in exchange for American investment and Nvidia processors. The UAE’s alignment with the United States on defense and AI limits what it can build with China, and this pro-US trend has only hardened since the Iran war.
Since the war in Iran, Chinese plans for engagement in the region have stalled. The second China-Arab States summit, initially scheduled for mid-June in Beijing, took place postponed indefinitely amid regional instability, and the parallel China-GCC summit slipped with it. The platforms on which Beijing intended to consolidate its position have collapsed because of the war. While the region’s directions are constantly evolving, China only has a narrow window to understand what Riyadh and Abu Dhabi want before making their decisions.
It is evident that in the post-war Middle East, Iran is linked to China and Israel aligns itself squarely with Washington. Beijing’s task is to prevent the closure of the cooperation space with the Gulf and to prevent Riyadh and Abu Dhabi from moving to the American side before the issue is definitively resolved.
Beijing is not so much trying to win over the Gulf states as to prevent them from crossing a point of no return, where major Arab states have aligned themselves entirely with the US camp and diplomatic cooperation with China is severely limited. With its attention and resources focused on its own neighborhood, China is not prepared to afford anything more ambitious.