Opinion The Express View: The China hand in Saudi-Iran diplomacy

The Saudi-Iran deal, brokered by China, is sure to have far reaching consequences. The decision by the two West Asian Islamic rivals to re-establish diplomatic relations seven years after breaking off ties is not as much a surprise as Beijing’s convening power in the region. The two sides had held several rounds of talks in Iraq and Oman. For Saudi Arabia, the drone attacks on its oil facilities in 2019, claimed by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, was a reality check. While then US President Donald Trump made clear to the Saudi monarchy that he was not going to be drawn into a direct conflict with Iran, the Biden Administration also signalled decreasing interest as a guarantor of peace in the region. On the other side, Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear deal, the reimposition of sanctions on the country, plus the targeted killing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard chief Qassem Soleimani by the US, jolted the Islamic Republic. The March 10 agreement followed negotiations in China. Significantly, Beijing is also a signatory to the deal, under which Iran and Saudi Arabia will reopen their embassies, as well as revive a 2001 security pact, and a 1998 agreement to build economic, commercial, scientific, cultural and sports ties. The agreement greatly improves the chances of an end to the conflict in Yemen, and may also have an impact in other countries where the two adversaries are engaged in hostilities, notably Syria and Lebanon.

For Beijing, its imprimatur on an agreement in faraway West Asia is a sign of both its economic interests and its political clout in a fractious region that is perceived as US turf. The optics project President Xi Jinping, at the start of his third term, as an international peace-builder, quite in contrast to his image as a territorial aggressor in his neighbourhood, not to speak of China’s reputation as a loan shark that builds economic dependencies in financially needy countries. Unlike the US, China has not allied itself to any camp. In 2021, it signed a strategic cooperation pact with Iran. At a time that Washington is noticeably unenthusiastic about dealing with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, China has been wooing him assiduously. The new equation is not without a link to the Russia-Ukraine war, which has seen Saudi draw closer to China’s friend Russia, and Moscow make an outreach to Tehran for military hardware — a quad of its own.

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For Delhi, this is a sobering moment. Its principal adversary has announced itself as a geopolitical player in the Persian Gulf, a region to which India has age-old ties. While deepening those ties, Delhi also allied itself to the US, whose role in the region now seems more diminished than ever. The I2U2 (Israel-India-UAE-US) or “quad of the middle-east” was to be the post-Abrahamic Accord security paradigm for the region. Now both Israel and the UAE appear isolated by the new deal with China at its centre.