Minxin Pei, Columnist

US-China Rivalry Is Destabilizing the Middle East

Beijing’s support has emboldened Iran and made the region more volatile.

August 6, 2024 at 9:00 PM UTC

Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. His latest book is "The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism."

Global contagion.
Photographer: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg

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Reducing America’s footprint in the Middle East to focus on China is one of President Joe Biden’s top geopolitical priorities. But extricating itself from the region has proven much harder than he might have thought. As a major regional war looms on the horizon, a deeper, although indirect, cause of the recent downward spiral in the Middle East is the global contagion of the Sino-American rivalry.

Most importantly, America’s pivot to East Asia has changed Iran’s strategic calculus, while Beijing’s response to the escalating US-China rivalry has resulted in a significant increase of its support for Tehran. These two momentous developments have made the Middle East more volatile and conflict-prone.