The recent visit of the GCC Foreign Ministers to China, followed by that of the Iranian Foreign Minister, resulted in a new wave of analyses on China’s presence and role in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): either in the context of global power rivalry between the US and China and/or an eventual ‘alliance’ between Russia and China; or in Asian terms, the great game for connectivity.
The rapidly evolving Chinese presence in the MENA region may be so far mostly of an economic – and less of a political or military – nature, yet, accompanied by an ambitious cultural push forward in the form of the mushrooming Confucius Institutes as well as Chinese scholarships, and the intensive COVID-diplomacy, the question has increasingly been asked if and when would China be ready to challenge the US position in the region. In order to formulate a guess at the Chinese options, however, a few remarks should be made first.
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