The war in Iran has unsettled the Gulf. Arab states are increasingly frustrated with the United States, which, after launching a war that wreaked havoc on global energy markets, failed to keep them safe from Iranian strikes. But the war is also forcing these countries to reassess their relationship with China. Beijing’s wait-and-see approach to the war and unwillingness to use its leverage over Tehran to contain the conflict have disabused Gulf Arab states of any lingering expectation that China could become an important security partner in the foreseeable future.
In the past few years, Gulf Arab states had come to see Beijing as a constructive force in the region. In 2023, about 36 percent of China’s total crude oil imports came from Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain); and in 2024, Gulf trade with China reached nearly $300 billion, exceeding trade with the European Union and the United States combined. Many governments in the region anticipated that as Beijing’s economic engagement deepened, it would become more willing to restrain Iranian aggression to protect its local interests and stabilize the region.
Gulf Arab states are now realizing that China is even less likely than before the Iran war to take on responsibility for keeping the Gulf safe. Beijing lacks a vision for what the regional security order should be, and the chaos of the war has reinforced for China that its long-standing strategy of avoiding security commitments or taking sides is the best approach. Although China will continue to build commercial and investment ties in the region, Gulf Arab countries are being forced to accept that Beijing will not counterbalance Washington in ensuring regional security. They must now choose between more fully embracing a volatile United States and searching for new partners to replace what they had hoped China could become.
THE CHINA DREAM
As China’s presence expanded in the Gulf since the beginning of this decade, expectations were high for what it could do for the region. Although many Gulf Arab states continued to look to Washington as their primary security guarantor, they were optimistic that Beijing was also going to contribute to their protection.
China was becoming increasingly reliant on the Gulf for energy and capital, which Gulf Arab states hoped would make Beijing more invested in safeguarding the region. Prior to the outbreak of the Iran war, in February, Gulf Cooperation Council countries exported nearly four million barrels of crude oil to China each day. Regional sovereign wealth funds were investing heavily in China and opening offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; and numerous Gulf countries signed cooperation agreements with China in sectors including renewable energy and space technology. The Chinese diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula was also growing, reaching more than half a million.
Beijing’s influence in Tehran provided hope that China could temper Iran’s belligerence toward its neighbors. Iran is heavily reliant on China for economic and diplomatic support because of Washington’s long-standing sanctions. In 2021, the two countries signed a 25-year comprehensive cooperation agreement, which signaled China’s willingness to expand its investments in Iran. China’s leverage over Iran was a factor in Saudi Arabia’s willingness to have Beijing act as guarantor of the agreement that Riyadh signed with Tehran, in 2023, which reestablished diplomatic ties between the two Gulf powers. China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia held three subsequent trilateral meetings, most recently in Tehran in December 2025, which were rare moments of diplomatic optimism in the region.
China has shown no intention of shouldering a meaningful regional security burden.
China’s words and deeds further contributed to Gulf expectations that China would become a regional security stakeholder. After a decade of pessimism following the Arab Spring, which saw the Middle East mired in intense fighting and proxy wars, China saw promise in a new generation of policymakers and reformers. Many Gulf leaders seemed determined to diversify their sources of growth, wean their economies off oil, and enhance their connections with their neighbors—goals that fit Beijing’s strengths and to which China was willing to lend support. Chinese state media published glowing profiles of rulers in the region, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom they described as pursuing “Chinese-style modernization.”
Meanwhile, China accelerated its diplomatic engagement with the Gulf. In 2022, Chinese leader Xi Jinping attended the first China–Arab States Summit and a China–Gulf Cooperation Council Summit held in Riyadh, where he signed a joint statement acknowledging the UAE’s territorial claims to three disputed islands controlled by Iran. In March 2023, Chinese analysts and officials heralded the détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran as the beginning of a “tide of reconciliation” that would overcome years of conflict, stagnation, and unrest.
Gulf Arab states also assumed that growing Chinese interests in the region would increase pressure on the United States to maintain its primacy and make it easier for them to gain economic and security concessions from Washington. The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for instance, maintains major operational hubs in Dubai and Riyadh, and U.S. efforts to force Gulf Arab states to divest from it failed because of a lack of viable alternatives. Growing U.S.-Chinese technology competition provided Washington with an additional reason to support the region. In May 2025, after U.S. President Donald Trump toured the Gulf, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia signed ambitious deals to procure chips from the U.S. technology company Nvidia, a necessary step toward achieving their goal of becoming artificial intelligence powerhouses. Gulf Arab states were optimistic that having two external powers interested in the region would offer them more options and enhance their overall security.
ANALYSIS PARALYSIS
But the violence of the past three years has dashed Gulf Arab states’ hopes about China, an assessment that officials and analysts in the region have frequently shared in conversations. Since the Hamas attack on Israel, in October 2023, China has shown no intention of shouldering a meaningful regional security burden. Although Beijing postured as a peacemaker and mediated talks between warring parties—in July 2024, for instance, it organized a meeting of various Palestinian political factions—the attempts remained superficial and did nothing to change the status quo. In late 2023, when the Houthis began striking commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea, China did not pressure Iran to rein in its proxy’s attacks on global shipping; instead, it negotiated a private agreement with the Houthis to secure the safety of Chinese-flagged ships.
During this year’s Iran war, China again declined to use its considerable leverage over Iran to keep the Iranians from attacking China’s Gulf partners—a move that especially concerned Saudi Arabia, which felt that Beijing should come to its defense because China was the guarantor of its reconciliation with Tehran. Although China mostly refrained from supporting Iran against U.S. and Israeli attacks, some Gulf states viewed China as complicit in Iran’s attacks on the Gulf because it vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an international force to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and because of reports that Chinese companies may have provided geospatial intelligence to help Tehran hit regional targets more accurately.
Beijing’s restraint was driven by both pragmatism and paralysis. Since the Arab Spring in 2010–11 and the expansion of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in the years that followed, Chinese policymakers and scholars have debated whether and how Beijing should change its behavior in the Middle East. Critics of the government’s policy argued that as a great power, China needed to do more to protect its interests and ensure regional stability. But they failed to elaborate what a different strategy would look like on the ground, when to potentially involve China’s military, and how to handle the costs of forging a deeper partnership with a regional power such as Saudi Arabia. For a turbulent region—and one with a long history of costly foreign interventions—leaders in Beijing seemingly decided that doing nothing remained the best option.
Chinese policymakers were also cautious because they were unsure where the region was headed. Beijing felt that the restoration of Iranian-Saudi diplomatic relations, for instance, burnished its image as a responsible power at very little cost. But the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, in 2024, and the 12-day war, in 2025, raised concern that the region would descend into chaos. As a result, when the United States and Israel started bombing Iran in February, Beijing did not have a clearly articulated alternative plan to protect its economic assets and minimize the chances of being dragged into protracted conflict. The resulting hesitancy to act meant sidelining Gulf concerns and leaving them vulnerable to Iranian attacks.
MORE MONEY, NO RESPONSIBILITIES
The Gulf is not going to give up on China completely. Gulf-Chinese relations will continue to expand in areas in which both sides have clear expectations, concrete interests, and limited political risks. Energy will be at the heart of ongoing ties. In the short term, Gulf countries will continue to export large amounts of oil to China. In the long term, as more of the world decarbonizes its energy supply and pursues electrification, China’s leadership in green technology will make it a key partner for Gulf Arab countries that want to undertake their own transition to renewable energy—a process that is already underway. Gulf states’ sovereign wealth funds are also likely to increase their portfolios in China, which wants more capital investment in its markets; at the same time, Chinese companies are funding mining and construction projects in the Gulf. China offers money, technological know-how, and industrial logistics capabilities that Gulf governments want and need to pursue their ambitions, especially in areas including drones, hydroponic agriculture, and robotics.
But the war has shown that China’s ongoing economic interests do not translate into help securing the region. This means that for Gulf Arab states, the United States is the only power capable of maintaining regional security—but is also the one most likely to destabilize it. Beijing’s unwillingness to play a larger role is forcing Gulf Arab states to make hard choices on how to protect themselves.
They are divided on the best way forward. Countries including Oman and Saudi Arabia, uneasy about overreliance on Washington, are pursuing new hedging strategies. Oman—which, in June, Trump threatened to bomb—has most forcefully called for balancing support from Washington by increasing regional security cooperation: in an article published in the French newspaper Le Monde on July 13, Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi called for the creation of a post-American security order that would include the Gulf monarchies, Iran, and Iraq. Countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE, however, are drawing closer to the United States. Without other viable patrons to protect them, and facing intense Iranian assaults, these states see moving deeper into Washington’s orbit as the safest option. But even the countries that want to take cover under the U.S. security umbrella are also investing in their own defenses, opening dialogues with Iran to reduce tensions, and reaching out to countries such as Turkey and Pakistan to establish additional security partnerships. Without being able to turn to China, they are pursuing whatever options are available in case the bet on Washington fails completely.
As Gulf Arab states search for other ways to protect themselves, China’s interest in getting more actively involved in securing the region is further decreasing. Beijing can maintain valuable economic ties with even fewer risks of security entanglements. The Gulf-Chinese relationship is increasingly resembling the Iranian-Chinese relationship: it is becoming a partnership sustained by necessity rather than by rising expectations. The only upshot for Gulf Arab countries is that because they have more to offer China economically than Iran does, when the war ends they will still find themselves in a far more favorable dynamic with Beijing.
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