During last week's three-day visit to the Middle East, Arab leaders pulled out all the stops to welcome China's President Xi Jinping.
Along with a 4,000 word joint statement demonstrating a range of policy alignments with Saudi Arabia, China agreed dozens of new deals in energy and investment as the Chinese premier met Arab state leadership from across the region and attended a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Xi's visit follows visits earlier this year by presidents Biden and Putin, suggesting the Middle East is shaping up as a central theater for great power competition. But does the West fully grasp the challenge to its traditional leadership in the Middle East? And is it ready to support Middle East agency through deepening constructive involvement?
This week, my colleagues and I at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change launched a comprehensive report on the rapid and substantial investments Russia and China have made in the Middle East, particularly in soft power. Beginning by charting accelerated Chinese economic and Russian hard power interests in the region over the last decade, the report points to China as now the region's largest investor, while the West has drawn back its economic involvement. Where Western countries have stepped back from having a security presence in the Middle East, Russia has stepped in in places like Iraq and Libya.
Less captured by observers but no less important, our report points to substantial Russian and Chinese soft power interests.
In July of this year, RT Arabic's website received 22 million monthly page views, more than Alarabiya or Al Jazeera. The social media platforms of Russian media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube also performed well against regional and Western competitors. Russian soft power has been aimed at shoring up support for its invasion of Ukraine, with some platforms in the region orienting their narrative to parallel the Kremlin's 'special military operation' toward 'liberating' Ukraine. Like China, Russia has thus far maintained strong ties between hostile parties, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, while tailoring its soft power to local contexts as seen in its support for the Palestinians.
However, is Russia's soft-power campaign working? In areas of significant Russian involvement like Iraq and Libya, our polling shows Russia is viewed favourability in comparison to other countries. Whereas in places like Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia the country doesn't fare well comparatively.
China is also substantially investing in Arabic-language programming, with media cooperation a key pillar of China's deepening engagement with the Middle East. CGTN Arabic has 16 million followers on Facebook, while CGTN Arabic and People.cn Arabic have more followers than TRT Arabi, the Arabic-language service of the Turkish public broadcaster, while almost all Chinese outlets have won a greater Twitter following than the Iran-backed Al-Alam TV. In Egypt alone, there was a year-on-year rise in the number of times China was mentioned in media, from 406 in 2013 to 3,951 in 2019 before Covid-19 struck.
China is now viewed equally or more favourably than the United States and other Western countries by people in many Middle East states. In countries such as Iraq and Tunisia, China is the top country people most want their government to partner with. In all contexts, China and the U.S. are very much duelling for influence.
China and Russia are clearly competitors for the West in the hearts and minds of the Middle East's people, as both countries seek to delegitimise the West in the region, including through hackneyed anticolonial narratives. But just how favourably the West is viewed in many Middle East countries is striking. The U.S. is viewed favourably by around three quarters of people in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. The United Kingdom and France are viewed equally favourably, with 76 percent of Iraqis having a favourable view of the UK. This contrasts sharply with conventional thinking in the West, which as our summer report demonstrates, largely believes the Middle East is hostile to Western countries.
The West needs to be a more constructive and consistent partner for the Middle East, in line with the views of people in the region. It needs to strengthen emerging, positive regional institutions such as the Abraham Accords. Having underpinned this historic agreement, the West has so far done little to advance accelerated collaboration between signatory states and others across the region. It should also seek to balance growing Arab state interest in forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, including through encouraging Middle East involvement in institutions that are based on shared values, such as the Commonwealth.
Finally, the West needs to enhance its support for credible media outlets, such as BBC Arabic and Persian rather than diminishing access to these critical services. It also needs to be proactive in its soft power approach and create new mechanisms to make the case that the West and people in the Middle East share the same fundamental values. As seen in our polling earlier this year, large majorities in the Middle East support women's rights, protection of religious minorities and see religion playing less of a role in society. These shared values should be the basis for renewed engagement with the Middle East, where countries are seen as like-minded partners, rather than perpetual conflicts or dependable ATMs.
The West's "pivot to Asia" was nothing short of an invitation to China and Russia to deepen their influence in the Middle East, an invitation they accepted with relish. Continued disjointed, transactional engagement with a region that will feature large in this century's global politics and economy is short-sighted. People in the Middle East want to partner with the West, but it remains to be seen whether the West is willing to work for it.
Matt Godwin is a program lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He has published on the internationalization of Sri Lankan politics, including in an upcoming book. His Twitter is @mkgodwin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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