Contextualizing China's mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran
This week's podcast features two new books on the evolution of Saudi Arabia's place in the global and regional order
David Wight, Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988 (Cornell University Press, 2023).
Simon Mabon, The Struggle for Supremacy in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Saudi Arabia’s role in the regional and global order has been back in the news this week, following the startling announcement of a China-brokered reconciliation with Iran. It’s not fully clear how far the rapprochement will go — diplomatic relations are being restored and there’s been talk of Saudi investment and Iran limiting its support for the Houthis in Yemen, but it remains to be seen how much will really come to pass. The deal strikes me as unambiguously positive, as far as it goes, especially if it actually leads to the de-escalation of conflicts in arenas such as Yemen and if it blunts the possibility of an Israeli-led war against Iran. I doubt its effects will be all that transformative, as abundant reasons remain for ongoing conflict and local conflicts are not likely to resolve just because outside powers pull back. But it could help.
The most interesting dimension is probably the role of China, which has prompted a wave of heated discourse over whether this represents a real challenge to American primacy in the Middle East or a supporting role for American priorities in de-escalating conflicts in the Middle East. China has long underperformed in regional diplomacy given its exceptionally high strategic interests in Gulf energy and the rapid growth of its investments and presence across the region, and I read this diplomatic initiative as the first move in a long-expected more assertive presence. Great powers tend to expand their diplomatic and military capabilities as needed to defend vital national interests, after all, and China has lagged on this for decades. At the same time, I don’t see this as necessarily challenging the US, since China and the Biden administration (at least) broadly share the same goals of keeping Gulf energy flowing, de-escalating long-running wars, and avoiding large-scale new wars.
Rather than join the chorus of analysis of the Chinese brokered rapprochement, I decided to instead offer some critical historical and theoretical context. I organized this week’s Middle East Political Science Podcast around two books which provide vital context for understanding what’s going on: David Wight’s Oil Money and Simon Mabon’s The Struggle for Supremacy in the Middle East. You can listen here, and read a bit about the two books below.
David Wight’s Oil Money offers a well-researched and well-written account of the petrodollar recycling which followed the nationalization of oil across the Middle East and the successive oil price increases which followed. Its account echoes that of David Spiro’s 1999 book The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony, but can now draw on a wealth of more recently declassified documents and other resources to flesh out the picture. It might also be read with, and against, Jeff Colgan’s recent Partial Hegemony (listen to our podcast conversation about the book here and about US-Saudi oil politics here) and Victor Macfarland’s 2020 Oil Powers. Within that growing body of literature, Wight makes a real contribution by delving deeply into the full spectrum of how the dramatic rise of oil prices ended up strengthening rather than undermining America’s Middle Eastern empire (as he terms it).
Petrodollar recycling was the key to this transformation of US empire, as Washington negotiated a “cooperative empire” based on massive arms sales and development projects, deposits in American and Western banking systems, investments in Western stock markets and real estate, Saudi support for American foreign policy initiatives like Iran-Contra and the Afghan jihad, and more. He sees this as a system more reflective of the interests of the local powers like Saudi Arabia than the older forms of empire, but one which reinforced and escalated both regional conflicts and domestic authoritarianism. Iran in the days of the Shah plays a pivotal role in all this, and Wight pays particular attention to how local arms races generated demand for US weaponry and a self-interest in recycling those petrodollars.
Wight draws extensively on newly available archival materials to detail American internal deliberations over how to deal with the new oil powers like Saudi Arabia, as well as how American popular culture dealt with Arab oil wealth (spoiler: racist and crude). But, in a welcome change from many US-centric narratives, he also gives equal time to voices from the region, showing the responses and perspectives on the new oil bargains from Arab governments, newspaper op-eds, popular culture, and public intellectuals.
Simon Mabon takes a very different approach in his new book The Struggle for Supremacy in the Middle East. Here, the focus is regional competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the United States and the global system fading into the background. Mabon views their contestation through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of fields and capital, offering a sophisticated social theory of their competition for influence across multiple arenas. In this approach, competition involves not just military assets but a wider range of cultural, economic and other resources which confer influence in specific contexts and not others. This makes for a highly contextualized vision of regional politics which demands careful attention to both regionwide grand narratives and granular local conditions; he traces this through detailed readings of Bahrain, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. It also highlights the potential for change, since competition is relational and situational rather than rooted in constructs like sectarianism.
He rejects conceptualization of this conflict as “proxy wars”, highlighting instead the agency of local actors whose own contestations and competition take place within discursive frames shaped by the regional context but are not reducible to them. Saudi Arabia and Iran may be competing for influence in Lebanon or Yemen, but local political forces in those countries have their own concerns and interests which mostly go beyond simply acting as proxies. That has implications, of course, for how we might think about that recent China-brokered rapprochement: just because Saudi and Iranian priorities may have changed doesn’t mean that Yemen’s competing forces will necessarily go along for the ride.
These two books together offer useful context and background for understanding the implications of China brokering Iranian-Saudi rapprochement. Through very different theoretical approaches and methodologies, they illuminate the nature of both US-Saudi relations and the Iranian-Saudi competition. They should be thought provoking for both experts and non-experts in the region, and could make for good classroom use at both undergraduate and graduate levels.