American Fecklessness Is Delivering the Middle East to China

For the past fifteen years, foreign-policy experts have been urging Washington to pivot away from its focus on the Middle East, and instead to turn its attention to confronting Beijing. While the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all, to various extents, heeded this advice, the recent agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia—brokered by China and concluded in Shanghai—suggests that it hasn’t worked as promised. U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, Michael Doran argues, is instead ceding this crucial region to Xi Jinping’s ambitions. Specifically, the U.S. has demonstrated that it is unwilling to defend its allies against Iranian aggression: