We can imagine how Washington and Beijing’s respective global outlooks and ability to project (soft and hard) power could affect their future relations with the MENA region.
How MENA countries deal with each other and the role they play in the emerging global energy and economy transitions could influence how the two superpowers engage with the region in ways as interesting and important as what the superpowers are able to do themselves. On the MENA side of the equation, two critical dimensions are likely to shape their role in the future US-China competition in the region:
Intraregional politics
The first is how regional countries relate to each other with functional and practical economic and political integration, or sustained dysfunction and instability. Prior to the current war in Gaza, there was a trend toward de-escalation, stabilization, and integration.
Whenever that momentum might be regained, under the “functional and practical” route, we could imagine MENA nations looking in new ways at the lessons of pan-regional intergovernmental organizations.
The region could explore policies and mechanisms that emulate the practical benefits afforded to member states of other regional blocs like the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Such ideas could first lower trade barriers, then foster closer economic and commercial ties across the region.
Similarly, the thinking behind the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe could influence MENA governments’ approach to their citizens’ human rights and each other’s domestic affairs.
The functional and practical path would represent a MENA equipped with deliberative, consultative decision-making processes to act with agency, putting its own interests before the dictates of the US-Chinese competition.
The alternative path is easy to define, MENA governments continue to support various armed groups in proxy wars, and use that environment to ignore human rights, enabling outside players to exploit that dysfunction.
Levers of the future economy
The fossil fuel resources of Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates ‑ energy-rich club might soon include Egypt and Israel ‑ are likely to remain MENA’s main sources of leverage vis-à-vis Washington and Beijing — at least for the next couple of decades. Given the desire of two superpowers to secure the region’s oil and gas for themselves and their allies, or deny them to adversaries, US and Chinese companies will remain powerhouses in regional markets.
MENA is poised to influence the future global stage, and gain agency in the US-China competition over the region, by leveraging its energy and financial power in different ways in the future.
As the world turns to renewable energy, the region’s petrostates are simultaneously ramping up economic diversification into tech sectors, while also leveraging their wealth to finance climate-friendly energy projects and other green economy endeavors in their neighborhood and around the world.
The new frontier for the region’s resource- and capital-rich countries will be fostering innovation and science/technology/ideas hubs for the post-carbon economy that humanity intends to build in the 21st century.
Beside eventually waning hydrocarbons and ascending green energy, new logistical/transportation/energy networks have proliferated in the region and are likely to further increase its geopolitical and commercial significance.
Be it through long-established routes, such as the Suez Canal, or new and proposed ones, such as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, India-Middle East Corridor, and the Turkish-Iraqi-Emirati-Qatari Development Road, MENA is going to be sitting at the center of global trade networks. Many of the region’s seaports and airports will also play an expanded role in international affairs.
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