China, the Middle East, and the Reshaping of World Order: The Case of Iran

The focus of this paper is China-US rivalry in the Middle East, which is analyzed by investigating how China conducts its Iran policy in the context of US sanctions on Iran and threats of punishment for those who violate these sanctions. The paper use geostrategy theory and historical context analysis to study current Chinese and US Middle East policies in the Persian Gulf. The US geostrategy can be traced back to the British geographer Halford Mackinder’s ‘heartland theory’, which nicely explains US policy after World War II up to the Carter Doctrine in 1980. Among the questions asked in this paper are whether the doctrine is now becoming obsolete and whether the US is about to change its geostrategy concerning the Persian Gulf. China’s geostrategy can be extracted from the speech President Xi Jinping gave to the 19th China Communist Party Congress in 2017. In his speech, two concepts from classical Chinese philosophy, the Doctrine of the Mean (zhongyong) and All under Heaven (tianxia), were reinterpreted from the perspective of international relations in order to advocate a multipolar international order following the principle of ‘harmony within diversity’. The paper identifies an ambiguity in this perspective on international relations: it offers a very promising vision for small and developing states, but is more troublesome for a status-quo superpower like the U.S, which can see in it a threat to its leading global position. The paper concludes that the signals from the US concerning its geostrategy in the Persian Gulf are becoming increasingly mixed, indicating a developing shift away from the Carter doctrine. Another conclusion is that there are no signs that China is promoting a hegemonic version of its geostrategy in the Middle East. Globally these two developments point to a more multipolar order emerging in the Middle East.