China’s Quest to Control the Middle East

Mudar Zahran

Take a look at the Belt and Road Initiative. Many experts barely discuss it, yet it’s essentially China reviving the Silk Road, building new trade routes to expand influence over global commerce, especially across the Middle East.

* For China’s dominance to work, some states along those routes have to remain unstable enough to stay influenceable. That is how China dictates and sustains dominance. Countries along the Silk Road corridors tend to fall under strong Chinese economic influence.

* Israel itself complicates that plan. Gaza especially is critical geography. It connects Europe, Asia, and Africa. That is not symbolic — that is strategic reality. Military doctrine, including what you hear at West Point and other war colleges, talks about a “center of gravity.” Many see the Levant — Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Iraq — as exactly that. If that region stabilizes, the world stabilizes. If it stays unstable, global tension stays manageable for outside powers.

* And yes, during Israeli operations in Gaza there was a sophisticated electronic jamming against Israeli systems. No Arab country has that capability. The names some military professionals mentioned were China or Russia.

* China clearly has an interest in continued volatility in the Levant. They have tried to pull Israel into their economic orbit for years, especially through technology.

* China has also, in my view, taken a lot of Israeli technology — sometimes outright stolen — and at the same time tried to buy influence inside the Israeli government. That largely failed because Israeli intelligence services are strong and extremely hard to penetrate politically.

* Israel has been hard to politically influence overall. Strong intelligence apparatus, strong national resilience. Not an easy country to buy.

* Look at Egypt — once firmly aligned with the United States, now increasingly in the Chinese economic camp. And Jordan’s King Abdullah is moving in that direction too. China is taking regional influence one country at a time.

* And let’s be honest about Washington: George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld helped prop up China economically at the expense of the United States. Decades of trade concessions, low tariffs, and globalization policies shifted enormous American wealth and industrial strength toward China — until Donald Trump finally started pushing back.

* Some nut jobs in Washington genuinely believed empowering China would create global balance against the US. Whether right or wrong, that doctrine shaped policy.

* Americans and Israelis are both difficult societies to control politically. Americans believe they rule their government and they are armed. Israelis are a mobilized society with deep security awareness. That makes outside pressure harder.

* Bottom line: China’s motivations are economic power, trade route dominance, geopolitical leverage, and long-term global influence. , A lot of what we are seeing in the Middle East begins with China and eventually circles back to it.

February 11, 2026 | Comments »

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