The China in MENA Brief - Trump's Visit
Trump Sends a Message: The Gulf Is No Longer China’s Playground
This article was originally published by the Hudson Institute.
Trump Sends a Message: The Gulf Is No Longer China’s Playground
Zineb Riboua
President Donald Trump’s arrival in Riyadh at the outset of his broader Gulf tour signals a calculated attempt to reassert American power in a region where the United States’ retrenchment has reduced its influence. Over the past decade, China has exploited this political and strategic vacuum to expand its presence across the Middle East. By enmeshing itself into the Gulf’s infrastructural, financial, and technological development, Beijing has steadily tilted the regional balance in its favor. Trump’s visit is the first direct attempt to halt China’s momentum and reestablish the United States as the principal outside power shaping the future of the Gulf.
The stakes of Trump’s visit are high. While the US narrowed its military footprint and deprioritized the region in its diplomatic strategy, Beijing quietly deepened its Gulf relationships. For example, it brokered the normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023. China is investing heavily in the Middle East because Beijing sees the region as an integral—not secondary—theater in its strategy for displacing US influence and reshaping global power dynamics. In particular, the region gives Beijing different options for challenging American dominance. Five factors drive this calculus.
First, the Gulf could provide the energy China needs to sustain its industrial economy. Producers in the region supply nearly half of China’s crude imports, and Beijing views long-term energy security as essential to regime stability.
Second, the Middle East serves as a geopolitical corridor linking East Asia to Europe and Africa. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has prioritized ports, logistics corridors, and commercial access points throughout the Gulf, which give Beijing leverage over key maritime and overland trade routes. More importantly, the Digital Silk Road, the technology pillar of the BRI, is projected to contribute up to $255 billion to the gross domestic product of Gulf Cooperation Council countries and generate 600,000 tech-sector jobs by 2030.
Third, the region can provide China with capital and opportunities to export its technology. Sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could be deep, politically stable sources of investment for Chinese firms, making Gulf states ideal partners for Beijing as it seeks to globalize its industrial policy and scale its technology platforms. At the same time, Gulf states are pursuing rapid digital transformation. This could grant Chinese firms greater access to funding and the opportunity to shape emerging technology ecosystems from the ground up. As an example, Saudi Arabia signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s Huawei in 2022 to develop cloud computing and high-tech infrastructure in Saudi cities. The deal coincided with the Chinese president’s visit, which Beijing considered its largest diplomatic push in the Arab world.
Fourth, the Middle East can help China undermine US export controls and sanctions regimes. The region—especially sanctioned actors like Iran—and China can work together to circumvent Western restrictions. By leveraging regional networks and opaque financial channels, Chinese firms facilitate the transfer of sensitive technologies and capital, eroding the effectiveness of US sanctions and exposing the limits of Washington’s economic power. China has also developed a way to import Iranian oil while avoiding Western financial networks and shipping services. Using dark fleet tankers, Iran ships oil to China and receives payments in renminbi through smaller Chinese banks. With major state-owned refiners pulling back due to sanctions risks, around 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports are now handled by “teapots,” which are small, independent Chinese refineries.
Fifth, the Middle East provides China with operational space to weaken US-led coalitions and discredit American influence. By engaging both US allies in the Gulf and adversaries like Iran, Beijing positions itself as a strategic alternative unconstrained by Washington’s political conditions. Through state media, diplomatic outreach, and security partnerships, China promotes anti-US narratives that frame American policy as destabilizing and self-interested. This messaging resonates across the Global South and erodes US authority in key regions.
The consequences of China’s influence campaign are becoming increasingly visible in US defense relationships across the region. One example is the collapse of Washington’s sale of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE. Washington warned Abu Dhabi that the Gulf state’s recently built network of Huawei communications equipment could be used to surveil sensitive F-35 infrastructure. But Abu Dhabi did not comply with the US request to rip and replace the Chinese equipment. Within a year, the $23 billion F-35 deal fell apart, weakening one of America’s most advanced defense partnerships in the region.
This disagreement among once-close allies demonstrates Beijing’s long-term strategy. China aims to undermine US influence while avoiding military confrontation by embedding itself in systems that are difficult for host nations to remove and even harder for the US to contest. As Mao Zedong articulated in On Protracted War, the objective is not to defeat the enemy in a single stroke, but to wear down its position over time until resistance becomes untenable. China has retooled this logic for the digital age, applying it methodically across strategic theaters—nowhere more visibly than in the Middle East.
China leverages its engagement with the Middle East as a Trojan horse to entrench its influence through three key mechanisms. First, Chinese technology platforms integrate artificial intelligence–driven surveillance and governance systems directly into state institutions, which normalizes those states’ dependence on China for infrastructure and standards.
Second, cooperation agreements make China integral to core state functions like communications, making it difficult for Washington to compete for access and leverage. And third, Beijing’s deals aim to lock in long-term energy ties while expanding petro-yuan transactions to chip away at the US dollar’s position as the global standard. This model positions Beijing as an indispensable partner in everything from data to finance to security.
Trump’s decision to make his first major foreign visit to Riyadh rather than Brussels, London, or Tokyo is a deliberate signal. It indicates that the United States no longer views the Middle East as a peripheral concern, but as a vital theater of strategic competition with China. The scale of the announcements confirms that message. Saudi Arabia has pledged $600 billion in US-linked investment, including more than $100 billion in arms acquisitions. At the same time, Washington is preparing a deal to provide the kingdom with access to advanced US semiconductors—a move intended to shut China out of future Gulf infrastructure in AI, surveillance, and cloud computing. These agreements are part of the administration’s strategy to push back on China’s expanding influence by making digital sovereignty central to US security partnerships.
This shift is also visible in the administration’s approach to Syria. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Damascus is not a random concession to the post-Assad regime. Rather, it is an attempt to reenter a strategic theater that the Obama administration ceded to China, Russia, and Iran. For years, Beijing has shielded Bashar al-Assad’s Syria at the United Nations and positioned itself to lead postwar reconstruction efforts alongside Russian firms. US sanctions helped ensure Moscow and Beijing had minimal competition in that space. The sanctions’ removal signals a renewed American effort to prevent Beijing from monopolizing a strategically central part of the Middle East.
If Trump’s Gulf tour is successful, he will have made significant moves to push back against growing Chinese influence, reassert American dominance, and reassure longstanding allies. In a region marked by shifting allegiances and strategic uncertainty, the visit underscores Washington’s renewed commitment to shaping the balance of power, not just reacting to it.
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Nicely done, yet again Zineb. Your proud professor, Billy