Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Egypt earlier this month generated countless headlines. Many of the reports highlighted Xi’s promise to usher in a new system of regional security for the Middle East.
Indeed, that message is precisely what the Chinese hoped the visit would convey. Here’s what the website of the Chinese Embassy of the United States had to say: “President Xi Jinping noted that the Chinese side supports regional countries in developing good-neighborly and friendly relations, upholding the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security, and building a new security architecture for the Middle East.”
The specifics of this vision were left largely to the audience’s imagination. According to news reports, Xi limited himself to anodyne comments like this: “The people in the Middle East should be the masters of their own affairs. Interference by external forces should be opposed.” Those doing the opposing should take care to “advance the comprehensive governance of regional common security.”
How, exactly? Well, the peoples in question should “enhance international coordination on regional common security,” and the “U.N. should be supported in playing a tangible role in regional affairs.” He added that “the Palestinian question” should remain “at the core of international affairs.”
He went on to add that China would work to “gradually enhance mutual trust and eliminate the breeding ground for conflict.” Just for good measure, he added that “the Chinese side stands ready to work with all regional countries to safeguard the security of international shipping lanes.”
This is the same China that is trying to assert unilateral control of a vast swathe of the South China Sea claimed by five other countries and one self-governing territory (Taiwan). This is the same China that is striving to subdue Taiwan and put an end to its democracy (which would, along the way, also give it unchallenged sway over the Taiwan Strait, a major corridor for global trade that is currently open to all). This is the same China that is working overtime to build a new global security architecture that excludes the U.S. as well as the democratic nations of Europe and Asia.
China also deliberately enables new Middle Eastern military alliances that could sustain instability rather than solve it. Notably absent from Xi’s statements in Cairo was any mention of the six-month long war to end Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. In the course of that war, Iran has launched an estimated 6,000 missiles and drones at 11 Middle Eastern countries: United Arab Emirates; Kuwait; Saudi Arabia; Bahrain; Qatar; Oman; Jordan; Iraq; Israel; Turkey; and Azerbaijan. China has sustained the Iranian regime by continuing to buy its oil as well as by reportedly providing it with weapons and battlefield intelligence.
Xi can breeze into Egypt and make vague pronouncements about a new security architecture in part because he is on a “security architecture tour,” having just played the starring role at the Sept. 1-2 summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, of the now 25-year old Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
Founded in 2001, the SCO — one of Beijing’s original security architecture projects — is now dominated by China, which pays for its headquarters in Shanghai. The main achievement of the SCO has been 8 large-scale multi-national and joint force military exercises. The last one took place in 2021, before Russia launched its horrific ongoing aggression against Ukraine.
China has been subsidizing the Russian invasion, which so far has killed up to half-a-million Russians and as many as 200,000 Ukrainians, by buying Russian petroleum and selling Russia the missile and drone components that, so far this year, are behind a 60% increase in Ukrainian civilian deaths compared with 2025.
Expect China to increase its economic and military component support should Russia expand its war to the Baltic States or Poland, since Russia’s war serves China’s direct interests by attriting vast quantities of U.S. and European weapons that accordingly won’t be available to defend Taiwan. As an added advantage, a weaker and increasingly dependent Russia will be more likely to comply with future Chinese economic and even territorial demands.
In the future, China could also pressure the SCO’s ten full members and 16 prospective members into contributing to larger future wars, such as a Russian invasion of Europe — yet another implication of China’s desire that the SCO become “a platform for implementing global security initiatives.”
On Sept. 12-13, Xi will breeze into New Delhi for the 18th summit of the now 20-year old BRICS organization, named after its founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
While BRICS has served primarily as a platform to promote non-Western-aligned South-South political solidarity and economic strategies, China has promoted a “BRICS-Plus” security agenda short of an outright alliance.
The potential for BRICS military cooperation was revealed in the Jan. 2026 “Will For Peace” exercise that saw Iran, Russia and China sending warships to Cape Town, South Africa, which gave desperately needed political legitimacy to Iran and simultaneously demonstrated an ability to threaten maritime access around the tip of Africa.
While the SCO and BRICS have different emphases, for China they serve the paramount mission of advancing a new system of what Xi likes to call “global governance,” his term for subjecting increasing numbers of member states to a China-centric international system that displaces the current Western-centric one.
In doing so, China also promotes the false notion that West is in decline and that the U.S. is no longer willing to provide global security. To name but one example, Turkish scholar Serdar Yurtcicek, a fellow with the Shanghai Institute for Global Governance and Regional Studies, recently wrote an article for a Chinese government publication that included the following observation:
Washington has lost both the will to guarantee security and order in every region of the world and the domestic political foundation to support such a will… [This has created a] vacuum [that] is both a threat and an opportunity. It is a threat because the external guarantees provided for decades are no longer unconditional; it is an opportunity because every area left by the retreat of hegemonic powers — arms supply, maritime security, regional mediation, defense industry partnerships — is a position waiting to be filled.
Chinese state media prints such conclusions because they reflect Beijing’s justification for its enabling of two new Middle East military alliances, the Sept. 17, 2025 Saudi Arabia-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) and the Aug. 7, 2026 Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey Mecca Joint Defense Agreement.
These alliances would not have strategic-level deterrent power if China had not spent decades helping Pakistan to build a nuclear weapons and long-range solid-fuel missile production capability.
This could soon include very likely China-assisted intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) targeted by Chinese surveillance satellites launched for Pakistan in 2025.
Pakistan, or its ally North Korea, could become a source of nuclear weapons or nuclear missiles for Middle Eastern countries that wish to boost their own deterrents.Turkey is also developing a liquid-fueled ICBM of of its own, and China would likely be eager to sell it and other alliance partners advanced missile defense systems.
So how does this contribute to “a new security architecture for the Middle East?”
For starters, it appears that China-armed Pakistan has gained two potentially active allies to join any future war between Pakistan and India, which is also armed with nuclear missiles (including ICBMs).
Such a regional conflict has the real danger of escalating into nuclear exchange, potentially causing unimaginable consequences for Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but also destroying India’s extensive effort to promote “multipolarity” via its membership in the BRICS and SCO.
These China-enabled alliances also pose a great risk of escalating future conflicts with Israel to a nuclear level. Fears of such a development may be driving Israel’s efforts to build a new layer of deterrence: by developing combat satellites that can attack targets on Earth, as revealed on Aug. 25 by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
China could promote a truly new regional security architecture by simply ending its extensive financial and military technology support for both Russia and Iran, helping to end two tragically destructive wars. Instead, Beijing requires conflicts that weaken the West and justify new “security architectures” that will allow China to become the dominant “external force” in the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
