China is upping its security game in the Middle East– and Washington is taking notice.
While the U.S. remains far and away the biggest supplier of weapons and the preeminent outside military player in the region, China’s share of the Middle East and North African arms market tripled in the first four years of this decade and that coincided with more direct engagements with several strategic players, according to the MBN China Tracker.
The MBN China Tracker pulls together data from a variety of open-source Chinese and other sources to provide a picture of shifting outside influence in the region. The military tracker released today draws on data about arms transfers, joint military exercises, and senior level military visits in the region.
The China Tracker’s findings suggest a more complex security landscape is emerging. The U.S. remains the indispensable security provider. But China is expanding its presence through targeted arms sales, drills, and diplomatic outreach.
The arms sales data gives a part of the picture. From 2020 to 2024, the United States supplied about half of all major arms imported by Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states, according to global arms-transfer datasets analyzed by MBN. Italy, France, and Germany together account for another sizable share of the market. China and Russia trail behind, although their trajectories diverge: Russia’s regional market share has dropped sharply in recent years, while China’s, though still small, has gone up.
Beijing’s slice of MENA imports was below 1 percent at the start of the decade, but has risen to 3.1% in recent years. Beijing has been helped by competitive pricing and fewer political conditions on sales. That fits a clear pattern: China increasingly fills “gaps” left by Western suppliers – especially in armed drones and other systems that Washington has been reluctant to share.
A tale of two superpowers
It’s telling who buys from whom.
Since 2020, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel, and the UAE have remained the top U.S. customers’ long-standing partners embedded in American security networks.
By contrast, the China Tracker’s tally of Chinese arms transfers shows Beijing focusing on a narrower set of MENA clients, such as Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia. These are often states looking for cheaper platforms, fewer political strings attached, or alternatives when Western suppliers are constrained by sanctions or export rules. Open-source reporting on Algeria’s purchase of Chinese drones and Mauritania’s recent acquisition of Chinese UAVs and air-defense systems supports this pattern of targeted, gap-filling sales.
Beyond arms sales, the China Tracker highlights a sharp rise in China’s military activities with regional partners.
According to the Tracker’s database, China conducted just one major exercise with MENA states during the entire 2010s. It has held 18 bilateral exercises since 2020. These include the first-ever China-Egypt air force drill, “Eagles of Civilization 2025,” held in Egyptian airspace this spring and described by Beijing’s Defense Ministry as a step toward “deepening substantive cooperation” between the two militaries.
America operates at a different scale. U.S. forces conducted around 55 joint exercises with just five Middle Eastern partners between 2020 and 2025, according to the China Tracker’s compilation of Pentagon and open-source data: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Jordan.
Military diplomacy is rising as well. Drawing on the Chinese Military Diplomacy Database developed at the U.S. National Defense University, the Tracker notes that Chinese senior-level military delegations visited MENA states 26 times from 2015 to 2024, up from 16 visits in the previous decade– part of a broader global uptick in outreach by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
New regional player
Beijing’s recent activity has gotten Washington’s attention. During President Donald Trump’s summit with Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohamed bin Salman last month, the U.S. pledged to sell advanced F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. This was seen partly as an effort to counter China’s growing presence and came despite concerns over potential operational intelligence and technology leakage to Beijing.
A previous F-35 sale to the UAE collapsed over similar concerns, including U.S. laws requiring that arms transfers preserve Israel’s qualitative military edge.
Experts note that Beijing’s reluctance to offer formal security guarantees still limits its influence. But the pattern in the data– especially China’s activity with Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania, and others indicates that Beijing is positioning itself for a longer-term regional role. For now, the story is not about a sudden power shift, but about a gradual broadening of security partnerships in which MENA states increasingly hedge between the world’s two leading powers.
Min Mitchell
Min Mitchell is former President and CEO of Frontline Media Fund and Executive Editor at Radio Free Asia.
