By Azhar Azam

While the U.S. has been increasingly eyeing the Middle East to inflate its arms sales and reduce its energy imports, China is working to promote peace in the region. On November 27 and 28, more than 200 delegates from China and Middle East gathered in Beijing to participate in the Middle East Security Forum to discuss security issues, challenges, and threats.

The participating Gulf officials applauded Chinese-conceived proposals – to stay committed for a political settlement, defending basic principles of fairness and justice, leveraging key role of the UN, and forging synergy in the region and international community – for regional security issues.

While on the U.S. side, its interests in the Middle East, especially in Arabian Peninsula, have tremendously decreased following it cutting its monthly crude oil imports from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in September to almost half the amount of last year.

So Saudi Arabia, once the sine qua non of U.S. foreign policy, is now primarily a region for the U.S. to increase its arms sales. And thanks to the entrenched Middle East conflicts, the U.S. continues to sell billions of dollars of armaments to the region every year while retaining a tight control on some lethal military technologies.

Yet due to Washington's boastful attitude and scratchy clash-fueling policy, Gulf kingdoms are now rapidly zipping toward China as an alternative to the U.S. in the Middle East. Beijing generally maintains good relations with all the regional states and is better positioned to broker peace in conflict-shrouded zone.

China's trademark recipe of resolving disputes through political and peaceful dialogue perfectly fits in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries' foreign policy amid plunging international oil prices and their unceasingly weary economies.

In middle of growing tensions in Middle East, Gulf economies are expected to shrink from two percent in 2018 to 0.8 percent in 2019 collectively. Over dwindling GDP growth, sustainable peace and economic stabilization will be the top insistence of GCC countries in place of large weapon acquisitions from Washington.

The region has ostensibly realized that billions of dollars of defense spending and arms purchases from the U.S. cannot warrant peace in the Middle East and they eventually have to get along and offset disputes for a wider goal of regional security and economic growth, which incidentally are the fortes of Chinese expertise.

Middle East propensity in the direction of China is momentous and infers deeper and far-fetched medium and long-term impacts on the regional politics. While it shows Gulf's hulking trust deficit with the U.S., it also demonstrates that these nations perceive themselves more aligned with Chinese foreign policy to mitigate differences through diplomatic channels.

Beijing is the second-largest economy and the world's largest exporter of the goods but it has never bullied its allies or rivals with U.S.-like trade tariffs and other intimidating moves to force down sovereign nations. China advocates the core principles of coexistence and multilateralism, promotes peace reconciliation and precludes imposing self-made international rules such as inflicting sanctions if someone does not adhere to its policies.

That's why the recently concluded China-Saudi joint naval drills, Blue Sword 2019, did not aim to overawe anyone and focused to enhance mutual trust and friendly relations, exchange experiences and improve the training level of the two special naval forces.

While Washington overburdened the ailing Riyadh economy by deploying thousands of U.S. troops, Beijing stationed about 1,800 troops in the Middle East as part of UN peacekeeping mission. Lucidly, the U.S. is flaming conflicts in the region whereas China is trying to restore peace in the region under a global diplomatic body.

China's blueprint of economic and technological cooperation is an ideal solution for the Middle East to buoy up their lurching economies. Being the world's biggest oil market, China can enormously aid oil exports-reliant GCC nations to revert their economic downslide. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing can additionally cater the transportation and infrastructure needs of the regional countries.

After China's crude oil imports from Saudi Arabia zoomed to a new height to reach about 1.99 million bpd in October at a windy increase of 76 percent year-on-year, Beijing did not ask Riyadh to take reciprocal measures and boost its imports from China. In addition, China is extending its economic, e-commerce, financial technology, logistics and artificial intelligence cooperation with other Gulf States such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

As the U.S. moves away from the Gulf oil markets, China has got an enormous potential to put forward a comprehensible and harmonized plan. Beijing maintains deep ties with Tehran and embraces strong economic relations with GCC states, so is in an ideal position to play an active role to facilitate regional peace and revive sopping economies, which would be heartily welcomed by the countries across the Middle East.