In a zero-sum game, America’s defeat in Afghanistan has resulted in China’s gain.

Beijing has moved expediently to embed itself with the Taliban as an erstwhile terrorist group that the US fought unsuccessfully for two decades, and while the US and its allies focused on countering China’s Indo-Pacific ambitions, Beijing has been working quietly and methodically on the other plank of its global strategy: to strengthen its influence in West Asia.

China’s President Xi Jinping.Credit: Reuters

West Asia – stretching from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean – was once under the sway of US-led regional alliances. During the Cold War, the US was a central player in shaping the regional order. Along with Israel, the oil-rich, pro-Western monarchical Iran and Saudi Arabia formed the pillars of American influence in the region. Although Afghanistan maintained a foreign policy of neutrality, it was well-disposed towards the US, and Washington expected Iran’s monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, to act as its regional gendarme and keep an eye on Afghanistan.

Yet, this is no longer the case and today China stands tall in the region. Its alliance with the “revolutionary” Islamic regime in Iran and its burgeoning ties with the ultra-extremist Taliban in Afghanistan have availed Beijing of a strong leverage to boost its geopolitical and geostrategic influence across the region.

Sino-Iranian camaraderie is nothing new. It has been developing since the Iranian Islamic regime came to power in 1979. While the US rejected the regime as fundamentalist and hostile to its regional interests, China immediately recognised it and the nation’s transformation into an Islamic Republic.

Despite serious ideological differences, economic and trade relations between the parties, involving oil imports from Iran to China and goods and technology exports from China to Iran, have taken a rapid upward trajectory. In the decade between 1981-91, China accounted for 41 per cent of Tehran’s arms purchases. By 2016, the bilateral trade amounted to more than $31 billion, and during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Tehran the same year, the two governments agreed to build economic ties worth up to $600 billion.

China has also assisted with Iran’s nuclear program, with the two sides signing a 25-year Cooperation Agreement in 2021, bringing enhanced Chinese investment in Iranian oil, gas and petrochemical industries, infrastructural development, and defence and intelligence cooperation. Last year, when Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as a full member, China was Iran’s top trading partner.

China has now begun to follow a similar pattern in its relations with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Though initially Beijing consented to America’s post-9/11 campaign against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and even found it convenient to have friendly relations with the US-backed Afghan governments, as the US-led intervention faltered in a climate of rising Sino-US competition, Beijing began to question Washington’s motives.