“This is puzzling to me given the size of Bahrain’s market and its relatively modest engagement with China,” he said.
The CSP announcement follows the launch of the first direct flight between Bahrain and China, and was soon followed by preliminary cooperation agreements between the two countries’ sovereign wealth funds and chambers of commerce.
“The key is to coordinate efforts in economic relations between the two countries.” [with] “We place great emphasis on promoting development and bilateral trade,” Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali Al Khalifa, director-general of the bilateral relations department at Bahrain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in an interview with Chinese state television station CGTN on June 1.
“We appreciate the importance China attaches to its ties with the region and the Arab world and hope that this will continue.”
Five of these six countries are also significant oil and gas exporters to China.
“Bahrain doesn’t fit this model,” said Afshin Molabi, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., because unlike other countries, it has not contracted with Chinese companies for large construction projects and is not a major exporter of energy to China.
The United States and Bahrain have a longstanding security alliance, as part of which the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet has been headquartered in Manama for nearly three decades.
China has signed strategic partnership agreements with Qatar and nine other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, a step beyond the comprehensive strategic partnership in diplomatic relations.
Whether the new CSP will lead to a significant increase in Chinese trade and investment in Bahrain is “uncertain at this point,” said Guy Burton, the book’s author. China and the Middle East Conflict: Responses to War and Conflict from the Cold War to the Present.
Burton said 2018 was the high point of Chinese investment in the Arab world, but that has since slowed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased pressure from the United States on its Middle Eastern partners to limit engagement with China.
Because economics is a relatively minor consideration in Bahrain-China relations, East China Normal University’s Mahoney said the two countries’ CSP should be viewed in the light of U.S. policy in Central Asia and the Middle East following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
He said US policy was aimed at “posing a new challenge to China” by establishing US air bases in Central Asia “with the capability to threaten China’s strategically located spaceports and defense industries in its western regions.”
Similarly, the operation would leave a large U.S. military footprint in the Persian Gulf and have the “capability to control global oil flows, including cutting off Chinese access,” Mahoney said.
As a result, he said, the development of closer ties and cooperation between China and several key regions, Russia, Central Asia and “especially” Bahrain in the Middle East, is the result of Beijing’s long-standing efforts to “mitigate the last vestiges of Washington’s previous anti-China containment strategy” as new and more direct conflicts emerge, especially in the Pacific.
Johns Hopkins’ Molabi said King Hamad’s recent visits to Beijing and Moscow should be seen as part of a “new trend of multilateral strategic alignment” being demonstrated by several Gulf Arab countries.
“They don’t see their relationships with China, Russia and the United States as mutually exclusive,” he said.
As long as Bahrain does not cross these red lines, it will have room to act without facing significant backlash from Washington.
“As long as Bahrain does not cross these red lines, it will have room to act without facing significant resistance from Washington,” Molabi said.
Instead, he said, China and the Gulf states have “worked together to hedge and diversify their relationships and options with each other.”
Mahoney described Bahrain as “one of many countries seeking to maximise international cooperation” amid ongoing great power competition.
“One of the goals here is to make sure that we don’t end up like Japan and South Korea and others have chosen a side and get caught in a security trap and lose any semblance of an independent foreign policy,” he said.
