The quicksands of the Arabian Desert are notorious for swallowing up anyone trying to control the area. Historically, that’s what happened to Turkey, Britain, France, Russia and the United States. Sooner or later, all discovered that instead of dominating the Middle East, they ended up being dominated by the region’s never-ending problems.

And that may also be the fate of China, the latest power to be lured by the idea that it has to engage in Middle Eastern diplomacy. Unless decision-makers in Beijing are thoroughly prepared for what awaits them, they will also find out that the region can absorb all their energies, and usually for no practical effect.

Traditionally, the Chinese have tended to avoid high-profile global diplomatic efforts. That proved to be a very clever strategy in the Middle East, where China did exactly what it wanted while avoiding giving offence.

It bought Israeli weapons but still claimed to be the Palestinians’ most ardent supporter. China identified Islamic extremism as its biggest domestic threat, but still maintained cordial links with the Middle East’s most radical Islamic movements. Beijing also embraced Arab monarchs while remaining close to Iran, their mortal enemy.When Libya’s bloody revolution erupted in 2011, Western governments discovered to their astonishment that the single-biggest group of foreign workers keeping the vital Libyan oil industry going was Chinese: no fewer than 36,000 of them. Yet it was still up to the West to sort out Libya’s problems; all the Chinese did was to dispatch some ships to evacuate their workers.

The same is now happening in Syria, another country torn to pieces by violence: everyone is asking what Washington, Moscow, Paris or London would do, but nobody is even thinking that Beijing may also have an obligation to deal with this tragedy.

EASY RIDE ENDING For decades the Chinese remained the free-riders in the Middle East, mouthing cliches about “peaceful solutions”, “harmonious outcomes” or “win-win strategies”, while leaving others to do the diplomatic heavy-lifting. As seen from Beijing, the Middle East was about oil, gas and troubles, in that order; the first two could be bought with cash, while the troubles could be ignored.

All this is now changing. In one of his last foreign policy initiatives before retiring, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao warned Iran “not to even think” about interfering with oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. It was the kind of sharp, threatening language which previously only the Americans used in the region.

Chinese ambassadors throughout the Middle East have also started taking a more active role in the countries to which they are accredited; Gao Yan Ping, the Chinese ambassador in Tel Aviv, is particularly energetic. And more recently, Chinese president Xi Jinping unveiled China’s own plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan contains nothing new but is significant because it comes from China; it’s the context rather than content which matters.

THE US PIVOTS AWAY There are several explanations for this change of heart. There is growing realisation in Beijing among policy planners that, as is already the case in Africa, China cannot just purchase raw materials from the Middle East without involving itself in maintaining regional stability. This clearly plays a role in the shift.

But the most persuasive explanation is the fact that, for the first time in almost half a century, the US is now self-sufficient in energy and no longer buys either oil or gas from the Middle East—while China now gets half of its oil requirements from the Gulf sheikhdoms alone.

In what must surely count as one of the world’s more bizarre strategic twists, the US remains the Middle East’s hegemonic power despite the fact that it has no major commercial interests, while China has no regional influence despite the fact that its economic well-being largely depends on the region.

In theory, getting Washington to pay for the security of China’s energy supplies should be the perfect deal for the Chinese. But that’s not how big, emerging nations think.

”If you look back at rising powers in history, one of the things they do is get very uncomfortable with leaving the security of trade routes to established powers,” observes Michael Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, one of America’s leading think-tanks.

In that respect, therefore, the Chinese may be following in the historic footsteps of the British, who were also initially interested only in the oil, but then quickly found that this required delving deeper into local politics and controlling sea routes.So “just as the US is pivoting East, the Chinese are pivoting West”, says Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies dean Vali Nasr, who points out that the Chinese refer to the Middle East as “West Asia”.

The question is whether China’s officials realise that a true “pivot” to the Middle East is not for the faint-hearted, and it can work only if China itself changes the tenets of its foreign policy in some fundamental ways.

The first obstacle for the Chinese is that they have precious few people who truly understand the Middle East.

None of the top decision-makers in Beijing has any exposure or interest in Middle Eastern affairs. Even the Chinese military’s Second General Staff Department, which is responsible for intelligence collection and for dispatching military attaches, is forced to rotate the same small number of agents from one Middle East country to the next, simply because it has no others.

This sense of ignorance in China is reciprocated throughout the Middle East. The overwhelming bulk of the Middle East’s sovereign wealth funds are invested in North America and Europe, while Chinese products, including weapons systems, are invariably dismissed throughout the region as inferior knockdown copies of Western goods. Dispelling such psychological barriers will take a matter of years, if not decades.

CHINA’S DIFFICULT CHOICES If China wants to become more deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs, it will also have to come off the fence by choosing those it wishes to support and those it is resolved to oppose. Until now, China’s historic record in making such choices was disastrous. Beijing supported the Shah of Iran right until the day he was overthrown. It also supported Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, well after the Libyan leader faced the wrath of the entire Arab world. In both cases, China’s stance was influenced by its inherent dislike of popular revolutions and its instinctive preference for the status quo. The snag is, however, that in a Middle East where the sectarian confrontation between Shia and Sunni is growing more acute by the day, the Chinese will have little credibility or diplomatic footprint if they simply avoid taking sides.

Ultimately, however, China will have to make a decision on whether it wants to team up with the US to uphold the stability of the Middle East, or wishes to challenge it. This is not just an academic debate for, although China is now the chief beneficiary of the international order which the US created after World War II, the Chinese also like to portray themselves as allies of those seeking to undermine this order. But this cannot work in the Middle East, where the response to an increased Chinese presence will largely be dictated by whether it is seen as upsetting or strengthening the current order.

By arrangement with The Straits Times/ANN