China, Russia, and the USA in the Middle East

The shift in international relations towards multipolarity has had profound implications across the world, but particularly in highly penetrated regions such as the Middle East. This book explores the rivalry between the USA, Russia, and China in the region, investigating its effects and assessing the influence of regional actors and issues.

Each chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of three core questions: How does global power competition manifest itself? How does it impact regional political, economic, and security dynamics? How do regional actors and issues influence the trajectory and dynamics of global power competition?

Expert international contributors take a country case study approach to consider these questions and investigate the most pressing contemporary events, issues, and trends in Middle Eastern politics. Tackling transregional and global issues and themes, they analyse the convergence, divergence, and competition between global powers in managing threats and interests such as terrorism, energy and cyber security, nuclear non-proliferation, conflict resolution, and warfare.

This volume will appeal to scholars and students of international relations, great power competition, China, Russia, the USA, and the Middle East.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Benjamin Houghton is an H.H. Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah Doctoral Fellow at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. Benjamin’s research focuses on the interaction between great powers and Persian Gulf states, particularly China. He is the co-editor (with Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Jia Liu) of the forthcoming volume China Moves West: The Evolving Strategies of the Belt and Road Initiative. Further to this, Benjamin has previously been published in Asian Affairs, Al-Monitor, and Orient.

Kasia A Houghton is an ESRC-funded doctoral researcher of Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict at the University of St Andrews, where she is a fellow of the Centre for Syrian Studies, MECACS, and the Centre for Global Law and Governance. She also works as a researcher on the Global Fragmentations project with the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep).