Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 pushed US Middle East policy toward a familiar mixture of pressure, bargaining, and demands for measurable economic returns.
The deeper question, however, is not whether Washington is disappearing from the Middle East. It is not. The more consequential issue is whether the United States can still translate its considerable power into strategic exclusivity.
Regional governments are not simply replacing Washington with Beijing, Moscow, or New Delhi. They are widening their options. In international-relations terms, this is strategic hedging: maintaining important ties with a principal partner while reducing the risks of excessive dependence on any single power.
Transactional diplomacy and the diversification incentive
Trump’s approach follows a clear logic. If the United States supplies security, advanced technology or access to its market, it expects investment, arms purchases and economic concessions in return. The 2025 Gulf tour demonstrated how much commercial activity such diplomacy can generate.
Yet a heavily transactional relationship also creates a counter-incentive. If access to security, technology, or markets appears increasingly conditional and exposed to political changes in Washington, regional governments have a rational reason to develop parallel relationships before they actually need them.
BRICS illustrates this emerging flexibility. Egypt, Iran, and the UAE are established members of the expanded grouping. Saudi Arabia presents a more complicated case. The official BRICS website has listed the Kingdom among its members, while the Saudi Press Agency described Saudi participation in the May 2026 BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting as that of an “invited country”. Reuters has likewise reported that Riyadh had been invited but had not formally completed its accession.
That ambiguity is itself revealing. Riyadh can engage with a major non-Western forum while preserving flexibility in its relations with Washington. This is not necessarily a rejection of the West; it is an expansion of diplomatic choice.
China: Beyond commerce, short of a security umbrella
China’s role in the Middle East can no longer be reduced to oil purchases and infrastructure contracts. Beijing hosted and sponsored the March 2023 talks that restored diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, according to the joint trilateral statement issued by China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Later that year, China and Saudi Arabia conducted their second “Blue Sword” naval special-operations training. China’s Ministry of National Defense said the exercise was intended to deepen military cooperation and improve maritime interoperability. The training included maritime counter-terrorism, rescue and special-operations exercises.
These developments do not make Beijing a substitute for the US security architecture in the Gulf. They do show that China has moved beyond commerce into mediation and selective security cooperation.
For regional capitals, China does not need to replace Washington in every domain to alter the balance of choice. It only needs to become useful in enough sectors to create credible alternatives.
Multipolarity is also becoming financial
The same logic is appearing in payments and settlement systems. This should not be confused with the imminent end of the dollar, which remains deeply embedded in Gulf monetary and commercial structures. But governments are building additional channels.
In July 2023, the Reserve Bank of India and the Central Bank of the UAE created a framework for rupee-Dirham settlement in cross-border transactions. Four months later, the Saudi and Chinese central banks signed a bilateral currency-swap agreement worth up to 50 billion yuan.
Then, on 29 January 2024, the UAE carried out its first cross-border Digital Dirham payment directly to China through the mBridge platform, transferring AED50 million, according to the Emirates News Agency.
None of these mechanisms amounts to full-scale de-dollarisation. Together, however, they represent a form of financial hedging: creating additional payment channels rather than relying exclusively on one.
Russia: Oil is only one instrument
Russia’s relevance in the Middle East is often reduced to OPEC+ cooperation with Saudi Arabia. That misses other channels through which Moscow remains connected to the region.
In April 2026, Vladimir Putin proposed the creation of a “grain and energy hub” in Egypt, one of the world’s major importers of Russian wheat. Reuters reported the proposal and Egypt’s importance as a market for Russian grain. Moscow’s regional role therefore intersects not only with oil markets but with food security as well.
Nuclear infrastructure creates an even longer relationship. On 23 January 2024, Egypt and Russia marked the start of the main construction stage of Unit 4 at the El Dabaa nuclear power plant. Rosatom, the project’s general contractor, documented the ceremony attended by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Vladimir Putin.
Such projects generate decades of technical, fuel and institutional interaction. Russia therefore does not need to match the United States across every dimension of regional power; it can preserve influence through sectors where relationships are costly to unwind.
India: Corridors without exclusive alignment
India offers perhaps the clearest illustration of why a multipolar Middle East cannot be understood through rigid blocs.
In February 2025, Trump and Narendra Modi agreed to deepen cooperation with Middle Eastern partners and to convene participants in the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The US–India Joint Leaders’ Statement explicitly linked economic corridors and critical infrastructure with wider regional cooperation.
Yet New Delhi has resisted turning that cooperation into exclusive alignment. India has continued to rely heavily on Russian oil, even as renewed US sanctions pressure has complicated that relationship.
At the same time, India is deepening its Gulf partnerships. For New Delhi, corridors are instruments of connectivity, not necessarily declarations of exclusive geopolitical loyalty. India can work with Washington on IMEC, maintain energy ties with Moscow, participate in BRICS and deepen separate strategic relationships with Gulf states.
Washington’s real challenge: power without exclusivity
This is the central paradox confronting Trump’s Middle East policy. Tariffs, sanctions, technology controls and transactional bargaining can all produce leverage. But repeated reliance on such instruments can also increase the incentive for partners to develop alternative suppliers, institutions, payment channels and political relationships.
The emerging Middle East is therefore neither post-American nor necessarily anti-Western. It is increasingly non-exclusive.
Washington retains substantial security, technological and financial advantages. But strategic autonomy for regional states increasingly rests on the capacity to work with several powers simultaneously: security cooperation with one partner, infrastructure with another, energy markets with a third and financial arrangements through additional networks.
Trump’s transactional approach did not create this transformation, and it would be misleading to treat it as the sole cause. Multipolarity was already advancing through the rise of Asian economies, BRICS expansion, new connectivity corridors and the growing agency of regional powers. Yet, a foreign policy that makes partnerships appear more conditional can reinforce the logic of hedging.
The strategic challenge for Washington, then, is not simply that China, Russia, or India could replace the United States. The deeper challenge is that regional states increasingly see no reason to choose only one great power.
In a more fluid Middle East, the ultimate currency of sovereign power may be less alliance loyalty than the freedom to choose.
Dr. Kamran Yeganegi, Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering, Islamic Azad University; Senior Researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies of the Middle East (CSME)
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