As Middle East tensions escalate amid Iran nuclear talks, the US response - and China's manoeuvres - come under the spotlight

Tensions are escalating between the competing power blocs of the Middle East as the decisive round of Iran nuclear talks heads towards an as-yet uncertain conclusion.

Negotiations in Vienna between representatives of Iran and four global powers over the return of the United States to a 2015 agreement to limit Tehran's nuclear programme are continuing, with the parties reporting that progress has been made.

Washington slightly sweetened the pot last week by reviving a sanctions waiver for Iran's civilian nuclear power programme allowing countries to cooperate with Tehran on civil nuclear projects, but made clear that Iran's uranium enrichment and installation of advanced centrifuges were a growing concern.

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"A deal that addresses all sides' core concerns is in sight, but if it is not reached in the coming weeks, Iran's ongoing nuclear advances will make it impossible for us to return to the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action)," a US State Department spokesperson told reporters in Washington on Monday.

While Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the parties had made progress, including Tehran's demand for guarantees that a future US administration would not abandon the deal again - as former president Donald Trump did in 2018 - US officials have said that such a guarantee is not possible.

In what has been seen as backing for Tehran's uncompromising position, its Houthi militia allies in Yemen last month launched an unprecedented series of ballistic missile and suicide drone attacks on the United Arab Emirates, a key US ally. On Thursday, they launched a drone attack on an airport in Saudi Arabia, wounding at least 12 people.

The aerial assaults were primarily carried out in revenge for the expulsion of Houthi forces from Yemen's oil-producing Marib and Shabwa areas by a pro-government militia armed by the UAE, and supported during the campaign by Emirati and Saudi warplanes supplied by the West.

While Saudi Arabia borders Yemen and has been frequently targeted since the Gulf Arab states intervened in the country's civil war in 2015, the attacks on the UAE - 1,000km away from Yemen - sent shock waves across the Middle East.

They reverberated all the more after a fourth attack against the UAE on February 2 involving explosives-packed drones was claimed by the True Promise Brigades, a shadowy Iraqi group believed by many security analysts to be a front for the country's Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia.

The same group claimed responsibility for a September 2019 drone swarm attack on Saudi Arabia's oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais, which knocked out half the kingdom's export capacity, but it had not been heard from since then until last week.

"This lack of activity suggests that the group exists more as a front to more effectively represent Iranian interests in Iraq while maintaining a layer of plausible deniability," said Jack A. Kennedy, head of Middle East Country Risk for the London-based information provider IHS Markit.

"If it is confirmed that Iran-backed militias in Iraq are also directly targeting the UAE, this would support indications that the Iranian government is actively attempting to increase external pressure on the UAE as a tactic to extract concessions from the US in ongoing negotiations to secure an agreement around Iran's ongoing nuclear activity."

Waqar Rizvi, a Middle East policy specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS), based in Verona, Italy, said Yemen and Iraq are two certainly important fronts for the Iranian sphere of influence.

"While the Iranians would argue that they only provide moral support to the Houthis, they are certainly not unhappy about Houthi retaliation on the UAE (or even Saudi Arabia) for their respective attacks on Yemenis," said Rizvi.

"Iraq is a different ballgame, as the religious affiliations cloud judgment," he said.

Iraqi Shia Muslim voters dumped the Tehran-backed Hashed al-Shaabi alliance of ex-militia groups in last October's general election.

Its subsequent attempts to bully the victorious bloc led by firebrand nationalist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr into forming a power sharing government have so far failed.

Al-Sadr condemned the February 2 attack on the UAE, saying some "terrorist outlaws" dragged Iraq into a "dangerous regional war".

"There is much back-and-forth and debate even within Iran about what a sensible policy towards Iraq would look like. It isn't as black and white as one may imagine," Rizvi said.

The UAE, however, has not accused Iran of complicity in the attacks launched by its allies in Yemen and Iraq.

Instead, Abu Dhabi has continued to pursue diplomatic engagement with Iran boosted in early December by the visit of the UAE's senior national adviser to Tehran, made shortly before a visit to the Emirates by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan received a telephone call from Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir Abdollahian hours after the February 2 attack. In it, Al-Nahyan stressed the need to stop the Houthis' "dangerous escalation", while Abdollahian reiterated concerns about intensified fighting between Yemen's warring parties but did not criticise the Houthis.

On his part, the Iranian foreign minister called for efforts to prevent "crisis-creating elements" from gaining a foothold in the region - a veiled reference to the UAE's fast-growing relationship with Israel since they signed the Abraham Accords.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog was in Abu Dhabi on January 30, making the first ever visit by a serving head of the Jewish state, when the Houthis launched their third missile attack.

"Saudi Arabia and the UAE are witnessing this friction between Israel and Iran which leaves them nervous about possible situations in which they could be caught up in the fire if tensions spiral out of control. Such concerns do much to drive their determination to engage Tehran in a dialogue," said Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based geopolitical risk consultancy.

For Bahrain and the UAE, the two Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members which have entered the Abraham Accords, "there are concerns that their formalised relationships with Israel make them increasingly vulnerable to the activities of Iran and Iran-linked actors in the region," he said.

Israel is opposed to the US rejoining the JCPOA and has vowed not to be bound by it.

Addressing a conference in Tel Aviv on February 1, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Israel's "campaign to weaken Iran has begun."

The campaign is being conducted in "multiple fields: nuclear, economic, cyber, overt and covert operations, both by ourselves and in collaboration with others," he said

Israel's growing presence and influence in the Gulf since the Abraham Accords "certainly puts the Iranians on alert," Rizvi said.

"All one has to do is look at the map, and with the Israelis now in the UAE, the Iranians are justified in being cautious about how close Israel is now to their (maritime) border," he said.

Last week, Israeli naval ships for the first time publicly joined vessels from Saudi Arabia and Oman - with which it has no diplomatic ties - for massive region-wide naval exercises hosted by the US Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. -

Washington's response to the recent missile and drone attacks on the UAE - the region's trade and investment hub, as well as its second biggest oil exporter - is being viewed in the Gulf as a test of its decades-long commitment to the security of its Arab allies.

The Gulf states were alarmed by the lack of a clear US response to the September 2019 attack by the Trump administration, in particular after its decision to withdraw from the JCPOA and impose "maximum pressure" economic sanctions on Tehran.

Before the missile and drone strikes on the UAE by Iran's paramilitary allies, President Joe Biden's administration placed enormous pressure on the US' Abraham Accords' partners Israel and the UAE to rein in their deep economic relationships with Beijing. This caused much consternation in Abu Dhabi.

China, too, has pushed back against the US campaign against its Middle East interests.

In the week preceding the first Houthi attack on the UAE on January 17, China hosted a visit to Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, by foreign ministers from the Middle East, including four from the GCC, as well as those of Iran and Turkey.

Shortly after meeting them, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued a statement questioning the need for a US-led security architecture in the region.

"We believe the people of the Middle East are the masters of the Middle East. There is no power vacuum, and there is no need of patriarchy from outside," Wang said.

On the other hand, China condemned the initial Houthi attack for causing casualties in Abu Dhabi, but otherwise avoided getting involved in the tensions between the UAE and Iran - both of which have signed strategic economic partnership agreements with Beijing. Jonathan Fulton, an assistant professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, saw this as evidence of a shift in China's policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

"It's safe to say that China is no longer hedging. Instead, it seems to be wedging: trying to create and take advantage of space between the US and its allies and partners in MENA," he wrote in paper published on January 27 by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

The Chinese foreign minister's message of a Middle East that does not need a "foreign patriarch" may ring hollow given the role of the US Patriot interceptors in defending the UAE from Houthi missiles, he said. "But in a region with complicated feelings about the US - alternating between concerns of retrenchment and hopes for a robust but less militarised role - Wang's articulation of an alternative great power approach to MENA is one that resonates," Fulton said.

"Don't expect to see China replacing the US role - there is no interest or capacity for that - but do expect more messaging and actions that create friction between Washington and its regional allies and partners."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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