This article was also published on the American site
al-monitor.com
.
Gilles Kepel is a political scientist, specialist in Islam and the Arab world, is an editorial writer for Al-Monitor and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean chair at the École Normale Supérieure.
The agreement brokered by China's top diplomat Wang Yi between the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers is a "great leap forward" in Beijing's conquest of superpower status in a key region for its energy supplies. hydrocarbons – essential to its manufacturing prosperity.
It is also a major rebuff for Washington.
President Xi Jinping's China was already the main global economic competitor of the United States, but it had never before taken the risk of translating this commercial weight into an explicit political challenge - in this case giving Iran international legitimacy, while most Western capitals consider the Islamic Republic…
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