Overview

China–MENA Relations and the Iran War: Geopolitics, Economics, and Energy

The 2026 Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas transits, marked a structural rupture in the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa, and China sits at the centre of its aftermath.

This roundtable, co-hosted by Chatham House and the Carboun Institute, is anchored in two Carboun Institute research papers: a published policy paper on how the war has reshaped the case for Chinese renewable cooperation with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia, and a forthcoming study mapping the conflict's cascading effects across the region's exporters and importers. It brings together perspectives on China from Gulf exporters and from North African and Levantine importers, and centres on three questions:

• How has the war altered China's strategic calculus in the region, and the region's calculus toward China, amid sharpening US–China competition?

• How is the emerging triangle of Chinese technology, Gulf sovereign capital, and European standards and finance being assembled, and on what terms?

• Will the shock ultimately accelerate the region's energy transition and green industrialization, or hold it back?

Speakers

• Dr Sanam Vakil - Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House

• Karim Elgendy - Executive Director, Carboun Institute

• Dr Mathias Larsen, Senior Policy Fellow at London School of Economics (LSE) Grantham Research Institute

• Dr Ahmed Aboudouh, Director East Asia Unit at the Emirates Policy Center

• Dr Michal Meidan, Head of China Energy Research, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies

• Tinhinan El Kadi, Postdoctoral Researcher, TIDE Centre, University of Oxford