American officials continue to harangue Middle East leaders, suggesting that economic, trade, and investment ties with China’s technology companies are risking their security ties with the United States. They are being shrugged off.

America’s fundamental challenge is Middle East countries don’t want to choose between the United States or China.  They believe that a bifurcation is possible: engage with China on commercial matters and simultaneously with the US on traditional national security challenges. Emirati senior Diplomatic Advisor Anwar Gargash said recently that “…economic ties can exist separately from [security and political] concerns.”

For Washington, economic security is national security. There is not and cannot be a meaningful distinction. At the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain last November, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl warned that China “pursues ties based solely on its narrow, transactional, commercial, and geopolitical interests, period.”

It’s not that Middle East actors see Beijing as a benign power, offering win-win cooperation and no-strings-attached economic benefits. There’s a long history of extra-regional powers in the Middle East and most know an opportunistic outsider when they see one. But they don’t see China as a threat, or at least not in the same way Washington does.

China is their largest trade partner, a great power with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and a technological giant that has transformed itself from third world to first in a single generation. After several years of warnings from the Trump and Biden administrations, and the case for disengagement with China still no better defined, officials in the region are simply tuning out the United States on the issue.