Abstract
This article investigates joint naval exercises (JNEs) between China and seven littoral states of the Gulf as a prism through which to examine shifting alignments in a global order in flux. These questions have become only more salient in light of the US–Israel–Iran war. In a region long shaped by U.S.-led security structures, JNEs with China, described by the U.S. as a ‘pacing challenge’, raise questions about the Gulf states’ evolving strategic orientations. Drawing on original open-source data and a newly compiled dataset of all JNEs involving Gulf states from 2000 to 2025, the article offers a quantitative and qualitative assessment of China’s role as a security actor in the region. By comparing the number and frequency of JNEs conducted by China with those of other external powers – including the U.S., U.K., France, Japan, South Korea, and Russia – it evaluates whether China’s growing global and regional stature has translated into meaningful security partnerships in the Gulf. Based on the findings, we argue that while Gulf states have increasingly pursued economic and political ties with China, the limited number of JNEs with these actors underscores the enduring predominance of U.S. and Western security partnerships. These findings shed light on the instrumental and performative nature of JNEs in the Gulf and particularly in relation to China-Gulf ties, as well as contribute to broader debates over multipolarity, alignment, and strategic signalling in the Global South and beyond.
Introduction
In November 2019, officers and sailors from the Royal Saudi Naval Forces and Chinese People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) held the first-ever Blue Sword bilateral joint naval exercise (JNE) in the Kingdom’s littoral waters around Jeddah. The timing of the 3-week exercise was particularly noteworthy and perhaps intentional – even though such exercises are typically planned way in advance. It occurred only 2 months after unprecedented drone and missile attacks on Saudi oil facilities attributed to Iran, amid growing unease in Riyadh over the United States’ (U.S.) restrained reaction – even as Washington insisted it was ‘locked and loaded’ (Trump, 2019).
China also conducted a JNE, in March 2025, with its so-called ‘axis of upheaval’ partners, Iran and Russia (Kendall-Taylor & Fontaine, 2024). Known as Security Belt-2025 and conducted annually since 2018, the exercise took place near Iran’s Chabahar Port – close to critical maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman. Consequently, JNEs involving China appear to have caused unease among some countries that have traditionally been security providers in the Middle East, as reflected in select official statements and media narratives, with U.S. Admiral Aquilino, Commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, testifying that ‘the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is the only country that has the capability, capacity, and intent to upend the international order’ (Aquilino, 2025).
The perceived expansion of China’s security/military footprint in the Gulf 1 has emerged as an area of concern for a constellation of states – from India to France to the U.S. and Japan – alongside Beijing’s broader great power ambitions and deepening economic ties across the Indo-Pacific. While often overstated in media and policy commentary, this perceived expansion stands in contrast to the relatively shallow and pragmatic military presence China maintains in the region – highlighting a persistent gap between perception and reality that this article seeks to clarify. Unlike the entrenched security assurances linking Arab Gulf states to the U.S. and its Western allies – or the enduring hostility between Washington and Tehran – Beijing has cultivated pragmatic and generally positive relations with all Gulf actors. Chinese officials have, for instance, decried the U.S. practice of ‘bloc politics’ and criticized its beefing up of military alliances targeted at a third party as ‘not conducive to maintaining common security’ (Cheong, 2022; State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2017). This positioning has largely enabled China to navigate the region’s rivalries, foster agreements to lessen tensions – as it attempted to do between regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023 – and jointly exercise with states on both sides of the Gulf.
China’s growing presence is widely perceived as complicating established patterns of security alignment and intensifying the sense, inside and outside the Gulf, that China is a potentially powerful economic and security partner for Arab Gulf states and Iran. It is through this prism of expanding ties and strategic ambiguity that China’s participation in Gulf-based JNEs should be understood.
JNEs involving China in the littoral waters of the Arabian Peninsula, as illustrated by the above examples, have increasingly become the norm, made headlines, and added another piece to an important but unsolved puzzle: on which side of the fence will states surrounding the Gulf fall vis-à-vis U.S.-China rivalry in a period of transition in the international order, a question made more urgent by the outbreak of the US–Israel–Iran war in February 2026, and the renewed vulnerability of Gulf maritime chokepoints. This is important because states on both sides of the Gulf – Iran and the Arab Gulf states – command significant influence in the global order. Their relevance extends beyond massive hydrocarbon exports and reserves to include sovereign wealth, financial clout, strategic geography, and outsized influence in regional security dynamics. They also sit astride key maritime chokepoints, namely the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, through which one-third of global trade, including food and energy, passes (Boston Consulting Group, 2024). Furthermore, political tensions, terrorism, and frequent upheavals, including inter- and intra-state wars, mean the Gulf is among ‘the most penetrated’ regional security complexes in the world, and its security and defence partnerships powerfully shape regional orders and attract great power attention (Brown, 1984; Hinnebusch, 2019; Rossiter & Cannon, 2023). Composed of proactive, relatively powerful actors in the emerging multipolar order, the Gulf is a theatre of regional order-building in which local actors leverage economic, military, technology, and diplomatic partnerships with larger extra-regional interlocutors to bolster their own sovereignty, regime security, and signal their evolving preferences (Sim & Fulton, 2021).
We suggest that JNEs offer a critical, if underexamined, lens into this complex balancing act. As planned, structured maritime interactions, they reveal both the operational and symbolic dimensions of alignment, intent, and capacity. Whether short, tactical, and bilateral or extended and multilateral, JNEs are highly visible manifestations of partnership preferences (Henke, 2019). While the Gulf’s Arab monarchies have maintained deep security ties with Western powers, especially the U.S. and the United Kingdom (U.K.), their growing engagement in JNEs with China as well as Russia may be a bellwether of what is to come; the former is regarded by the U.S. as its ‘most consequential strategic competitor’ and ‘pacing challenge’, while the latter is viewed as an ‘acute threat’ (U.S. Department of Defence, 2022). 2
Conversely, Iran’s participation in JNEs with China and Russia is on the rise and indicative of Iran’s resistance to Western-led regional architectures (Zamiri, 2024). Examining the nature and frequency of these JNEs thus allows us to assess how Gulf states position themselves in the broader evolving regional and international orders, as well as how external actors seek to shape regional security through naval diplomacy.
We admit, nevertheless, that while JNEs can tell us much, they are an imperfect barometer of alignment and capability. They are episodic, often under-reported, and can be structured to serve multiple audiences at once (Rossiter et al., 2025). Accordingly, we treat JNEs primarily as observable signals of security engagement. They demonstrate patterns of contact, routinization, and willingness to be seen cooperating rather than direct measures of alliance commitments or high-end operational integration. Secondarily, we read JNEs as practices of naval diplomacy and status signalling, in which visibility and framing can matter independently of military content. Read this way and based on the data presented below, the comparatively low numbers of China–Gulf JNEs relative to Western partners qualify claims that the Gulf’s security order is rapidly transitioning to a multipolar configuration.
The article proceeds in five sections. The first conceptualizes JNEs within the broader field of naval diplomacy and regional order-building. The second outlines the methodology and dataset used to track Gulf-based JNEs from 2000 to 2025. The third presents the core empirical findings, comparing the frequency, scale, and patterns of JNEs involving China with those involving traditional and emerging partners. Structural constraints on military effectiveness and integration in the Gulf are examined in the fourth part. The final section offers a discussion of the implications of our findings for China’s evolving role in Gulf security and the utility of JNEs as statecraft tools amid great power rivalry.
Joint Naval Exercises
JNEs represent a powerful and adaptable instrument through which states convey strategic alignment, demonstrate capability, and engage in regional order-building. As a subset of joint military exercises (JMEs), JNEs serve a hybrid function: they can enhance operational readiness, build interoperability, and foster naval learning, while also acting as vehicles for diplomatic messaging, symbolic reassurance, and strategic signalling (Rossiter et al., 2025). This dual instrumental and performative nature (see Figure 1) makes JNEs especially useful as indicators of evolving security partnerships in contested regions such as the Gulf, where great power competition, regional rivalries, and strategic uncertainty converge to produce overlapping spheres of influence and alignment. We therefore treat JNEs as both instruments of naval diplomacy and partial indicators of security engagement, while recognizing that they cannot, on their own, establish the depth of operational integration or binding alignment. JME’s blend of purposes (Rossiter et al., 2025, p. 150)
JNEs also differ meaningfully from their land or air counterparts. In the Gulf context, JNEs – particularly those centred on public goods missions like mine-countermeasures, maritime security, or search-and-rescue – are often perceived as less politically provocative than joint air or land drills, which more readily signal coercive intent or alliance commitments. They are also mostly conducted in international waters and are therefore in line with neutrality of the seas in terms of legal permissiveness, such as freedom of navigation and innocent passage.
Scholars of naval diplomacy argue that navies exert unique political influence simply through their presence (Patalano, 2018a, 2018b; Rowlands, 2018; Till, 2013). As Rowlands (2012, p. 1) noted, ‘the political (or diplomatic) role of sea power has always been important and, arguably, far more commonly exercised than its wartime uses. Indeed, it is unique to navies and has no parallel on land or in the air.’ This is why JNEs often serve as an entry point for nascent security relationships and minilateral partnerships, especially in contested or geopolitically complex regions such as the waters surrounding the Arabian Peninsula (Bernhardt, 2020; Cannon, 2025; Till, 2013). Recent reports of Iran-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) naval exchanges, though limited in scope, suggest that even minimal cooperation at sea can serve as confidence-building mechanisms, potentially lowering tensions in historically adversarial contexts (Sarı, 2023).
It is for these reasons that we assess studying Gulf states’ JNEs as analytically and empirically valuable. Their growing prevalence is tied to trends in globalization that have increased the importance of sea-borne trade, which accounts for over 80% of global trade by volume (UNCTAD, 2025). This makes maritime security central to both regional stability and international economic prosperity (Bueger & Edmunds, 2024). Navies have thus taken on expanded peacetime and grey-zone roles, from protecting energy flows to responding to piracy, terrorism, and natural disasters. JNEs have correspondingly become more frequent, varied, and prominent, particularly in the Indo-Pacific (Grant, Patalano, & Russell, 2023; Heng, 2025). The maritime domain also poses unique operational challenges – including difficult sea conditions, vast operational areas, and complex communication protocols – which require tailored naval responses. These distinctive characteristics, combined with the often-broader geographical remit of naval forces compared to land or air units, justify treating JNEs as a discrete subcategory of JMEs.
JMEs vary widely in terms of their participants, duration, and geographic setting (Heng, 2025). The states involved – and the specific activities they undertake – are closely tied to the exercise’s intended function, which differs across cases (Raymond, 2025). Exercises between close allies typically aim to enhance joint warfighting capabilities, demonstrate resolve to adversaries, or reassure partners of their mutual commitment. In contrast, other JMEs may focus on initiating or deepening diplomatic ties, or on signalling deterrence to rivals (Rossiter et al., 2025).
Given their multilateral, that is, ‘joint’ nature, JMEs carry significant implications for core international security issues such as alliance cohesion, deterrence strategies, operational effectiveness, and efforts to construct or contest regional orders. 3 Despite their growing prevalence and strategic weight, the underlying purposes of JMEs – like their JNE subset – also remain underexamined in a systematic fashion (Heng, 2021).
JNEs serve as an especially meaningful tool for informal alignment and strategic signalling on account of the absence of formal multilateral security alliances among Gulf states – aside from the GCC, which despite calls for a more robust intra-Gulf security mechanism in the wake of the US-Israel-Iran conflict remains politically and economically fractured (Al-Khulaifi, 2025). Whether bilateral or multilateral, held in littoral waters or near critical chokepoints, occurring as a one-off drill, a (bi)annual event, or biennially, JNEs convey layered messages. They can reassure partners, deter adversaries, or signal a willingness to deepen ties with emerging actors. As such, they provide a valuable lens through which to interpret Gulf states’ positioning amid intensifying great power rivalry and an evolving international order. Over time, repeated bilateral JNEs may even foster military-cultural emulation or mimetic isomorphism, contributing to a gradual recalibration of security preferences in favour of key partners (Oling et al., 2022).
The typology developed by Rossiter et al. (2025) provides a useful conceptual framework for interpreting the varied functions of JNEs. It outlines five key indicators – participants, content, location, frequency, and framing – that help distinguish exercises aimed at military effectiveness from those intended for political display and relationship-building. This distinction – albeit often quite blended, as Rossiter et al. (2025, pp. 150–152) admit – informs our broader understanding of how JNEs function as strategic tools and guides our interpretive reading of the dataset below. For instance, Japan’s recent engagement in numerous JMEs – hosting European warships in its ports and participating in high-profile exercises such as Germany-led Arctic Defender and U.S.-led RIMPAC – demonstrates how naval cooperation is increasingly leveraged as an instrument of cross-regional influence and value-based alignment (Heng, 2025). These patterns reinforce the utility of JNEs as indicators of evolving partnerships and geopolitical signalling.
In what follows, we use these indicators primarily as an interpretive guide and illustrate their relevance through a small set of high-visibility exercises, rather than as a coding framework applied across the full dataset. Nevertheless, JNEs between Gulf states and a variety of partners, when the context and content are analysed, should still be revelatory. Saudi Arabia’s willingness, for instance, to engage in two Blue Sword JNEs with China or Oman’s 2024 JNE with Iran and Russia, aimed at enhancing ‘… regional collective security and promot[ing] multilateral cooperation’ (Anadolu Staff, 2024), are sharp departures from JNEs with mostly Western navies in the 2000s. These activities may function as instruments through which Gulf states seek to hedge or diversify relationships amid global power transitions, which is in line with an increasingly large body of work by scholars of the Arab Gulf states and wider Indo-Pacific (Alnuaimi, 2020; Kamrava, 2025; Kuik, 2008).
Despite interest in Gulf dynamics and their potential effect on the fast-changing international order, JMEs have been less studied, with even less attention being paid to their subset, JNEs. Iran’s JNEs are a small exception, given the important role played in Gulf (in)security by the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (Alshehhi, 2022; Amiri, 2020; Dolatabadi & Kamrava, 2024). But Arab Gulf states have been exercising jointly with Western and other partners for decades (AlAwadhi, 2023; Khan, 2013; Yates, 2020). Nevertheless, perhaps because their navies remain relatively underprivileged compared to their air and land counterparts, the literature on JNEs in the Gulf remains underdeveloped, a gap we hope to fill, in part, with this research.
Indeed, the dual nature of JNEs as both instrumental and performative makes them particularly suited for studying Gulf regional security dynamics in the context of great power contestation and evolving international orders. They do not require formal alliance commitments, yet they can project powerful messages of trust, alignment, and intent. In this way, they serve as accessible and observable proxies for understanding how regional actors like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), and Iran perceive and navigate global power transitions.
Methodology and Methods
This study adopts a mixed-methods approach, with a central emphasis on quantitative analysis, to assess the scope and significance of JNEs involving seven littoral Gulf states: Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. Iraq was excluded from the study because it’s very short coastline and naval capabilities limited mainly to coastal defence constrain its ability to host or participate meaningfully in blue water or multilateral naval exercises.
There is no single, comprehensive, publicly available, well-maintained database that lists all JNEs by year, country, assets, and participants. Consequently, we compiled an original dataset of JNEs conducted from January 2000 to June 2025 using open source and open access data – including official press releases from national navies, the Joint Military Exercises Dataset (Bernhardt, 2021), the Chinese Military Diplomacy dataset (Saunders & Ha, 2025), and media reports. We then cross-checked each mention with another source to increase data reliability.
By identifying the number, frequency, and participant composition of these exercises, we quantify and compare the Gulf states’ naval engagements with external partners. These numerical patterns serve as the core empirical evidence in evaluating whether China is emerging as a credible security actor in the Gulf. We also replicate the same procedure for JNEs with other extra-regional powers that maintain robust military-to-military ties with the Gulf states to allow for peer comparison with China. These are France, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the U.S., and the U.K.
We selected these states because they either play a prominent role in contemporary great power rivalry or have long-standing political, security, and economic ties with the Gulf. The U.S., U.K., and France are traditional security providers in the region with deep-rooted military, economic, and political engagement. Japan and South Korea, while not great powers in a classical military sense, are major economic actors with increasingly active naval diplomacy in the Gulf and broader Indo-Pacific (Heng, 2022; Jeong, 2022). Russia, meanwhile, is an assertive strategic actor seeking to expand its influence and challenge the U.S.-led security architecture in the region, such as through its ‘Concept of Collective Security in the Persian Gulf’ first announced in 2019.
We excluded states such as Pakistan and India from our comparison set. Pakistan has long-standing military ties with several Arab Gulf states and has hosted major multilateral exercises such as the AMAN series, but it is generally viewed as a subcontinental security actor. Likewise, India, until recently, was firmly a subcontinental actor. It is, however, an emerging naval power with a growing presence in the western Indian Ocean, but its JNE footprint in the Gulf has been limited during the period under review.
Our dataset was restricted to only those naval exercises in which the Gulf states and their extra-regional partners were active participants, which we defined as contributions of naval assets such as vessels and/or personnel. JNEs in which one or the other was simply an observer were excluded in line with the previously mentioned typology by Rossiter et al. (2025), although future research may include them if relevant. A case in point was the JNE in October 2024 between Russia, Oman, and host Iran: while it was included in the tally for Russia–Oman and Russia–Iran exercises, it was excluded from the count for Saudi Arabia and Qatar since they were present at the JNE but only as observers.
While our analysis is primarily quantitative – centred on JNE numbers over time – we use the typology developed by Rossiter et al. (2025) as a conceptual reference to distinguish, in broad terms, between exercises oriented toward military interoperability and those intended for political signalling. However, due to the limited availability of detailed public information on exercise content, we do not apply the typology systematically. Instead, we focus on the number and distribution of JNEs as our core empirical variable, interpreting these patterns as a proxy for the depth and trajectory of Gulf states’ evolving security relationships with external powers. To clarify, although not coded as a separate variable in the dataset, we used Rossiter et al.’s (2025) typology heuristically when interpreting the nature of specific exercises – for example, multilateral, short-duration, low-asset JNEs were generally interpreted as more politically symbolic in intent, while repeated bilateral exercises involving complex naval tasks and higher-value platforms were taken as indicative of more substantive military interoperability objectives. 4
Data gathering for this article was facilitated, but at the same time also limited, by the use of open source and open access publications for several reasons. One of these has to do with the strictures of doing research in less-than-democratic contexts such as the Gulf states (Benstead, 2018; Janenova, 2019). Another concerns the culture of secrecy and confidentiality surrounding defence or military-related matters in many countries. Taken together, these restrict information about the occurrence and/or the level of detail about particular JNEs. For instance, between May 2023 and 2024, a press release noted that the Combined Task Force (CTF) 154 conducted nearly 30 training exercises, to include Compass Rose I and II in Bahrain (Combined Maritime Forces Public Affairs, 2024). Verifiable online references to each of these exercises, to include participants and assets, were not available. Additionally, disparities in the availability and transparency of official reporting among Gulf states likely affect the number of publicly verifiable JNEs, potentially skewing aggregate comparisons across countries. Consequently, the original dataset we compiled is likely less-than-comprehensive, but it does offer the minimum number of JNEs held particularly in the case of exercises conducted between the Gulf states and the U.S. or the U.K. Our claims are, accordingly, confined to what JNE patterns can reasonably indicate: observable engagement, signalling, and routinization, rather than definitive measures of China’s strategic intent or high-end operational capacity in the Gulf.
Modalities and Constraints of Gulf JNES
JNEs conducted between January 2000 and June 2025. Authors’ composite table drawn from the literature and related research
Modalities of China-Gulf JNEs
Our research finds that JNEs between China and the Gulf states are a relatively recent phenomenon, with most of them occurring less than 10 years ago in response to several changes in the security calculus. Specifically, China’s more intensive economic and people-to-people engagement with Iran and with the Arab Gulf states has occurred in lockstep with JNEs. China is among the top five trade partners for all these countries, it supplies the labour force, components, and finance that builds many of the region’s energy and transportation infrastructure projects, its stock of investments in the Gulf is growing quickly, and it is a major source market for inbound tourism (Fulton, 2021; Fulton & Sim, 2022; Sim & Griffiths, 2024). All of these require a ‘soft military presence’ beyond its traditional maritime zone of operation in the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas as part of its ‘far seas protection’ naval strategy to guard against threats to these overseas interests in the Gulf (Rice & Robb, 2021; Sun, 2018).
The recent nature of China–Gulf JNEs is also partly a reflection of China’s multi-decade naval modernization program. This has produced a navy that has surpassed the U.S. as the largest in the world. The PLAN is assessed to grow and acquire blue water operational capabilities thanks to the pace and capacity of naval shipbuilding in China (O’Rourke, 2025).
Additionally, China–Gulf JNEs are symptomatic of the desire among Gulf states to achieve more ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘relational autonomy’ in foreign and defence policies (Mason, 2024; Samaan, 2023). In the case of Iran, attempts to reduce the constraints of sanctions have taken the form of diplomatic rapprochement with the U.A.E and Saudi Arabia prior to the US-Israel-Iran War that began in 2026, as well as closer economic and diplomatic engagement with China and Russia. Complementing them is the naval security component, which involves a ‘long hand’ strategy to reach adversaries in distant waters, rather than simply deter attacks on Iran, particularly since the previous strategy of targeting U.S. bases in Arab Gulf countries risks jeopardizing reconciliation with these neighbours (Azizi, 2024). In Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E, strategic autonomy born of the desire to reduce vulnerability to uncertain security commitments from the U.S. includes, but is not limited to, initiatives aimed at indigenous capacity building in the defence sector (Rossiter & Novella, 2025; Rossiter & Yates, 2025). Examples include Saudi Arabian Military Industries’ joint venture with Spain’s Navantia to produce corvettes and the creation of unmanned surface vessels by Israel Aerospace Industries and Emirati defence consortium EDGE. In short, the China–Gulf JNEs are not only driven by China’s interests but resonate with recalibrations by Gulf states seeking greater agency in defence procurement and international diplomatic and economic partnerships.
A second finding is that although China has indeed intensified its JNEs with the Gulf states in recent years (see Figure 2), JNEs with China are skewed in favour of a multilateral format. Of the 20 JNEs identified between 2000 and 2025, almost two-thirds (13) were multilateral exercises. Moreover, with the exception of Iran, these multilateral exercises took place in the waters off Pakistan together with participants from many other countries as part of the AMAN series of annual naval drills, hosted by Islamabad. Indeed, this JNE series has resulted in the navies of both France and the U.S. ‘exercising’ with the navies of Iran and China. Given the presence of so many participants and assets involved – to include major rivals – AMAN is about political display rather than military effectiveness. This is consistent with Rossiter et al.’s (2025) emphasis on participant breadth and public framing as indicators of performative intent. JNEs conducted between China and the Gulf states (including Iran) between 2010 and 2019 and between 2020 and 2025
The prevalence of multilateral JNEs likely reflects China’s preference to be seen as a team player contributing to a public good, namely, maritime security. It also dovetails with Beijing’s oft-stated principles of peaceful coexistence and active defence on the high seas (Odgaard, 2017). This preference was also observed in its trilateral JNE with Iran and Russia: cognizant of how the trilateral exercise could be perceived, China’s state-run Global Times (2025) highlighted that Oman was an observer in the most recent iteration of the Security Belt exercises in 2025. Likewise, Iran, which has made progress in normalizing relations with its Arab Gulf neighbours in recent years, duly reported that Oman was joined by Qatar and the U.A.E. among other observers (Iran Daily, 2025).
In contradistinction, China has conducted over 110 JMEs with Russia between 2003 and mid-2024, with more than half of them either purely JNEs or multi-domain exercises with a naval component. Specifically, more than half of the JMEs took place since 2018, and nearly half were multilateral in nature (China Power Project, 2025). The point here is that the Middle East is relatively low as a priority for China as far as its maritime security and interests are concerned; China prioritizes JNEs in the Asia-Pacific as well as in and around the South and East China Seas.
A third finding is that when bilateral JNEs involving China and the Gulf states do take place, they are meticulously balanced. Of the seven bilateral JNEs, there were two each with Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as one each with the U.A.E., Oman, and Kuwait. In this regard, the even-handed approach implied by the empirical data in our study provides a useful and corrective counterweight (see also Dolatabadi, 2023; Fadlon & Zimmt, 2024) to the oft-repeated claim that the $400 billion, 25-year investment agreement between China and Iran announced with great fanfare in 2021 is detrimental to the Arab Gulf states and to the U.S.’s pre-eminence in the Middle East (Cordesman, 2021; Yazdanshenas & Saleh, 2023). It is, in fact, arguable that China has been at pains to signal that its relationship with Iran is neither at the expense of the latter’s neighbours nor of regional security. Our data indicates that, whereas the last bilateral JNE with Iran was in 2017, China conducted four bilateral naval drills in 2023 with Arab Gulf states. The evidence from our study, therefore, seems to corroborate the claim that China ‘does not pick sides in the Middle East. It [China] has no allies, nor does it have enemies. It has maintained friendly relations with both sides of conflicts’ (Zhuang, 2016).
China’s JNEs in Comparative Perspective
Gulf states conduct far more JNEs with long-standing partners like France, the U.K., and the U.S. than with newer actors such as China or Russia. This is our fourth finding (see Figure 3). While there has been an uptick in JNEs between Arab Gulf and Chinese navies in recent years for reasons that were discussed above, the small numbers (11) are hardly commensurate with the level of angst among some members of the security community (Herzinger & Lefkowitz, 2023; Singh, 2024). They seem to believe the rhetoric rather than the reality of Beijing’s repeated calls for a new security architecture in the Middle East that privileges a regional-led model of security over the current reliance on external intervention. The JNE record suggests that China has not yet translated its growing naval capacity into regular, sustained exercise-based security engagement in the Gulf (Sun, 2024, 2025). JNEs between Gulf states, including Iran, and China. Figure was generated using Julius AI, an artificial intelligence-powered data analysis and visualization platform, based on the figures collected by the authors for the research
JNEs between Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and external state partners. Table was generated using Julius AI, an artificial intelligence-powered data analysis and visualization platform, based on the figures collected by the authors for the research
Of note, and by far the most frequent, are the JNEs associated with Gulf states’ non-binding membership of the various CTFs under the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces (CMF). CTF 154, for instance, was specifically created in 2023 to offer training opportunities to CMF partner states with the aim of improving their operational capabilities by sharing the U.S. Navy’s best practices (U.S. Naval Forces Central Command Public Affairs, 2023). CTF 154’s JNEs involve five core areas: maritime awareness, maritime law, maritime interdiction, maritime rescue and assistance, and leadership development. However, exercises focusing on next-generation naval warfare technologies – particularly those involving artificial intelligence and unmanned systems – are expected to be included on the agenda (Mazzucco, 2023). To this end, CTF 154 conducts the biannual Compass Rose JNE. Compass Rose IV, for example, was held from December 15–19, 2024, and included practical training in visit, board, search and seizure procedures, maritime domain awareness and damage control, and firefighting. Sixteen CMF member states and partner organizations, including the United Nations and INTERPOL, participated (Combined Maritime Forces, 2024).
Based on the findings, frequency is analytically meaningful as a measure of engagement and routinization, but it can be misleading where a small number of highly visible or symbolically charged exercises carry greater political weight than repeated, low-salience drills. As such, we interpret our counts with this limitation in mind when assessing China’s role in Gulf security. In addition, the number of participating states does not, in itself, indicate greater operational depth or military effectiveness. Large-scale multilateral exercises often serve signalling and reassurance functions, especially when they involve limited complexity, short duration, or modest asset deployment. Thus, while multilateralism frequently correlates with performativity, it cannot be treated as an automatic proxy. In applying Rossiter et al.’s (2025) typology, we use the number of participants only as one heuristic indicator of scale and breadth and interpret it alongside exercise content, repetition, and platform complexity to assess whether an exercise is primarily symbolic or oriented toward operational interoperability.
Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have played prominent roles in Compass Rose exercises, reinforcing their alignment with U.S.-led frameworks. By contrast, the UAE’s 2023 departure from the CMF – justified by an ‘ongoing evaluation of effective security cooperation with all partners’ (United Arab Emirates Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023) – underscores a broader Gulf dynamic of calibrated hedging between East and West. This divergence suggests that while some Gulf states may use high-profile multilateral JNEs for symbolic reassurance, others are reassessing the strategic value and durability of these arrangements.
Infrastructural, technical, and institutional lock-ins – such as longstanding Western defence procurement and U.S. basing arrangements – will likely reinforce existing security patterns. For instance, Arab Gulf states were among the top three largest recipients of arms transfers by the U.S., France, Italy, and the U.K. between 2020 and 2024 (George et al., 2025). Examples of institutional path dependencies include Qatar’s designation as a major non-NATO ally for the U.S. on top of hosting the largest U.S. base in the region, existing Defence Cooperation Agreements with Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and U.A.E, as well as the U.S.-U.A.E intention to forge a ‘Major Defense Partnership’ following the 2025 visit of President Donald Trump to the country.
While China’s joint naval activities with Gulf states remain limited compared to their engagements with traditional Western partners, the question remains: what do these exercises actually achieve? Are they driven by political signalling, genuine efforts at capacity-building, or both? The following section investigates the operational content and symbolism of China-Gulf JNEs to assess their strategic significance.
Symbolic Display or Operational Effectiveness?
Interoperability is defined as forces working together coherently, effectively, and efficiently (Yates, 2025). The potential for military effectiveness, that is, interoperability at multiple levels with the U.S., the U.K., and other exercising partners, remains constrained – as is the case in much of the rest of the world – by several factors (Pernin et al., 2020). One is the divergence in defence procurement. Although most Arab Gulf militaries have historically procured U.S. or Western equipment, recent diversification into Chinese or other defence articles may affect compatibility over time. As importantly, the process for purchasing defence articles is often less about military effectiveness and more about diplomacy (Soubrier, 2016). Qatar’s purchase of different air assets from France, the U.S., and other states is a case in point.
Second, Gulf states – Iran and Saudi Arabia excepted – have generally limited numbers of assets and military formations because of their small territories and populations. This inhibits the types of JMEs and joint military operations with partners for which the American military is designed. These are generally designed for the brigade level and above.
A third constraint on meaningful military interoperability among Gulf states and their external partners is the divergence in military doctrines and, more critically, the operational processes that underpin real-time battlefield execution (Pernin et al., 2020, p. 39). While many Gulf militaries are nominally influenced by British military doctrine – with varying degrees of American input – this does not necessarily translate into cohesive practice. Saudi Arabia is a notable exception in its doctrinal structure, but for most other Gulf states, actual operational practices are rooted in older traditions. These practices often trace back to military advisors from Arab countries like Egypt or Jordan, who provided training in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, many of these procedures are dated, reflecting Cold War-era British methods rather than contemporary coalition standards (A. Yates, personal communication, May 22, 2025).
To understand this gap, it is important to distinguish between doctrine and the more granular elements of military effectiveness: namely, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). 5 Doctrines provide the overarching conceptual frameworks for military action, but TTPs govern how operations are executed on the ground, such as how platoon assaults are conducted or how forward observers coordinate artillery strikes. Without regular large-scale joint formations and exercises, doctrinal alignment remains largely theoretical. In practice, TTPs are where operational friction becomes most visible – and they are at this level where most foreign training engagements in the Gulf are focused.
The U.S. military, for instance, has formalized its expectations for coalition effectiveness through its interoperability manual, which defines four levels of interoperability, particularly at the brigade level and above (U.S. Army, 2024). These levels span functional areas like situational awareness, direct fires coordination, and mission planning. Achieving the highest levels of interoperability (Level 4) requires not only technological compatibility but also full-spectrum information sharing, legal synchronization, and tactical integration – a threshold few Gulf partners have reached. In fact, even within elite units like special forces or air forces, such levels of interoperability are rarely realized.
In the maritime domain, interoperability manifests itself in specific requirements such as helicopter certification protocols for landing on U.S. warships – an example of technical integration often governed by communication protocols like Link-10. However, what truly matters is not the hardware itself but the operational processes that allow for real-time information sharing, command coordination, and legal authorization across platforms and partners. While some Gulf states are developing naval doctrines and capabilities – such as convoy formation or maritime interdiction, their relevance often remains limited due to the absence of integrated multinational formations. Instead, most engagements in this space resemble the transfer of best practices rather than genuine joint operations.
Further complicating coalition integration is the challenge of sharing sensitive information across borders, especially in real-time combat environments (Tuinier, 2021). For example, efforts to establish a shared air defence picture among GCC states have long been discussed, but political will and trust barriers remain substantial obstacles. This reveals the extent to which military interoperability, especially among Gulf states and external partners, is not just a technical challenge but a deeply political one. For now, most collaborative progress remains confined to TTP-level engagements – such as tactical hostage rescue or ship-boarding protocols, which, while valuable, fall short of the integrated capabilities required for high-level coalition operations. Ultimately, achieving deeper interoperability will require not just training and equipment alignment but also confidence-building measures and institutional reforms that transcend tactical execution (A. Yates, personal communication, May 22, 2025).
A final, important constraint is the limited trust and political cohesion among Gulf states, which – alongside mutual caution between Arab Gulf capitals and external powers – has historically inhibited the development of formal collective defence arrangements. This extends to training and interoperability. As Cordesman (2017, p. 2) noted, ‘There has been no meaningful GCC-wide cooperation in creating major common training facilities that are properly used to conduct common training, maintenance, or military production. There is no meaningful effort at standardization, and only minimal internal effort to ensure interoperability’. While bilateral security assurances between the U.S. and the Arab Gulf states are the norm, these are non-binding and flexible – a source of frustration at times for both sides. Added to this, the ambivalence from Western partners for certain Gulf security conundrums, such as how to react to the Houthi in Yemen, is yet another complication.
In this context, multilateral JNEs often serve as confidence-building or signalling exercises rather than operational efforts at combined military effectiveness. Their value lies less in relationship building or showing the flag, and more in reflecting evolving patterns of cooperation and alignment. As such, and despite China’s expanding naval capacity and economic engagement across the Gulf, there is little reason to believe it will overcome the entrenched challenges that have long constrained interoperability between Gulf militaries and their partners. These constraints are further compounded by Arab Gulf states’ pursuit of diversified, symbolic defence partnerships as part of broader autonomy- and status-driven strategies (Soubrier, 2025).
Conclusion
This article advances three principal findings. First, while China’s engagement in Gulf JNEs has grown in visibility, it remains limited in scope, frequency, and operational depth. These exercises appear designed more to demonstrate symbolic alignment and presence than to embed China within the Gulf’s operational security architecture. Second, Gulf states continue to prioritize traditional security partners – particularly the U.S., U.K., and France – for deeper and more frequent exercises, although tactical interoperability still dominates over strategic integration. However, JNEs with both traditional partners and China should be understood as platforms for Gulf states like Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. to hedge and participate in exercises, events, and forums that are non-Western but not necessarily anti-Western. At the same time, they can maintain strong – even cordial – relations with Washington, Tokyo, and Paris. In the case of Qatar and Bahrain, which record zero JNEs with China and Russia, the permanent presence of the forward headquarters of the U.S. Central Command and the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, respectively, prevents them from acting like their Arab Gulf peers. Third, structural barriers – doctrinal divergence, limited trust, and procurement fragmentation – persist across the region, impeding meaningful multilateral military cooperation regardless of partner. These findings suggest that China’s rise in Gulf security affairs remains cautious and calibrated, with JNEs operating more as tools of diplomatic hedging than military transformation, even as the US–Israel–Iran war has renewed questions about Gulf security coordination and external guarantees.
China’s security relationships in the Gulf, however, are not uniform. Generally viewed as a pariah state by the U.S. and a rogue actor by many European states, Tehran has pushed for closer relations with China and Russia – Eurasian giants with the power to frustrate the West and a desire to reform, even overturn, the international order. Yet Iran’s JNEs with China and Russia exhibit similar limitations to those with Arab Gulf states: they are recent, relatively infrequent compared to Western-led JNEs, and face even greater impediments to military effectiveness. These challenges stem, in part, from divergent defence cultures, platforms, doctrines, and outlooks.
In contrast, JNEs between Arab Gulf states and traditional partners such as the U.S., U.K., and France occur more frequently, involve greater assets, and last longer. This reflects the enduring legacy, institutionalization, and dilemma of Gulf–Western security partnerships: the latter reinforces the threat perception posed by Iran while Arab Gulf states are prioritizing peaceful relations with Iran, as underlined by the Saudi–Iran peace deal of March 2023, a diplomatic opening whose longer-term significance now appears more contingent in light of the US–Israel–Iran war. Arab Gulf states also conduct a growing number of JNEs with newer regional actors such as Japan and South Korea – both of whom now surpass China and Russia in exercise frequency. Future research could expand the dataset to examine JNEs with other emerging interlocutors, such as India.
Despite the predominance of traditional partners, most JNEs remain tactically focused. They emphasize TTP-level cooperation over strategic integration. Gulf militaries continue to face deep structural and doctrinal limitations – including fragmented procurement, outdated operational procedures, and the absence of collective defence frameworks. These constraints inhibit meaningful interoperability with any partner – Western or otherwise.
There is little reason to expect China to circumvent these challenges. Its military cooperation with Gulf states is unlikely to evolve into the kind of high-level, trust-based interoperability that characterizes more mature alliances. Rather, China-Gulf JNEs serve both sides in other ways: for Gulf states, they provide a low-risk mechanism to hedge against uncertainty and diversify partnerships; for China, they are a low-cost means of demonstrating global naval presence and signalling great power credentials. In this sense, JNEs are instruments of statecraft, more about narrative and optics than about hard security outcomes.
Finally, the findings contribute to a couple of broader debates in international relations. The first is about how the Arab Gulf states and Iran manage uncertainties in their external environments. While many classic accounts emphasize their different approaches in terms of motivations and power projection (Gause, 2014; Mabon, 2013), more recent studies have noted similarities such as their self-perceptions as middle powers, desire for regional peace, and diversification of foreign partnerships (Kamrava & Dolatabadi, 2024; Samaan, 2023). Our findings make it clear that the Arab Gulf states have had more success in partnering with a wider range of countries when it comes to JNEs. A sub-finding on Iran–Oman JNEs – that there have been at least 12 bilateral JNEs since 2009 – suggests an intriguing datapoint on agency and regional peace, even if recent events point to the fragility of such regional stabilising mechanisms. The other broader implication of this work concerns China’s rise and the strategic use of civilian infrastructure. Civilian ports – 96 of which were owned, co-owned, or operated by Chinese firms as of 2023 (Sultana & Cohen, 2025) – are often perceived as stealth basing networks to support blue-water power projection (Kardon & Leutert, 2022). The same may be said of China’s port–industrial park complexes in the Middle East (Fulton, 2022). Yet our data on Gulf–China JNEs is inconclusive. While China conducts more naval exercises with Iran than any Gulf state, its investment in Iranian ports is limited. Conversely, China is actively developing ports in Abu Dhabi and Duqm – despite holding fewer JNEs with the U.A.E. and Oman. This suggests that Chinese civilian infrastructure in the Gulf, while often perceived as latent military assets, does not correlate strongly with its actual security engagement. Thus, while China’s rise is reshaping global power balances, its influence in Gulf maritime security – at least through the lens of JNEs – remains cautious, calibrated, and largely symbolic.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the able research assistance of Danah Mohamed Alkindi, Mariam Abdulla Almansoori, Metha Naser Alsaeedi, Mohamed Aldhuhoori, and Zohre Akrami in compiling the dataset. Any remaining errors are our own. We also wish to thank Ghebrebrhan Weldit Gebrehans for his assistance with images and heat maps.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.