Voices from the Arab press: China’s role, medicine’s lessons, and the future of Iran talks

Imagine you are the leader of a country facing problems or seeking to affirm your legitimacy on the international stage. Where would you go?

For all the talk about a multipolar world order – a nearly meaningless phrase, since more than two poles means there is no polar order at all – Washington remained the preferred destination for leaders seeking help or legitimacy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping gave both visitors the same elaborate reception, while granting neither the concessions they sought. The red carpet was rolled out, 21-gun salutes were fired, and children waved flags while cheering the honored guests, but no pens were uncapped to sign deals.

Trump had hoped for help in convincing Iran to make the concessions needed to end the current war. He also wanted Xi to finalize purchases of 300 Boeing aircraft and large quantities of soybeans and other American goods. Xi, however, offered only his faint smile, then made a vague reference to his favorite subject, Taiwan, invoking the “Thucydides Trap” and warning against “discord.”

Anti-Trump commentators translated the old Chinese term for “discord” as “conflict” or “war” to suggest that Trump had been threatened, but those interpretations quickly collapsed for lack of evidence. In truth, there was no threat. Xi’s reference to the Thucydides Trap concerned changes to the status quo, rather than casting China as a rising power replacing the US as a declining one.

Trump, for his part, behaved with perfect discipline and gently reminded Xi that the US remains the indispensable global power. He also made clear that China has much to lose from any blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, if only because around 40% of its energy needs pass through it, while the US has the capacity to allow Chinese tankers through. And if closing maritime routes becomes the norm, what would the closure of the Strait of Malacca by US-allied coastal states do to China’s global trade?

Xi gave Putin almost the same treatment: pomp, ceremony, and no concrete result. Putin had hoped to close a deal on a new Siberian oil and gas pipeline that has been under negotiation for nearly a decade. Xi, however, was determined not to fall into the same trap Russia set for Europe through the Nord Stream pipelines. Putin, too, received a faint smile and little else.

Misunderstanding what China represents today, and what it may possess tomorrow, could have disastrous consequences. Treating China as merely a regional power is as wrong and dangerous as elevating it to the status of the new global superpower.

Xi appears determined to learn from the US’s experience as a superpower that paid heavily in blood and treasure to secure allies and protectorates, only to face explicit or implicit anti-American hostility.

That is without considering unintended consequences: Few remember that Iran’s nuclear program began with American money and expertise in 1959, and that the first generation of Iranian nuclear scientists was trained at American universities.

China is certainly more than the regional power imagined by Obama and Biden, but it is not the global superpower celebrated by the chorus proclaiming “the end of America.”

It is undergoing a scientific and technological revolution unmatched since the start of the Industrial Revolution in England, and each year trains more engineers than the US and the European Union combined.

It is also rapidly expanding its military power, with a particular focus on projecting naval power. Yet China remains far from possessing a reliable deepwater navy capable of projecting influence worldwide.

Xi’s genius as a leader lies in understanding the dangers of great-power games. China is the only major power that knows when and where to pack up and leave trouble spots rather than remain and fight for an uncertain outcome. His priorities remain the preservation of economic growth and the raising of living standards for the two-thirds of the population still close to poverty.

Then there is the problem of an aging population and declining birthrate, which China cannot correct through waves of immigration, as the US and European Union can. China also remains a second-tier competitor in soft power, despite ambitious plans across cultural fields.

Meanwhile, beyond the noise from China critics and China obsessives – such as the late Henry Kissinger – I believe China should be treated as a stabilizing force rather than a disruptive one, as some French intellectuals claim.

The ugly rhetoric of the “yellow peril” has harmed both China and the rest of the world, and Trump deserves credit for recognizing that. He remained firm and showed the leverage he holds, but treated Xi with respect.

Not all roads end in Beijing, but some inevitably lead there. My guess is that Xi will not invade Taiwan, because he understands the Confucian idea of “active waiting.” Decades ago, president Hu Jintao was asked why China waited so long to recover sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macau. He answered with the familiar faint Chinese smile: “Things take time.”

Whenever I listen to an Egyptian charlatan appearing before the public with delusions and hallucinations far removed from science and medicine, only to see society believe him and follow him as if hypnotized, I remember the French physician Jacques Despars.

In the 16th century, illness was widely seen as a heavenly curse, divine punishment, or the direct result of demons touching human bodies. The European Church possessed the authority to interpret pain and death, while priests and monks practiced rituals of “exorcism” more often than physicians practiced diagnosis and treatment.

Amid that darkness emerged a rebellious French doctor named Jacques Despars, who fought one of the fiercest intellectual battles against explaining disease through superstition.

Despars was an anatomical physician influenced by the spirit of the Renaissance. He believed that the human body was not a battleground for demons but an organic system governed by natural causes that could be understood and studied. At a time when epileptic seizures were interpreted as “demonic possession” and psychological disorders were considered evidence of evil spirits, he tried to offer medical explanations rooted in observation and clinical experience.

The most dangerous thing Despars did was not merely treat patients but publicly attack the idea that priests possessed the keys to healing. He believed some religious rituals delayed real treatment, and that patients were dying because people rushed to incantations and incense rather than medicine.

For the religious establishment, this was not simply a scientific disagreement but a direct threat to its spiritual and social authority. Despars cried out to the entranced society of his time: “I have never seen a disease that needed a demon in order to explain it.”

The meaning of that sentence was revolutionary. He was effectively saying that every disease, no matter how mysterious or terrifying, has a natural cause within the body or environment, and is not the product of evil spirits or divine wrath. The sentence was a cultural slap in the face to an age in which people explained epilepsy as possession, hallucinations as demons, and plague as punishment from God.

The idea itself extended a line of thought that began with Hippocrates, who rejected the notion of epilepsy as a “sacred disease,” then developed further with Renaissance physicians who wrested the body from the grip of priests and magicians and returned it to the laboratory of observation and dissection.

Perhaps the power of the phrase lies in its simplicity: It does not deny religion but rejects the use of the unseen as a substitute for knowledge. It is as if Despars was saying: Whenever we fail to understand, we invent a demon; but the task of medicine is to kill the demon through knowledge, not incantations.

Some clerics accused him of atheism and blasphemy and considered his material explanation of illness a denial of the unseen world. But Despars answered with a simple and devastating question: If demons are the cause of disease, why do epidemics spread through monasteries and churches, too? Why do some sinners survive while the most pious monks die?

His battle was part of the immense historical transformation that removed medicine from the hands of priests and placed it in the hands of scientists and doctors. Before modern medicine, people died from simple infections, seizures, or psychiatric disorders, whose sufferers were treated as demon-possessed. After the rise of the scientific method, diseases began to be understood as biological malfunction, infection, or neurological disorder – not as a hidden war between angels and jinn.

Although Despars is not as famous as Andreas Vesalius or Louis Pasteur, his struggle was part of the great revolution that liberated the human body from magical interpretation. Along with others, he helped move humanity from the age of “cast out the demon” to the age of “search for the cause.” Between those two sentences, modern medicine was born.

The theory of persuading Hezbollah with guarantees – expanding its presence in government and authority in exchange for relinquishing its weapons – is not new to Beirut’s political vocabulary.

This idea of a “tradeoff” has been circulating for decades, especially since the liberation of southern Lebanon in 2000, and is revived whenever Hezbollah is seen as disruptive or obstructive to stability.

Discussions vary over the nature of the incentives that might be offered to the party in exchange for laying down arms and joining the ranks of the regular political players alone.

Some have spoken of a “three-way power-sharing” arrangement, prompting fear and suspicion among others. Some have mentioned constitutional amendments that would give Shi’ites command of the army or, at a minimum, the vice presidency, in the hope that this would address the implicit Shi’ite grievance against the Taif Agreement.

It was therefore not surprising, amid the current crisis caused by Hezbollah’s unilateral decision to launch the Gaza support war, that some circles – particularly those opposed to the party – began quietly reviving talk of a potential bargain to encourage Hezbollah to drop its objections to direct negotiations with Israel and accept their outcomes.

No doubt, some of these circles raised this divisive issue in order to smear Hezbollah as a force seeking power gains rather than carrying a cause.

The matter becomes even more sensitive when the discussion centers on altering the Taif Agreement or overturning the equation it established in the early 1990s.

Recently, a different approach to such a bargain has emerged, based on the idea of abandoning efforts to “break” Hezbollah or push toward a comprehensive confrontation with it, in favor of “integrating” it into a governing equation that creates new balances of power inside Lebanon.

Some voices are urging Shi’ites to respond positively to such offers, arguing that the sect has suffered under a political structure that excluded it from participation in national decision-making, particularly through hybrid and self-interested coalitions.

Yet Hezbollah itself has been careful to distance itself from any discussion or debate suggesting a desire to expand the Shi’ite share of power. It has always been keen to show that it does not respond to “bargaining offers,” which it says are always presented by external actors influential in Lebanon’s internal game.

When any Hezbollah official is asked what proposals might guarantee expanded participation in national decision-making in exchange for giving up weapons, the traditional answer is: We have dedicated ourselves to another mission – confronting occupation. That has been our priority since our founding. We know some focus on this issue only to portray us as greedy for power, in an attempt to obscure our true objective and frighten others, especially those who appointed themselves guardians of the structure of power and devoted their efforts to preventing any change to it.

At the same time, the party declares that it fully understands the need for changes in the nature of governance. It has presented its vision for reform more than once through written documents, including calls to implement all provisions of the Taif Agreement as an indispensable starting point.

The US administration is still exploring the possibility of a negotiating track with Iran amid significant internal pressures, increasing pressure on President Donald Trump personally to adopt an urgent approach that could push either toward a negotiated solution or toward renewed military action, whatever its form or scale.

The Pakistani mediator no longer has much to offer, after exchanging drafts and proposals from both sides and exhausting its ability to move the negotiations forward.

Added to this is Trump’s growing conviction that his administration must reach an agreement better than the one concluded by the Obama administration in 2015, from which Washington withdrew during Trump’s first term on the grounds that it was a bad deal that would later cost the US heavily and lead to further repercussions for Middle East security and regional partners, as the administration argued at the time.

Any deal that might be reached or negotiated by the US and accepted by Iran, or vice versa, would be tied to files and issues across nearly every level. This is something the Trump administration is well aware of, as it deals with the matter as a single package, amid fears that Iran will not comply and may resume uranium enrichment at high levels.

If Iran reaches that stage, negotiations will become more complicated, and a deal acceptable to all American institutions will be harder to achieve. These institutions see the need for a solid agreement protected against Iranian countermeasures, given Tehran’s reputation for evasiveness and maneuvering across multiple arenas to gain time.

Trump realizes the difficulty of turning to other mediators. Only Russia remains, after the administration concluded that China is maneuvering in its dealings with Washington, which demonized it in the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 Pentagon document. Russia, meanwhile, is watching the administration’s positions and does not want to intervene except to secure gains within what has been described as a great war of bargaining among the three international powers.

In the search for a mediator, it will be difficult to bring the parties’ views closer together, especially as Arab states remain deeply suspicious of Iranian behavior, should a bilateral US-Iran agreement be reached. These suspicions are heightened by attempts to link any rapprochement to a flexible strategy that could accept an expected deal while trying to integrate Iran regionally without interference from other parties.

In all cases, Arab states will be watching Iranian behavior closely, and that behavior is likely to remain aggressive, requiring full Arab caution and a focus on securing Arab interests first.

The US must understand clearly that it cannot sign a bilateral agreement with Iran without taking Arab requirements into account, foremost among them ensuring that Iran is restrained from returning to the current scenario in the future, which would impose high costs on the entire region.

The weakening of the foundations of Iran’s brute power, regardless of any agreement, may encourage change from within Iran and produce a complete shift in the picture – something Washington is betting on amid major security and intelligence operations coordinated with Israel.

In reality, the US administration will eventually find itself compelled to resume the use of force to push Iran back to negotiations.

Abandoning, for now, options such as siege, monitoring, and tracking is not because they are costly but because they lead toward an approach imposed by Iran itself.

The debate inside the US over what has already been achieved militarily suggests that consensus within the administration is moving toward settling on the military option as the only exit from the current scene and all its consequences.