In the wake of American soft power efforts leaving Iraq, Chinese interest in the nation continues to replace it. The current administration’s “America First” approach to politics has minimized foreign aid, resulting in the shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organization with a strong presence in the Middle East. As a consequence of this shutdown, Iraq, a nation famously abrasive toward the U.S. due to decades of military occupation under the premise of U.S. national security, has welcomed the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s influence, a force which American intelligence views as its largest security threat in today’s global landscape.
To understand where the PRC’s soft power threat is coming from, it is important to examine the United States’ involvement in Iraq up until today. Historically, Iraq has held a predominantly negative sentiment toward the U.S. as a result of the 2003 Iraq War. In a 2019 poll that was presented to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 53% of Iraqis felt that the United States initially entered Iraq to “occupy and plunder [its] wealth,” while over 84% of Iraqis viewed the U.S. as an “occupying force.” To this end, soft power has been considered vital to Iraq’s cooperation with the United States—a means to alleviate the damage Iraq has experienced in previous years. Thus, before its shutdown, USAID worked in Iraq to establish “an Iraqi democracy” for the post-Saddam nation, cultivating neoliberalism and a stronger relationship between the U.S. and Iraqi citizens in the process.
USAID’s most recent endeavor in Iraq, the Takamul Project, was meant to complement the Tishreen Movement, a series of mass protests in Baghdad against government corruption, which some consider a second Arab Spring. In the spirit of Iraq’s rising call for democracy, USAID provided outlets for the Iraqi people to establish fair and self-governing institutions. Most notably, the Takamul Project circulated over $6 billion worth of private sector bids in Iraq via infrastructural, agricultural, and waste management facilities. The private bids proved successful for Iraqi citizens as their government continues to receive criticism for its kleptocratic practices; these industries, with USAID’s help, now circulate commerce outside the confines of Iraq’s political upper class. Additionally, USAID assisted in the return of over 4 million Iraqis to their homes from ISIS-occupied territories.
As the Takamul Project officially concluded in 2023, the Iraq Civic Engagement Activity was set to replace it in January 2025. However, now that USAID is no longer an active agency, American efforts to bolster relationships with Iraq have disappeared. As a result, the current views of Iraqi citizens toward the United States risk a continued downward shift. And while the U.S.-Iraq Combined Joint Task Force Operation, one of the last U.S. military operations in the country, plans to withdraw operations in Iraq by the end of September 2025, the nation is still being used as a base for operations in neighboring Syria until September 2026. The prolonged exposure of Iraq to American military forces—paired with only a brief exposure to quantifiable aid—creates an emerging soft power vacuum and risks sustained resentment of American affairs. In turn, the current state of Iraq gives plenty of outlets for the PRC to advance its hegemonic agenda against the United States.
Currently, the PRC buys between 50% and 67% of Iraq’s oilfield production, which accounts for an estimated 90% of the government’s total revenue. With this, the PRC has also been keen on developing its diplomatic relations with Iraq over the past two decades, with an increased focus on the matter in the past few years. These growing diplomatic ties are largely a result of the PRC’s own soft power initiatives. One of their most notable moves yet has been its promise to establish 1,000 schools across the nation. In turn, Iraq has been very welcoming to Chinese influence, feeling that they are less “invasive” and more economically reliable as an ally than the United States. While USAID has contributed over $6 billion through its private sector bids, Iraq’s oilfield revenue currently exceeds $101 billion, meaning that the PRC has contributed anywhere from $51 billion to $68 billion to Iraq’s economy.
However, unlike the $6 billion contributed from the United States, approximately $60 billion from the PRC contribute to Iraq’s kleptocracy via state-owned oil fields, not Iraq’s struggling people via the private sector. Between the two powers, only the United States has given directly to Iraq’s citizens as a means of gaining their favor. The PRC merely aims at swaying Iraq’s elite for political gain, not the nation as a whole. Thus, the soft power initiatives coming out of the PRC, despite being perceived as beneficial to Iraq’s economy overall, leave many Iraqis with a continued financial struggle—even when compared to the monetarily lesser soft power efforts conducted by the United States.
The PRC’s increased interest in Iraq’s economy comes with additional threats surrounding the PRC’s military. While there are currently no Chinese military personnel within Iraq’s borders, the PRC possesses troops as close as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The establishment of Chinese military personnel in the UAE came with the suspected construction of a military base only after PRC soft power increased through improved diplomatic and cultural exchanges in the 2010s, with economic trade between Shanghai and Abu Dhabi exceeding $100 billion in 2015. Thus, based on tracking similarities between how the PRC has conducted diplomacy across both nations, it could be postulated that the same diplomatic strategy is being used in Iraq as what was being used in the UAE.
Now, the “America First” policies that intend to improve the lives of American citizens risk damaging the development of a strategic alliance between Iraq and the United States, conceding international advancement to a U.S. adversary. As the PRC’s soft power initiatives grow their access to Iraqi oil and potential military developments, the liberties of Iraqi citizens are disregarded in favor of a kleptocracy. Thus, the United States is left with both a degradation of the democratic ties it has spent years developing and a more dire great power competition.