IRAN WARWhat the Iran War Taught China About Fighting the United States
Iran could not defeat the United States militarily, but it never needed to—and China is taking note. By choking the Strait of Hormuz, spiking energy markets, and running down the clock, Tehran offered Beijing a case study in how to impose costs without seeking victory.
President Donald Trump’s administration may soon recognize that the most important audience for the Iran war was not in Tehran or Jerusalem, but in Beijing. Chinese strategists have seen a demonstration at scale of U.S. military capabilities—and how the United States fights. They have been assessing the durability of U.S. deterrence across the Taiwan Strait, and they can now see the gap between military outcomes and strategic effects. Chinese President Xi Jinping will likely include these lessons in his strategy for this week’s Beijing summit.
Iran could never win a conventional war with the United States, but it didn’t have to. It simply had to run down the clock, drive up the costs, and survive. For Chinese planners, the Iran war is a case study for what multi-domain warfare should look like.
By attacking the economic heartbeat of its Gulf neighbors, the Iranian regime took critical oil and gas production offline and spiked the price of both. By de facto closing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to all but those it allowed, the regime did something few scenarios over the last decades had explored: it allowed its own oil bound for China and elsewhere to transit while shutting down the rest of the outflow through the strait. It choked an economic artery, caused insurance markets to tighten and supply chains to falter, turning a regional conflict into an economic disruption. It demonstrated its leverage was not on the battlefield, but in its ability to affect the global economy.
Now let’s take those sobering lessons to the Indo-Pacific. A Taiwan contingency has long been framed by U.S. military planners as a race between invasion and defense, ultimately coming down to whether Taiwan could deny China a quick military victory to provide the time needed for the United States to overcome the tyranny of distance and flow forces to the Western Pacific. But that misses Beijing’s own doctrine, which places far greater emphasis on disrupting an adversary’s economic and operational system than on defeating its military outright. The inferences China can draw from the Iran war are clear: there is no need for a decisive, strategic victory if it can generate enough economic and political pressure to constrain U.S. decision-making.
