Subject: Re: Dear MAGA, thank you for the foreign wars!
https://www.hudson.org/nationa...

The Iran Strike Is All About China
Why Operation Epic Fury is the opening act of the Indo-Pacific century.

Several reasons:

Operation Epic Fury, this weekend’s joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, has been widely described as an extraordinary assault on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. That is true, but it misses a critical dimension. For years, Beijing has spent billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture.

In other words: This is all about China.

Indeed it is.

Iran’s value to China also extends to proxy warfare. When Iran’s Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in late 2023, the consequences rippled across the global economy. Container traffic through the Red Sea fell by 90 percent within three months. Goods worth roughly $1 trillion were disrupted in the first seven months. The rerouting of ships around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope added nearly two weeks and about $1 million in fuel costs to every voyage, driving freight rates between Asia and Europe.

Recall that the Houthis were not initially attacking Chinese flagged ships or ships bound for China. I wonder why that was. They would later hit some anyway, though.

The U.S. bore the heaviest burden of response. Carrier strike groups were deployed, air campaigns were sustained for months, and precision munitions costing between $1 million and $4 million per interceptor were expended at a rate that, by mid-2025, had consumed roughly a quarter of America’s high-end missile interceptor inventory. Last week, it was reported that Tehran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-made supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, capable of threatening American carriers now massing in the Persian Gulf. Earlier, Chinese suppliers shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a key missile propellant ingredient, to an Iranian port, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that Israel spent 12 days destroying.

In other words the REAL drain on US warshots was the whackamole game of 'suppress the Houthis', who were being fed missiles by the mullahs. So instead of playing the same game, Trump decided to hit the source. Why allow a proxy army to continually harass and threaten you while doing nothing about it?

Amazing how clear events get when you allow yourself some perspective.

China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports at steep discounts. The shipments travel on a ghost fleet of tankers that switch off their transponders and relabel their cargo as Malaysian or Indonesian to circumvent American sanctions. Since 2021, the cumulative value of these purchases has exceeded $140 billion. This makes China the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt.

The arrangement works beautifully for Beijing. It gets cheap oil for its industrial base, saving billions annually compared to market-rate suppliers. And in exchange, China acquires influence over a nation of 90 million people sitting astride the world’s most consequential energy corridor.

Now, nobody's tankers are getting through. If we're going to pay an economic price...so are they.

When Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei received Chinese president Xi Jinping in Iran in 2016, he praised the 25-year strategic partnership as “totally correct and endowed with wisdom,” adding pointedly that “Western governments have never been able to win the Iranian nation’s trust.” Khamenei was not merely flattering a guest. He was describing a structural reality: Iran’s economy now runs on Chinese money, and both capitals know it.

In 2021, the 25-Year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership committed China to invest an estimated $400 billion across Iran’s energy, banking, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors, formalizing a relationship that was already underway. The deeper this integration runs, the less leverage anyone else has over Tehran, and the more leverage Beijing accumulates.

China owns Iran.

Meanwhile, Chinese-flagged ships sailed through with less interference. Beijing contributed no vessels to the multinational protection force and issued no condemnation of the attacks. In fact, Chinese satellite companies were providing the Houthis with intelligence to enable their targeting of commercial vessels.

The Chinese have zero compunctions about waging a cold trade war with the West in an attempt to redirect world capital flows away from us and towards them. Their strategy has always been to make us poorer and weaker and themselves richer and stronger.

The logic here is simple. Every dollar the United States spends defending Red Sea shipping lanes is a dollar unavailable for submarine production, Pacific bases, or Taiwan contingency planning. Every carrier group stationed in the Gulf of Aden is a carrier group absent from the Western Pacific. Iran’s proxies, armed with Iranian weapons and supported by Iranian intelligence, function as a mechanism of American strategic attrition, and the costs fall entirely on Washington while Beijing accumulates strategic gains.

Yep. People here keep whining about this making us weaker but forget that the status quo was already doing that. Joe Biden's limp response to the Houthi attacks put us on a course of a money and resources drain while the Chinese got stronger. In other words, the exact opposite of what this board says.

China benefits from the Iranian threat in another, less obvious way: It uses the anxiety that Iran generates among Gulf Arab states to deepen its own relationships with those states, which happen to be America’s most important regional partners.

The Gulf monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have lived for decades under the shadow of Iranian aggression. Historically, they managed this through close alignment with the U.S. But confidence in American reliability has eroded, a process that began with the Barack Obama administration’s pursuit of a nuclear deal with Tehran, deepened after the muted American response to the 2019 Aramco attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, and accelerated after the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gulf leaders increasingly believe they cannot rely solely on Washington.

China has stepped into this uncertainty with commercial patience and diplomatic ambition.

A brilliant strategy, that. This is their Dragon face/Panda face diplomacy in action: The Dragon feeds the Iranian regime, which threatens the Gulf and then the cuddly Panda is there to comfort the Gulf states and offer protection from the monster China created. Very neat.

The pattern should be legible by now: Iran’s threat pushes Gulf states to diversify their partnerships, and this very diversification increases Chinese leverage. The more leverage China holds over Gulf capitals, the less likely those capitals are to side with Washington on the questions Beijing cares about most: Taiwan, semiconductor export controls, sanctions enforcement, and the future of the dollar-based financial order.

But that strategy has been blown away by the US stepping in and standing on Iran's d1ck. Who are the Gulf states aligned with now?

All of which brings us to the central problem. President Trump didn’t launch Operation Epic Fury only to punish Khamenei for his massacres. Trump launched it because every year Washington spends focusing on managing Tehran is another year Beijing gets to build control in the Pacific. The orientation of the Middle East will determine whether the U.S. can prevail in the defining confrontation of this century: a Chinese move against Taiwan.

Bingo. Not for "ego" or "because they told him no" or some other fanciful imagined thing. For the cold reality that the board needs to be cleared if China is to be deterred.

Simple.

Collapse the Islamic Republic, and you remove the single greatest drain on American strategic bandwidth, expose the fragility of every client relationship Beijing has built from Tehran outward, and free the United States to concentrate on the Pacific with a credibility that 20 years of pivot talk never produced.

That outcome, however, requires following through.

The Trump administration must use the convergence of military pressure, regime fragility, and allied momentum to finish what its opening act this weekend began. The Venezuela playbook offers a template: Recognize a legitimate transitional authority, marshal international support around the transition, and let the regime’s own fragility do most of the work while American pressure forecloses Beijing’s ability to reconstitute what has been broken.

Yep. Adults are back in charge in Washington, people who are students of Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest foreign policy minds in American history.

So yes, the Iran question was never about Iran. Remove the Islamic Republic from the equation, and China loses its pawns for a Taiwan contingency. Leave it in place, and the Middle East remains what Beijing designed it to be: a second front that Washington can never afford to leave and can never afford to stay in. Trump’s strikes are the first move by an American president who appears to understand that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran.

Boom.


Anyone who's bothered to read Sun Tzu at all knows that the very best wars are the ones you never fight. The Chinese version of that is to weaken western economies and political will to the point that the West decides that Taiwan and anything else China wants isn't feasible or isn't worth it.

This board hates this thought, but the West needed somebody with enough political will to break the first part of their strategy and that guy is named Trump. Reality does not care a whit what this board hates, though.