Subject: Re: Dear MAGA, thank you for the foreign wars!
Erm, okay. You can instead choose to believe we’re doing this just because they said no if you like.

There are other possible reasons. Indeed, I cited a second one that I think is likely - that Trump wants to "solve" longstanding geopolitical trouble spots because he believes that burnish his legacy and mistakenly thinks that they are actually easy to solve through military force and only weakness has kept the U.S. from historically just "solving" them. He thinks he's solved Venezuela, and thought that Iran could be similarly solved.

There are others. But none of the plausible reasons has anything to do with containing China. Iran is China's ally, but it's mostly for economic and energy security purposes.

Russia has a strong military and geostrategic interest in the Middle East, especially because of the importance of the Black Sea and the eastern Med to their naval operations. Russia gained from having a militarily strong Iran and powerful proxies that can stir up trouble and unrest in the region, since that limited US/Western abilities to project power in the region. Plus, Russia is a massive oil producer, so it benefits economically from instability in the region. It is a major blow to Russia that Iran is now militarily weakened and has lost most of their proxy ability to attack Western-allied interests.

But China doesn't have a direct military interest in the region. Their indirect "Great Game" interest of using the ME as a check on U.S. interests has also mostly disappeared in the last decade and a half, as the U.S. has now transitioned from being heavily reliant on ME oil imports to being a net oil exporter. Now it's China that's the destination for most of the oil from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil states. China is a massive oil importer, and benefits from stability in the Middle East. They don't want chaos and upset and crisis in the region. They want a stable source of energy resources. And China gets far more oil from the countries that Iran has been hostile to (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwai) than from Iran, so they definitely don't want Iran stirring up problems in Saudi and elsewhere.

China doesn't have strong security ties to Iran - they've been reducing those for the last decade or so. They have a strong economic and energy trade alliance with Iran because they want a dependable source of oil, but Saudi and the other Gulf oil states are bigger economic partners so they don't want Iran upending the security situation in the area. Iran is an economic and diplomatic partner: a source of crude oil and a reliable anti-Western vote in international institutions. They're not a security partner for China, other than as a customer for arms and other military resources.

So in many ways, this is an absolutely ideal outcome for China. Iran will still be as it was, politically and economically - an authoritarian dictatorship hostile to the West that will be looking primarily to China as its primary economic and development partner. Since Russia is in dire straits economically and militarily, Iran will be even more dependent than ever on China as a patron. And Iran will have both reduced ability to stir up geopolitical problems in the region and a massive need for Chinese assistance in just getting themselves back up to even modest pre-war levels. Teheran will be far more in Beijing's pocket than Moscow's, just as virulently anti-American and anti-West as it ever was, and desperate to trade energy resources for materials and technology and economic aid in rebuilding everything we just destroyed.

Add in the fact that we depleted tens of billions of dollars of our own military resources while China didn't lift a finger, and it's hard to script a better outcome for the Chinese. They're certainly better off than they were before the war started.