The war in Iran — and President Trump’s shifting tactics in fighting it — are roiling relations with China, just weeks before the president is to make a high-stakes trip there.
The complicated dynamics have a straightforward core.
China has numerous ties with Iran, economically and strategically. At the same time, Beijing has zero interest in getting involved in an all-out conflict with the United States merely to prop up the Islamic Republic — a cause that is incidental, at best, to its larger priorities.
Experts say that Beijing is far more focused on the long-standing issue of Taiwan — and the bigger question of China’s position in the world — than the minutiae of the Iran conflict.
That said, China is not shedding many tears over Trump’s decision to launch a war in the Middle East where the prognosis now looks uncertain and there is at least some plausible chance that the U.S. could get further bogged down.
“The war in Iran has presented China with a significant strategic opportunity,” Henrietta Levin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told this column.
Levin, a senior fellow with the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, said that this general belief is “exacerbated by the fact that the United States is drawing down its missile [stock] so rapidly, moving missile capacity from Asia to the Middle East. I mean, that’s a dream for China!”
Levin emphasized, however, that this did not mean China would provide overt backing for Iran to prolong the war. She noted that China’s relationship with other Gulf nations is in fact deeper than its more “transactional” dynamics with Iran.
China is attempting to thread the needle through this complicated strategic landscape.
Its approach has amounted to an effort to continue some measure of cooperation with Iran — from where it obtains around 12 percent of its oil — while keeping plausible distance between itself and Iran’s war effort.
It’s not an easy task — and it has been rendered even more complicated since Trump ordered a blockade of ships traveling to and from Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
The move prompted China to make some of its strongest statements since the war on Iran began.
A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry on Tuesday described the U.S. actions as “dangerous and irresponsible behavior” and predicted that they would serve only to “intensify contradictions, exacerbate tensions [and] undermine the already fragile ceasefire.”
The same day, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a broader critique, clearly aimed at the U.S. and Israel, when he complained about inconsistent attitudes toward international law.
Those laws cannot be “used when convenient and discarded when not,” Xi said during a visit to Beijing by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, according to Reuters.
Trump, whose conduct of the conflict has been mercurial to say the least, responded on social media on Wednesday morning.
The president insisted that China was “very happy that I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz. I am doing it for them, also— And the World.”
In a characteristically flamboyant touch, Trump also predicted that Xi would “give me a big, fat, hug when I get there in a few weeks.” But he also warned the U.S. could fight “far better than anyone else” if necessary.
Despite the vaguely threatening reference to American military might, Trump’s message was widely viewed as a conciliatory one — aimed at setting the stage for a successful visit to China, which is scheduled for mid-May.
The picture is never simple. For example, reporting in recent days that U.S. intelligence sources believed China was about to deliver new weaponry to Iran caused uproar.
Trump said that any such move would mean “big problems” for China.
The Chinese, for their part, have disputed the idea that they have any intention of providing such material assistance.
CNN, which broke the story, also quoted a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington saying that it had “never provided weapons to any party to the conflict; the information in question is untrue.”
Separately, there is the issue of the potential for China’s yuan to pose a growing challenge to the U.S. dollar as the de facto global currency. Any toll that Iran could successfully impose for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, is likely to be payable in yuan.
That being said, the yuan is a long way from truly threatening the status of the dollar — and the question is at least temporarily moot while the Trump blockade stays in place.
On a macro level, experts say, China is taking a certain amount of satisfaction from seeing the U.S. apparently bumping up against the limits to its own power.
“The Chinese have long held a narrative that the West is in decline,” said Scott Harold, a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation.
While the opening phases of the Iran conflict looked to be going smoothly from a U.S. perspective, “now the Chinese will look at this and say that the U.S. has been caught in this a bit more,” he said.
At the same time, Harold was skeptical of the most gloomy prognostications that Beijing was somehow on its way to superseding Washington as the world’s key strategic power — even as it might try to exploit the frustrations that clearly exist between Trump and traditional U.S. allies in Europe, in particular, over the war.
Harold said that it is certainly true that China “can play on tensions in transatlantic relations.” But he noted that Beijing was weighed down because most European nations “do not regard Xi Jinping as a credible defender of the rules-based international order … even if they are not happy with U.S. policy or U.S. actions.”
For now, all that seems certain is that there will be more twists and turns in store before Trump makes his way to China.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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