The False Choice Between Deterring China and Defeating Iran

As the Iranian regime bottles up the Strait of Hormuz and President Trump pulls out all the stops to protect energy shipments and mitigate the damage to the global economy, doubts and fears about the latest stage of the war with Iran are growing. One increasingly common argument is that further operations against Iran weaken the effort to deter China from military aggression, so Trump should declare victory pronto and go home.

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Trump Is Dismantling Xi’s ‘China Dream’ One Piece At A Time

China has been chasing the title of world superpower for over a decade. Trump is still holding Xi back.

Iran, China, and Trump’s ‘art of the squeal’



The combined bombing campaign that began in Iran Saturday morning, decapitating senior leadership and hammering military targets across the map, may look like a massive undertaking.

And it is — for Israel.

Iran looks like an existential threat.

It is — for Israel.

An invasion does not run on slogans. It runs on fuel.

For the United States, the existential threat sits elsewhere. Iran has financed and fueled anti-American violence for 47 years — from the 1979 hostage crisis to the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, from Hezbollah and the Houthis to the IED pipeline that chewed up Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Trump on Saturday morning laid out a clean rationale for turning the mullahs’ war machine into mulch and ending, once and for all, Tehran’s nuclear obsession.

Still, the bigger strategic picture points east — to China.

Beijing’s global ambitions rise and fall on one commodity that keeps modern economies alive and modern militaries moving: oil. If you want to understand why pressure on Iran matters beyond the Middle East, start with the tankers.

Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for Taiwan by 2027. Call it an invasion timeline or call it a readiness deadline — the intent reads the same.

China has spent years preparing the battlefield: artificial islands to extend maritime control, relentless air and naval exercises that rehearse the encirclement of Taiwan, and a missile force built to hunt U.S. ships and push America back behind the horizon.

That missile layer — DF-21s and DF-26s — supports the bigger concept: anti-access/area denial. China wants to make U.S. intervention costly, slow, and uncertain. It wants American commanders staring at a clock they cannot beat.

Washington answered with its own doctrine and its own race against time. The U.S. built concepts like AirSea Battle doctrine and pushed Agile Combat Employment — a dispersed, resilient approach designed to survive missile salvos and keep aircraft flying. The Air Force started rehabilitating old Pacific airfields and expanding access across Guam, Saipan, and especially Tinian, because the next war in the Pacific will punish concentration.

Then Orange Man Bad made two moves in two months that hit Xi exactly where he lives. Not more nasty rhetoric on Truth Social or posturing. Logistics.

First, the United States seized Nicolás Maduro and dumped him in a Brooklyn jail. That operation did more than embarrass a dictator. It jolted the real-world flow of Venezuelan crude — and with it, a slice of China’s import stream that Beijing prefers to keep quiet, rebranded, and discounted. Analysts peg Venezuela’s contribution to China’s seaborne crude imports in the low single digits, roughly 3% to 5% depending on the year and the counting method. In Beijing’s world, even “small” percentages matter when the margin for error narrows.

Second, the joint strike campaign against Iran instantly put a hand on another lever: Iranian exports.

RELATED: Israeli officials say Khamenei is dead. Update: Trump confirms.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

China buys the bulk of Iran’s shipped oil. Various trackers place Iranian barrels at roughly 10% to 15% of China’s seaborne crude imports in recent years. Tehran sells because it needs the cash. Beijing buys because it wants the discount. Trump’s move did not need to “block” every barrel to land the message. It only needed to introduce uncertainty, disruption, rerouting, insurance spikes, interdiction risk, and political friction. Oil markets react to fear faster than to facts.

Put the two together, and the math starts to hurt: a meaningful share of China’s oil — not symbolic, not academic — now sits under pressure from U.S. action in Venezuela and Iran.

That creates a Taiwan problem.

An invasion does not run on slogans. It runs on fuel. It runs on shipping. It runs on industrial output. It runs on a domestic economy that stays stable while the military gambles. Xi can build missiles all day long, but he cannot launch an island war on an economy gasping for discounted crude.

So yes, the current Iran campaign matters for the obvious reasons: international terrorism, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the nuclear program. Those are legitimate reasons for “Epic Fury.”

Trump’s larger play hits the supply lines that make China’s invasion timetable plausible.

In only two months, Trump has put Xi in the position of a man getting a testicular palpation from a recalcitrant physician in a hurry.

Do not distract him. He might clench.

I think Trump wrote a book about it, or he should. Call it “The Art of the Squeal.”

Japan’s Iron Lady Won’t Go Wobbly Against China

In the land that introduced the world to Godzilla, a new giant has arisen. The Liberal Democratic Party's landslide victory in Japan's lower house elections on Sunday gave Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi the largest majority of any party in 80 years. So many party members won their districts outright that the LDP has to find extra candidates to fill the seats that are awarded based on percentage of the national vote.

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While Jimmy Lai Sits In Prison, Eileen Gu Takes The CCP’s Millions

As Americans, we should celebrate heroes like Jimmy Lai and demand accountability from public figures such as Eileen Gu.

America Needs a New START? Our Enemies Never Stopped.

To the shock, horror, and dismay of onlookers around the world, the New START treaty expired on Thursday. U.N. secretary-general António Guterres called it "a grave moment for international peace and security" and lamented that, "for the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the [American and Russian] strategic nuclear arsenals." Nuclear disarmament advocates and their media supporters fear the onset of an arms race and global thermonuclear war.

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The fastest way to stop Iran’s killers ... without firing a single shot



The mullahs of Iran have resumed the familiar work of slaughtering their own people. (Again!) The United States can respond without firing a shot — and without waiting months for a traditional embargo to bite.

It can impose an electronic embargo.

An electro-embargo could do something sanctions often cannot: break the regime’s control quickly enough to matter while the killing is still underway.

Washington could pursue this approach unilaterally, or it could press the United Nations to authorize it under Article 41 of the U.N. Charter, which empowers the Security Council to order measures “not involving the use of armed force,” including the partial or complete interruption of “postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication.” The text already exists.

The question is whether anyone has the imagination — and the nerve — to use it.

The electronic advantage

In the context of Iran’s continuing humanitarian emergency, the United States, with a bit of diplomatic legerdemain from Ambassador to the U.N. Michael Waltz, could challenge the Security Council to act. China and Russia sit on the council. They will posture. They will threaten vetoes. But even a public debate would force them to explain why the world should tolerate a regime that murders civilian protesters in the streets.

If the Security Council approves an Article 41 action, the United States could then present its combatant commanders with something Iran has never faced at scale: an embargo not on goods but on electrons.

Physical embargoes remain a standard tool of statecraft. They also take time. Iran can evade, reroute, smuggle, barter, and stall. An electronic embargo moves at the speed of light.

Target Iran’s hardline regime — not the Iranian people — by degrading the communications infrastructure that allows the government to command and control its security forces and manage the extraction and export of oil, its primary source of hard currency.

Strike the regime’s hardened telephone and cellular systems, satellite communications, and broadcast television.

Cripple the internal nervous system that keeps the state coordinated, disciplined, and armed.

The effect would be immediate. A regime that cannot communicate cannot coordinate raids, deploy forces efficiently, jam dissident signals, or maintain operational tempo. It cannot manage a modern oil export apparatus without functioning networks. It cannot run a crackdown in real time if it loses the ability to issue orders and track compliance.

The ‘Venezuelan formula’

Just as important, an electronic embargo could reverse the regime’s favorite trick: cutting the Iranian people off from each other and from the outside world. Tehran has already tried to block the internet and throttle social media. A targeted electronic campaign could negate that control and unleash an information tsunami — one the mullahs cannot shape, censor, or contain.

That shift matters. When citizens can communicate, organize, document, and broadcast, repression becomes harder and riskier. The regime loses its monopoly on narrative. Fear starts to spread in the other direction.

RELATED: Memo to Hegseth: Our military’s problem isn’t only fitness. It’s bad education.

erhui1979 via iStock/Getty Images

One can imagine a greatly expanded “Venezuelan formula”: degrade internal communications, then use broadcast means to confuse and complicate the regime’s grip on what is happening — while simultaneously encouraging the population to resist theocratic authority. The goal would not be spectacle. The goal would be collapse: the steady unraveling of the regime’s confidence, coherence, and control.

In this mode, a combatant commander could employ SOFTWAR principles to engage and degrade the mullahs through coordinated, non-kinetic lines of operation. Properly executed, such a campaign would affect nearly every aspect of Iranian society — and it would do so without turning Iranian cities into ruins.

A greater strategic payoff: China

The strategic payoff for the United States extends beyond moral clarity. It comes down to oil — and to China.

The recent decapitation of the Maduro junta in Venezuela proved a point many analysts ignore. The key factor is not the quantity of oil in a given country. It is control of the flow of oil. Energy states matter because they can fuel, fund, and sustain adversaries.

If the mullahs fall, China loses a major energy supplier at a moment when it can least afford disruption. Beijing’s ambitions depend on stable inputs. Xi Jinping’s dream of Chinese communist hegemony runs on energy. Remove an important provider, and you squeeze China’s strategic bandwidth — again.

That result alone justifies exploring an electronic embargo.

This is not a call for war. It is a call to use power creatively, within the bounds of international law when possible, and in defense of a population being beaten, shot, and silenced by its rulers.

The mullahs survive by controlling the physical streets and the electronic space above them. Take away the second, and the first becomes harder to hold.

An electro-embargo would not solve every problem. But it could do something sanctions often cannot: break the regime’s control quickly enough to matter while the killing is still underway.

Trump not worried about Canada's China-centric 'new world order'



Try explaining this one: President Donald Trump’s relaxed — almost insouciant — response to news that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged allegiance to a China-centered “new world order."

Why did Trump appear to shrug off Carney’s insistence that Canada’s future lies more with China than with the United States?

Carney’s favorable assessment of China’s role in climate and green finance is not an isolated remark.

Perhaps it has something to do with Greenland and Canada being viewed as components of Trump’s broader Western Hemisphere security plan.

Cue the black helicopters

Not long ago, “new world order” belonged firmly in the vocabulary of conspiracy theorists. But in Beijing last week, Carney elevated the phrase into an official Liberal talking point.

So what did Carney say? Plenty.

Mine is the first visit of a Canadian prime minister to China in nearly a decade. The world has changed much since that last visit, and I believe the progress that we have made in the partnership sets us up well for the new world order.

Trump did not respond immediately. Instead, he waited until the end of the news day last Friday before offering his reaction.

“That’s what he should be doing, and it’s a good thing for him to sign a trade deal. If you can get a deal with China, you should do that,” Trump said.

Not the response many expected from a president who has urged countries in the Western Hemisphere to distance themselves from Beijing.

World order word salad

Pressed on what he meant by a “new world order,” Carney responded with his characteristic blend of abstraction and deflection.

So the question is, what gets built in that place? How much of a patchwork is it? How much is it just on a bilateral basis? Or where do like-minded countries in certain areas? So like-minded countries, just to be clear, doesn't mean you agree on everything. So aspects, for example, on digital trade or agricultural trade, climate finance as another area to move into areas of geo-strategy, geo-security, you will have different coalitions that are formed. So what this partnership does is in areas, for example, of clean energy, conventional energy, agriculture, as we were just talking about, and financial services, which we have talked less about, but the evolution of the global financial system.

Trump’s nonchalance was not shared by conservative commentators, who sharply criticized Carney’s remarks.

Alex Jones, for one, described Carney as “a Klaus Schwab acolyte” and warned: “You are about to see the globalist prime minister of Canada pledge allegiance to the communist dictator in China, Xi Jinping."

RELATED: What does Trump see in Canada's pro-China prime minister?

Chip Somodevilla/Dave Chan/Getty Images

China guy

So far, Carney’s new world order with China has produced a trade agreement allowing up to 49,000 electric vehicles to be imported into Canada annually at a reduced tariff of 6.1%. In return, China is expected to lower tariffs on Canadian agricultural exports — most notably canola oil, a key cash crop for Canadian farmers — to roughly 15%.

But there is nothing new about Carney’s deference to China.

After leaving the Bank of England in 2020, Carney became vice chairman of the board of Bloomberg L.P., the privately held financial data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg. During the same period, he also served as co-chair of the U.N.-backed Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, working alongside Bloomberg in his separate capacity as the United Nations’ Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions.

In that capacity, Carney consistently praised the alleged environmental stewardship of China, somehow locating a deep commitment to fighting climate change in a country that continues to power its economy with coal-fired plants.

Take Carney’s March 2024 visit to China, during which he told a reporter for the Chinese business outlet 21st Century Business Herald (English translation via Google Translate):

China has made a huge contribution to the fight against climate change, not only in terms of its massive investment in clean technologies and exporting them to other countries, but also in actively developing the financial system needed for the green transition.

Yuan to grow on

Carney’s favorable assessment of China’s role in climate and green finance is not an isolated remark. It aligns with a broader argument he has advanced in recent years: that global economic leadership should become more multipolar, with China playing a larger role alongside — rather than beneath — U.S. dominance.

That worldview extends to currency and finance. At the 2019 Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, Carney argued that the world should reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar by exploring a new “synthetic hegemonic currency,” a framework designed to dilute the dominance of any single national currency.

Carney did not explicitly call for the Chinese yuan to replace the U.S. dollar outright. But his proposal would, by design, weaken the centrality of the dollar and expand the influence of non-U.S. currencies and financial systems.

Trump, for his part, has twice endorsed Carney during Canadian federal elections. Their relationship — particularly during Oval Office meetings — has been described as friendly, though it may be better understood as Trump indulging a leader he views as temporary.

Why does Trump consistently give Carney a pass?

Perhaps because Trump sees Carney less as a lasting architect of global order than as a passing phenomenon — unlikely to impede the president’s broader aim of reinforcing American economic primacy, regardless of how warmly Carney speaks of China’s place in the world.

Venezuela was the stage. China was the target.



Last weekend’s Caribbean live-fire exercise in and around the suburbs of Caracas delivered a steady stream of tactical messages to the Western Hemisphere. We don’t like narco-terrorists, wannabe communists, bloated dictators, or people who supply oil to our adversaries.

But that wasn’t the real message.

Message to Xi: There’s a new sheriff in town. He isn’t ‘Sleepy Joe.’ And his call sign is FAFO.

The love note was addressed to China, and it read: We are awake now. Our game is FAFO.

America’s 36-year slumber on the Monroe Doctrine — “Stay out of the Western Hemisphere or else” — began after Panama in 1990. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terrorism followed, and Washington became dangerously myopic about threats in America’s own backyard.

Then came the turning point. When Bill Clinton signed off on communist China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, Beijing rapidly surged into a world-class economic power. Along with that rise came a succession of Chinese leaders who openly advanced the idea of global Chinese hegemony.

Oddly enough, many of those ideas came from an American — my late friend Alvin Toffler.

Toffler’s book “The Third Wave” so impressed Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang in 1984 that millions of bootleg Chinese translations were distributed — without royalties — throughout the People’s Liberation Army. The same thing happened after Toffler published “War and Anti-War.” Once again, millions of pirated copies circulated, and Beijing began integrating his ideas into military doctrine.

In the late 1990s, PLA Major General Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui wrote “Unrestricted Warfare,” borrowing heavily from Toffler while laying out a strategy to defeat the United States.

In hindsight, it should have been titled “Slow Motion War.”

The book focuses on perceived weaknesses in American character and American war-making. The United States remains a nation of quarterly earnings reports and election cycles. We change political leadership every two or four years. The Chinese think in generational time frames.

From their perspective, Americans only go to war when facing a “clear and present danger.”

The genius of “Unrestricted Warfare” lies in exploiting what happens when a threat is clear but not present — like cancer from long-term smoking — or present but not clear, like the slow poisons Lucrezia Borgia allegedly used on her enemies.

Qiao and Wang proposed a slow, steady pressure campaign against the four pillars of American national power: diplomatic, information, military, and economic — the DIME.

Examples abound. Diplomatic and economic leverage through the Belt and Road Initiative. Tight control of information inside China paired with aggressive information warfare abroad through platforms such as TikTok. A decades-long military buildup aimed at surpassing U.S. power. And a long trail of currency manipulation.

(And then there’s this gem from page 191 of “Unrestricted Warfare”: “Can special funds be set up to exert greater influence on another country’s government and legislature through lobbying?” Eric Swalwell might find that line interesting.)

RELATED: From Monroe to ‘Donroe’: America enforces its back yard again

Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

While America fixated on the Middle East, China quietly embedded itself throughout Latin America. In Panama, Beijing gained control of port management at both ends of the Panama Canal and began upgrading the system. In Costa Rica — which has no army — China donated 3,500 police cars and built a national stadium in San José, free of charge. It also cut sweetheart deals involving hundreds of Chinese fishing trawlers. Colombia saw similar treatment.

Then came Orange Man Bad.

Donald Trump is the first president to grasp that China isn’t a Red Godzilla stomping cities with napalm breath and a scything tail. China is more like the Blob — and Trump is Steve McQueen.

Venezuela, Maduro, oil, and narco-terrorism were all subsets.

China was the target. Xi Jinping was the bullseye.

Zero hour wasn’t set by the weather. It was set by the departure of Chinese envoy Qiu Xiaoqi, who had just wrapped up discussions on future ties with Venezuela. Unfortunately for Beijing, Delta Force snagged and bagged Nicolás Maduro and his wife and had them sitting in a Brooklyn jail before the envoy even made it home.

Message to Xi: There’s a new sheriff in town. He isn’t “Sleepy Joe.” And his call sign is FAFO.

Any questions?

The Foreign Policy Winners and Losers of 2025

The first year of the second Donald Trump presidential term has been a carnival of outrages and delights. Historians will struggle to make sense of the whirlwind of activity around the Oval Office, but some big events are already clear. The year has had some big winners, including:

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