The China Wild Card

New York Times

23-06-2025

Andrew here.
After President Trump's decision to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, there are a cascade of questions on Monday morning. The most pressing that has so far gone largely overlooked is this: What about China, one of Iran's biggest economic partners?
Would Beijing quietly support efforts by Tehran to retaliate against American interests? Will it continue to prop up Iran's economy by buying the country's oil? If it stands by Iran, how could that impact the U.S. trade negotiations with China? And, perhaps most critically, what does this mean for President Xi Jinping's calculations about Taiwan, and how Trump might react to an effort to take the island?
I spent the weekend talking and texting with policymakers and analysts in Washington to understand what may come next. Perhaps the most intriguing perspective I gleaned was that the U.S. action might actually grant China greater leverage in its broader negotiations with Trump — not less — over trade and nearly everything else.
'The U.S.'s call for China to counsel Iran to not close the Strait of Hormuz adds to the list of things Washington needs from Beijing, the others being its rare earth exports, cracking down on the fentanyl trade, and reducing its trade surplus,' Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me. 'As a result, China's potential leverage grows and the costs to the U.S. from escalating in any domain against China grows.'
Many in Washington say that China would prefer to de-escalate the situation as quickly as possible. Bonnie Glaser, who runs the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund explained: 'Chinese interests are in a cease-fire, not a wider war. I don't think the Chinese will support Iranian strikes on the U.S.'
Indeed, the truth is that 'China is much more important to Iran than vice versa,' Ryan Hass, a senior fellow and director at the Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, told me. Consider: About 90 percent of Iran's oil exports go to China, Hass said — but that represents just 10 percent of China's oil imports.
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