Iran could not defeat the United States militarily, but it never needed to—and China is taking note. By choking the Strait of Hormuz, spiking energy markets, and running down the clock, Tehran offered Beijing a case study in how to impose costs without seeking victory.
Elisa Ewers is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Michael Schiffer is a partner at Scalare Advisors and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He previously served as the assistant administrator for Asia at USAID and deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia.
President Donald Trump’s administration may soon recognize that the most important audience for the Iran war was not in Tehran or Jerusalem, but in Beijing. Chinese strategists have seen a demonstration at scale of U.S. military capabilities—and how the United States fights. They have been assessing the durability of U.S. deterrence across the Taiwan Strait, and they can now see the gap between military outcomes and strategic effects. Chinese President Xi Jinping will likely include these lessons in his strategy for this week’s Beijing summit.
Iran could never win a conventional war with the United States, but it didn’t have to. It simply had to run down the clock, drive up the costs, and survive. For Chinese planners, the Iran war is a case study for what multi-domain warfare should look like.
By attacking the economic heartbeat of its Gulf neighbors, the Iranian regime took critical oil and gas production offline and spiked the price of both. By de facto closing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to all but those it allowed, the regime did something few scenarios over the last decades had explored: it allowed its own oil bound for China and elsewhere to transit while shutting down the rest of the outflow through the strait. It choked an economic artery, caused insurance markets to tighten and supply chains to falter, turning a regional conflict into an economic disruption. It demonstrated its leverage was not on the battlefield, but in its ability to affect the global economy.
Now let’s take those sobering lessons to the Indo-Pacific. A Taiwan contingency has long been framed by U.S. military planners as a race between invasion and defense, ultimately coming down to whether Taiwan could deny China a quick military victory to provide the time needed for the United States to overcome the tyranny of distance and flow forces to the Western Pacific. But that misses Beijing’s own doctrine, which places far greater emphasis on disrupting an adversary’s economic and operational system than on defeating its military outright. The inferences China can draw from the Iran war are clear: there is no need for a decisive, strategic victory if it can generate enough economic and political pressure to constrain U.S. decision-making.
Related: How the Iran War Confirmed, Contradicted, and Complicated U.S. Policy
China does not need to launch a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan—a risky and complex undertaking. It could instead pursue a layered campaign of coercion: maritime quarantine, cyber disruption, financial pressure, and selective military action. The goal would not be immediate conquest, but cumulative pressure on Taiwan, on regional allies, and on the United States.
The Iran conflict suggests this approach could work more quickly than many assume, particularly if the pain is felt beyond the Indo-Pacific and riles markets in a way that echoes globally. Each element of such a campaign would be calibrated to fall beneath the threshold of any single ally’s red line, forcing Washington to choose between escalation and acquiescence while regional governments—Canberra, Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, and others—each calculate their exposures, desynchronizing any effort to respond decisively. Moreover, a campaign that forces crisis decisions on a compressed timeline denies the United States the space needed for current force posture assumptions, and it exploits precisely the kind of strategic incoherence the Iran conflict has exposed.
By Sam Vigersky
By Erin D. Dumbacher
The war with Iran has also pointed to a second U.S. vulnerability relevant to Taiwan scenarios that has been theoretically obvious for years: finite capabilities and readiness costs. Washington is spending its precision munitions, air defenses, and naval assets, or at least tying them down in the Middle East. Long production times, fixed budgets, and maintenance schedules will mean it takes time to replenish and prepare. Even if the Pentagon insists that commitments to Taiwan remain intact, the visible reality of multi-theater strain matters. If Beijing’s hotwash on the Iran war concludes that the United States would struggle to sustain two high-intensity contingencies simultaneously or to recover quickly from its spent capacity, the credibility of U.S. commitments in Asia is diminished.
Beijing, no doubt, also will note that time, too, has become a dimension of the Iran war that the Trump administration was ill-prepared to manage. The war has demonstrated how rapidly economic effects propagate and how difficult they are to contain. The Trump team sought several ways to reassure markets before a temporary ceasefire was reached, including its scheme to escort vessels through the strait and claims that the war would only last “two or so weeks.” All failed. The Iranian regime deployed an economic escalation ladder effectively against a U.S. military one. For China, this reinforces the appeal of strategies that create leverage and impose immediate, structural economic costs. In such a scenario, with time, another variable to be managed across multi-domain warfare, the challenge for Washington is not simply a rapid military response but managing the velocity of cascading economic and political consequences at home and abroad.
In the end, the U.S. military has succeeded in each of its objectives against Iran. Its advantages remain formidable, and a major conflict would be catastrophic for China as well. But deterrence is not static. It evolves with each conflict that reveals new vulnerabilities. The war with Iran, however it ends, is revealing more than most.
The crisis could reinforce U.S. centrality in global energy markets and signal a willingness to absorb costs. But benefits accrue slowly, while the perception of vulnerability is immediate, especially as the Iranian regime continues to hold the Strait of Hormuz at risk. No matter how the ceasefire negotiations proceed, the deterrence environment in that maritime waterway will be more complex and perhaps more fragile than the one that preceded this war.
The Iran war has demonstrated that the question facing U.S. policymakers is no longer simply whether it can win a military conflict over Taiwan. Now, it is whether the United States can sustain a prolonged, multi-domain confrontation in which economic disruption, supply-chain instability, and domestic political pressures are as decisive as military outcomes—especially when strategic objectives are not clear.
That is a fundamentally different test of power than the one the United States has been preparing for in the Indo-Pacific. Whether Washington recognizes that difference before it is too late is an open question. Beijing is learning with every passing day—and almost certainly not waiting to find out.
This work represents the views and opinions solely of the authors. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
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What the Iran War Taught China About Fighting the United States – Council on Foreign Relations
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