{"id":16007,"date":"2026-05-13T04:23:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T04:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/what-the-iran-war-taught-china-about-fighting-the-united-states-council-on-foreign-relations\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T04:23:48","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T04:23:48","slug":"what-the-iran-war-taught-china-about-fighting-the-united-states-council-on-foreign-relations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/what-the-iran-war-taught-china-about-fighting-the-united-states-council-on-foreign-relations\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Iran War Taught China About Fighting the United States – Council on Foreign Relations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iran could not defeat the United States militarily, but it never needed to\u2014and 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.<\/em><\/span>
President Donald Trump\u2019s administration may soon recognize that the most important audience for the Iran war<\/a> was not in Tehran or Jerusalem, but in Beijing. Chinese strategists have seen a demonstration at scale of U.S. military capabilities\u2014and 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\u2019s Beijing summit<\/a>.<\/span>
Iran could never win a conventional war with the United States, but it didn\u2019t 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.<\/span>
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.<\/span>
Now let\u2019s 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\u2019s own doctrine, which places far greater emphasis on disrupting an adversary\u2019s 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.<\/span>
Related: How the Iran War Confirmed, Contradicted, and Complicated U.S. Policy<\/a><\/strong><\/span>
China does not need to launch a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan\u2014a 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.<\/span>
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\u2019s red line, forcing Washington to choose between escalation and acquiescence while regional governments\u2014Canberra, Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, and others\u2014each calculate their exposures, desynchronizing any effort to respond decisively. Moreover, a\u00a0campaign 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.<\/span>
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\u2019s 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.<\/span>
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<\/a> markets before a temporary ceasefire was reached, including its scheme to escort vessels through the strait and claims that the war would only last \u201ctwo or so weeks.\u201d 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.<\/span>
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.<\/span>
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.<\/span>
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\u2014especially when strategic objectives are not clear.<\/span>
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\u2014and almost certainly not waiting to find out.<\/span>
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.<\/em><\/span>
From Middle East Program<\/a>
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
By Joshua Kurlantzick
By Sam Vigersky
\u00a92026 Council on Foreign Relations<\/p>\n

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Iran could not defeat the United States militarily, but it never needed to\u2014and 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}