The past three Presidents have all made noises about “pivoting to Asia” and reorienting American foreign policy around competition with China. But, in a darkly literal metaphor for the failure of the United States to adequately address China’s growing influence, President Donald Trump postponed an April summit with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping because of the war he launched against Iran in February. Iran is China’s largest trading partner in the Middle East, but China’s diverse energy sources have shielded it from the heavy economic toll and energy crisis that the war has caused for other countries in East Asia. China has called for a ceasefire, and recently said that the Strait of Hormuz should be reopened; American officials have said that U.S. intelligence agencies may have found evidence that China is sending offensive weapons to Iran.

I recently spoke by phone with Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, who also served in the Biden Administration as the director for China at the National Security Council. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the warmth of China-Iran relations has been overstated, why China sees the Trump Administration as representing continuity as much as change, and what the wars in Ukraine and Iran might mean for the future of Taiwan.

What would you say is the conventional wisdom of how China views this conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel? And in what ways do you think that conventional wisdom is right or wrong?

It is bimodal at this point. There’s one school of thought out there, from people adjacent to the Trump Administration, arguing that this is all part of a grand strategy for dealing with China, and that the actions against Venezuela and Iran are designed to deter China and put China on the back foot by going after two of its partners. And that all this is really affecting China’s headspace.

I see very little evidence of that. I don’t think that this is really about China, and I don’t really see this upsetting China’s expectations about how the United States has behaved more broadly, across Administrations, throughout this century, and also about Trump in particular. The penchant to lash out violently is something that’s well baked into Xi’s understanding of Trump. During their first meeting, at Mar-a-Lago, in 2017, Xi famously learned about American strikes on Syria. So I think all of this very much fits with Xi’s baseline expectations.

Separately, I think there’s a tendency to say that China is really a tremendous beneficiary from all this. And I think there are some real potential upsides for China, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the case that China is necessarily gleeful about what’s going on. I think they will capitalize on some advantages, like the United States being distracted, and the removal of American assets from the Pacific. They would rather this not have happened, but I think they’re probably feeling like they are well positioned to manage and navigate this. And they really see this as just the latest iteration of this kind of conflagration in the Middle East.

Do you agree that China is better prepared to deal with hiccups in energy markets than, say, Europe?

Yeah, although they do rely on some energy from the Middle East. But the irony in all this is that it seems like the two powers that are best equipped to deal with this war, as painful as it might be here in the U.S., are actually the U.S. and China. And, for the U.S., it’s partially because of what’s happened since the fracking revolution. We end up exporting more than we import now, in terms of energy. But China has been really laser-focussed since the first Trump Administration and the first trade war on enhancing the resilience of its own economy and preparing for a contingency exactly like this. Their whole planning process is now built around efficiency and resilience. Part of what gives them the advantage is that they’ve made considerable investments in green energy, and the other piece of it is that, while they may not have a lot of oil or natural gas, they do have a lot of coal, and they are positioned to have diversified energy input and rely on the coal that they’re able to make at home to insure their own economic resilience.

Can you explain what you were referring to earlier, when you said that America had moved assets from the Pacific?

A number of naval assets, including two aircraft carriers. That’s huge. And then, a couple of weeks ago, America was talking about moving one particular system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) that had been in South Korea, which is a missile system that we had placed there at the end of the Obama Administration, to China’s great consternation. The Chinese did not like it when we deployed it. They leaned heavily on the South Koreans for several years thereafter, and the South Koreans stuck with it. And now, you fast-forward the movie a decade later, after we’ve proclaimed many times that we are pivoting to Asia, and now we’re talking about packing up those systems and moving them to the Middle East. (The THAAD system is still in South Korea at the time of publication.)

How do you view China’s relations with the major players in the Middle East now, specifically Iran and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

What I think is the case, not just in the Middle East but more broadly, is that a lot of the relationships that China has across the world are asymmetrical. Where China is Country X’s most important purchaser of oil or energy, as is true in the case of Iran, that is not the case for China, right? So when you look at China and its energy inputs, Iran is not the most important supplier. I think this notion of it being some kind of ally or quasi-ally has really been overstated. I’ve even seen some Chinese commentators say that actually China has bigger interests and deeper interests with the Gulf states, like with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. in particular, and that these countries are more important to China, not just as energy inputs but also because of the investments those countries are trying to make in modernizing their own innovation and technological infrastructure.

I think one way to think about this is that the difference between China’s relationships with Iran and the Gulf states is a really stark difference from the dynamic that we see in China’s balance of interest between Russia and Europe. In that instance, Russia is clearly where Xi is invested in the relationship. That is the relationship he prioritizes. And, even though China has real economic interests in Europe, I don’t think they’re really concerned about pushback from the Europeans. I think in the Middle East, it’s a different story line. I think they have a weaker relationship with Iran than they do with, say, Russia, and they have deeper relationships with the other side of this conflict, namely the Gulf states.

Yes, you did see Xi calling for the Strait of Hormuz to be opened up after a call with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, which I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret, but which felt like a light critique of Iran, and that’s something we haven’t seen from Xi when it comes to Russia.

Yeah. China will strike the same pose and same posture when it comes to Russia: They’ll claim to be a neutral party, but, no, they won’t imply that Russia’s doing something untoward in the same way. And I think that reflects where they’re really at. I don’t think they like what’s going on in the Middle East.

What have you made of the reports that China is offering some sort of military assistance to Iran? What do we know about that, and how significant do you think it is?

I think that there is a well-established defense nexus between the two of them. But my guess would be that, in this instance, it would probably be limited, right? They don’t want to do anything that’s going to be overly provocative toward the Gulf states or toward the United States. I think what ends up happening a lot of the time on the Chinese side is that, because they do have a sprawling defense-industrial complex, it’s a little bit of either malign neglect or implausible deniability. I think there may be awareness of firms selling to the Iranians, and I think they’re comfortable with letting it slide, as long as it doesn’t really have the Chinese government’s clear fingerprints on it. And then if somebody complains about it they may go after a particular firm or entity and finger-wag at them and say, No, no, no, you’ve been naughty, and you shouldn’t do that anymore.

You said something in your first answer about the degree to which China sees American behavior vis-à-vis Iran in the past few months as similar to American foreign policy throughout this century. Were you referring to American wars of regime change specifically?

Yeah. I think as idiosyncratic and as different as Trump is from his predecessors, from Beijing’s perspective, there is a real through line of continuity across Administrations, Democratic or Republican, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq, to what President Obama did in Libya, and then the Iran war. So this is just, in their mind, the latest iteration of the same foreign policy and impulse in the Middle East which is bipartisan and spans Administrations, even to encompass Trump.

China and Russia are often described as caring deeply about sovereignty and disliking regime change for that reason. Putting aside the issue of Ukraine and the hypocrisy there, is this posture an ideological thing or about self-interest?

I think it’s more strategic than ideological. I do think that both the Chinese and the Russian sides, and Xi and Putin in particular, do see themselves as bedevilled by the United States and the West, and think that they need to lock arms to fend off against that. I think there is some mutual admiration between the two of them as authoritarians, but I really think about this as being a marriage of convenience, almost like between two Mob bosses. I don’t think there’s any kind of pretense that there’s real amity or affinity there, but I think in some ways, for guys like that, that is actually a more sustainable basis for a relationship than having shared values or shared ideological goals.

They both talk about sovereignty, but I think you’re right, as we’ve seen in the case of Ukraine, that China doesn’t necessarily care that much. And despite the fact that they’ve long talked about their non-interference policy, I think if you look at China’s behavior globally and what they do in other countries, that’s not quite right. They talk about sovereignty and they don’t want to get involved in other countries’ business, unless they have some kind of equity or their own interest at play, in which case they’re happy to muck around in the politics of other countries, right? Especially if it’s a much weaker country.

But I want to circle back: I think one of the biggest pieces of conventional wisdom where there’s a real misconception is that there’s a tendency, I think, in a lot of strategic circles in the United States to still think about the Middle East as the locus of great-power competition or relationships. And I just don’t think that’s true anymore. I think people think about what’s going on in the Middle East and kind of superimpose on it something like what happened when Kissinger did shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, when the region was a potential flash point between the United States and the Soviet Union. But I don’t think that’s how China sees it, certainly, and I think objectively it is not the case. The Middle East is still important because of the supply chains and because of the energy and the oil, of course, but it is not the geopolitical center of gravity that it once was.

Spain recently hosted a summit of global leaders from the left and center left. It seems like there’s a hope for some creative thinking about international institutions that wouldn’t be dominated by the United States, in light of Gaza and the Trump Administration. Do you think that China sees this as an opportunity?

There has been this effort over time by China both to insinuate itself more deeply into existing international institutions, such as the U.N., and at the same time to build up parallel or sometimes complimentary international bodies, too, like through their Belt and Road Initiative or through the expansion of the BRICS in particular. But my sense is that, as much as these new institutions have gotten a lot of attention, if people are looking to these as really meaningful alternatives to existing ones, I think they’re going to be disappointed. I think China tends to be very grandiloquent in its posturing, but when it actually comes down to it they are very parochial about their own interests. They basically want to know, at the end of the day, O.K., even if there’s regime change in Iran, can we still do business with the new guys? Are we going to be able to buy energy? Are they not going to say the wrong things about Taiwan? And I think that it’s very hard for us in the United States to think about another superpower behaving in such a kind of myopic way.

Why is it hard to think of us behaving that way? It doesn’t seem strange if you pick up a newspaper.

Yeah, your point’s well taken. I think that the chief difference now is that China tends to be still more parochial than we are, and I would say much more disciplined, too, right? In saying, We have an interest in this issue, and then just staying focussed on that. They are not as distracted as we are by more short-term impulses or concerns.

I think what Xi brings to this, though, compared to his immediate predecessors, is that he is more hard-edged, and more willing to do things like lean into the relationship with Russia and be tougher with U.S. allies and partners. After Liberation Day, once it became clear that that was going to be an omnidirectional trade war—not just a trade war focussed on China—a lot of observers at the time were expecting there to be some kind of charm offensive from Beijing, and that never really materialized, and I don’t think that was just them getting in their own way. I think it was a strategic choice. I think their approach to a lot of U.S. allies and partners who felt adrift in the wake of the tariffs was not to try to alleviate the pressure and say, “Hey, come align with us. We can do business. We can make good trade deals.” I think their approach, instead of alleviating the pressure, was actually to accentuate it and say, “Look, Washington’s not going to help you. If you want to play ball with us, you’re going to have to come around to our perspective on some things.” And I think, from Beijing’s perspective, the fact that there’s been a parade of European leaders arriving in China since the end of last year validates their approach that they didn’t need to pursue a charm offensive or offer any meaningful concessions, and that all they had to do was really just wait before countries started coming around a little bit more to their perspective and try to hedge and diversify away from the United States.

If you’re China watching this war, are you less concerned with the specific things Trump says than you are focussed on how difficult this war has seemed, even for the more powerful United States? Same with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Is that the lesson of the last few years for China, in terms of Taiwan?

I think that’s right. I think in that way it does have a salutary effect on China and keeps them deterred because they recognize how challenging an invasion of Taiwan would be. I think even for a guy like Xi Jinping, if he were to go to war over Taiwan, it’s really putting all the chips on the table. It’s gambling with everything that China has accomplished, at least since the death of Mao. And so I think, from their perspective, Taiwan is still a crisis to be avoided rather than an opportunity to be sought.

China is probably really impressed with what the U.S. military has been able to do tactically and operationally in terms of decapitating two regimes this year, and while moving pretty quickly. But at the same time we also seem to be getting bogged down strategically. And so what I worry about is: Yes, on the one hand, it deters China, but on the other hand it could have a catalytic effect on the People’s Liberation Army and its modernization.

Let me put this more clearly: What it leads to is China going back to the gym. And they’ve already made themselves a pretty formidable military. So they see how hard this is, how many contingencies they have to think about, what the U.S. is able to do, and it forces them to go back and think about new exercises that they need to do, new platforms that they need to build, new ways they need to think about operations and get them more and more pumped up.

Yes, we keep reading that, however much the war in Ukraine has been a disaster for everyone involved, it’s also forced all these different militaries to take drone warfare seriously and reinvest in new technologies, which could be dangerous.

Yeah, exactly. They are getting a real education in what the U.S. military is capable of, what its constraints are, and they’re getting an opportunity to think through the best ways to deal with that. The First Gulf War really had a catalytic effect in shaping how China thought about its own military modernization program. They saw for the first time, really, what U.S. precision-guided munitions were able to do. And that spurred a lot of creative thinking inside the Chinese military about how they need to rethink their own military modernization.

But Xi has also conducted a huge military purge. You really have to go back to the Mao era for something that extensive. And I think this is actually a sign that Xi’s pretty comfortable with his relationship with America right now. When you’re a homeowner, you don’t renovate when you’re insecure. But I think it also shows that he’s serious about a Taiwan contingency, not as a today-or-tomorrow problem but maybe something for his fourth term and beyond.

All these guys, including our President, are going to live forever. So that’s great.

Yeah. They’re all middle-aged men. ♦