US President Donald Trump’s war on Iran is open to varying interpretations depending on the audience. These range from annihilation of Tehran’s nuclear capacity to cripple its policy of aiding and abetting terrorism in the Middle East through its proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Palestine, to promotion of democracy by changing the Islamic fundamentalist regime.
However, there now seems to be a growing consensus among the pundits on another explanation of Trump’s ongoing war. Coupling the attack on Iran on February 28 with the one on Venezuela on January 3, that explanation is that behind all this is a “strategic” mother goal. And that is China’s containment.
As Hongda Fan, director of the China-Middle East Center at Shaoxing University, told Newsweek recently, “I firmly believe that the primary impetus behind the Trump administration’s military actions against Venezuela and Iran is the global power competition that Washington has consistently advocated, particularly the competition between the United States and China.”
Some left-leaning analysts go so far as to term it “the China Chokehold doctrine”. The idea is to strike at elements of the geopolitical framework that Beijing, Washington’s principal strategic rival today, has spent decades constructing. A blow to China’s diplomatic and economic statecraft is the ultimate goal.
Three features of the China-containment strategy are particularly noteworthy.
First, if China can harass the United States on the issue of rare earth material, which it virtually monopolizes, the latter can retaliate by limiting the former’s capacity to procure oil from its hitherto reliable sources. That is precisely what Trump has done by attacking Venezuela and Iran, China’s important sources of energy after Russia.
Incidentally, China is the world’s largest crude oil importer, purchasing roughly 11.6 million barrels per day, according to the 2025 estimate by the Center on Global Energy Policy.
Last year, Iranian oil accounted for 13.4% of China’s seaborne energy imports. Venezuelan oil accounted for another 4.5% of China’s total. Put together, one could thus say that China, until recently, was importing nearly a fifth of its oil from Iran and Venezuela.
And if one sees it from the exporters’ point of view, Venezuela reportedly sold three-quarters of its oil to China and Iran as high as 90 per cent.
Thus, one could say that China has been the lifeline for Venezuela and Iran. On the other hand, the loss of oil imports from Iran and Venezuela could also be said to significantly increase China’s vulnerability as the world’s largest importer of oil.
In the process of annihilating or disrupting or controlling the regimes in Venezuela and Iran (in Venezuela, it has already happened), Trump has also succeeded in damaging what is said to be the “Yuan trade”.
After all, Venezuela and Iran did not hesitate to trade oil in Chinese yuan rather than US dollars, thereby challenging the dollar’s status as the world’s overwhelmingly dominant currency.
Secondly, American military operations in Venezuela and Iran have reportedly exposed weaknesses in Chinese military technology. Chinese-made radar and missile defense systems (like the JY-27 and HQ-9B) used by Venezuela and Iran failed to detect or intercept U.S. aircraft during the raids.
Though China has been touting the HQ-9B missile as the best air defense system in the world, in less than a year, it has failed “catastrophically” in Pakistan, in Venezuela, and now in Iran.
After its poor performance in last year’s India-Pakistan skirmishes, the HQ-9B defense system was once again defeated with deadly strikes on Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei and some 49 high-ranking military officers.
Similarly, though China’s JY-27 radar is boasted as a system capable of identifying and scanning targets (F-22 and F-35 fighter jets) between 280 and 390 kilometers away, in real combat, when President Maduro was captured in Venezuela, it failed to detect even one of the 150 aircraft that penetrated Venezuelan airspace.
Thus, Chinese military instruments have been severely exposed by superior American technological capabilities and military expertise.
Thirdly, the American attacks have also neutralized Chinese diplomatic gains in Latin America and the Middle East. It has incurred heavy economic losses in the process.
For instance, China had an ‘All-Weather Strategic Partnership’ with Venezuela, under which the latter reportedly received significant loans and $60 billion of investments. These loans were supposed to be repaid through oil exports to China. But with Nicolás Maduro’s regime gone, all these “debt-for-oil arrangements” have apparently vanished.
Likewise, China has a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ with Iran. Significant Chinese investments have been made in Iran. In 2021, the two countries signed a 25-year, $400 billion deal to invest in Iran’s energy, infrastructure, and banking sectors, partly in exchange for discounted oil exports to China.
China has also been involved in constructing new railway lines from Tehran to Hamadan and Sanandaj, as well as from Kermanshah to Khosravi. China is also building ports, airports, and navigation systems, and there have been reports that it is upgrading the Abadan refinery in what is said to be a $2.1 billion project.
Diplomatically speaking, in 2023, China had a feather in its geopolitical cap by masterminding a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This visible foray into Middle Eastern statecraft was perceived as a masterstroke by China and a reflection of its successful strategy of guarding its logistical self-interest on the one hand and reducing conflict risk between two of Beijing’s largest energy suppliers on the other, while keeping American intervention at bay.
Iran has also been targeted by China to play an important role in the pursuit of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI and the consequent projection of Chinese “soft power”. Beijing sees it as a “vital nexus” connecting Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East.
Obviously, by attacking Iran, Trump wants China to realize that its policy of grand infrastructure and investment to establish a strong diplomatic presence in this vital part of the world will remain unfulfilled.
In the process, the American President wants to remind the world that American military and economic hegemony in the Middle East is still unparalleled.
As one writes this, Trump has not won the war in Iran. Nobody knows how long it will continue to change the present regime of clerics or implant a pro-American one there. But as of now, he has sufficiently crippled Iran’s infrastructure and economy.
Even if this hostile regime continues for a long time, the country’s economic arteries have been so weakened that it looks unfathomable for them to pump benefits to a rival power like China.
Admittedly, Trump’s war is unpopular, both within the United States and among its allies and partners in Europe and the Middle East. But as things stand now, all the allies and partners, whether voluntarily or reluctantly, have joined hands against Iran, something that was hitherto unthinkable.
“This is only happening thanks to strong and decisive U.S. leadership”, points out Arturo McFields, an exiled journalist, former Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States, and a former member of the Norwegian Peace Corps.
Robert Burrell and Arman Mahmoudian, senior researchers at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, make another interesting point: “The collapse of anti-American governments in Venezuela, Syria, and now potentially Iran has significantly reshaped the strategic landscape. These developments will gradually free US resources and attention from protracted confrontations in Latin America and the Middle East, enabling Washington to concentrate more directly on major international competitors like China and Russia rather than being consumed by regional quagmires”.
Burrell and Mahmoudiantying are not alone in this school of thought, which holds that with a diminished Iranian threat in the Middle East, American military resources—carrier groups, air bases, missile defense systems—can now be directed toward the Indo-Pacific, where Washington recognizes the Chinese threat as most potent.
Seen through that lens, behind Trump’s perceived “madness” in Iran (or, for that matter, Venezuela), is America’s strategic goal of the disruption of China’s long-term geoeconomic and military expansion. Whatever his critics may say, and they are numerous, his supporters think that history will remember him as a great President.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
