China Sees a ‘Giant With a Limp’ as U.S. Drains Weapons on Iran War
America’s ability to deter China in a war over Taiwan is weakened, Chinese analysts say, giving Beijing leverage in an upcoming summit with President Trump.
A grinding war in Iran has so severely drained American firepower that Chinese analysts are openly questioning Washington’s ability to defend Taiwan. That shifting calculus threatens to undercut President Trump’s leverage in his high-stakes summit next week with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
Since the war began in late February, the United States has burned through around half of its long-range stealth cruise missiles and fired off roughly 10 times the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles it currently buys each year, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.
To some Chinese military and geopolitical analysts, the war has done more than deplete U.S. munitions stockpiles, it has also shattered America’s aura of dominance. They argue that it has exposed a major flaw in U.S. war strategy: its inability to make weapons quickly enough to replenish its arsenal in a sustained, intense conflict.
This depletion “has significantly diminished the U.S. military’s ability to project its combat power, laying bare the shortcomings of its global military hegemony,” said Yue Gang, a retired colonel of the People’s Liberation Army, in an interview.
Such arguments help fuel a narrative among hawkish Chinese commentators, and potentially in the government, that American forces could no longer effectively defend Taiwan should the United States and China ever go to war over the self-governed island. The logic of Chinese nationalists is that since the United States has been unable to achieve a quick victory against Iran, a regional military power, then it would most likely have even less success against China, which the analysts see as a peer competitor.
From this perspective, the U.S. impasse with Iran weakens Mr. Trump’s position going into talks with Mr. Xi next week.
“Trump originally intended to visit China with the air of a swift victor, leveraging his position to increase pressure on China,” Mr. Yue said. “Now, however, with the conflict deadlocked and the military campaign stalled, he finds himself in a difficult position.”
Mr. Trump, he added, “will be unable to project the same arrogance.”
Mr. Trump is expected to seek deals with Mr. Xi to help reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. That could include pledges by Beijing to buy more American soybeans and Boeing planes. Mr. Trump will also press Mr. Xi about China’s continued purchases of Iranian oil, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.
China, for its part, wants to stabilize ties with the Trump administration and extend the trade truce in order to focus on revitalizing its economy and developing its own technologies.
Beijing wants the Trump administration to reduce its support for Taiwan. Mr. Xi warned Mr. Trump in February that China would “never allow Taiwan to be separated from China,” as he urged him to handle U.S. arms sales to the island with “prudence.” (The Trump administration has since delayed announcing a package of arms sales to Taiwan to avoid upsetting Mr. Xi.)
China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, has hinted that Beijing could be seeking some kind of a breakthrough. In a phone call last month with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mr. Wang called for China and the United States to “open up new space” on the Taiwan issue, though he did not go into specifics.
China Sees a Declining Power
Ahead of the summit, both countries have tried to maintain a neutral, if uneasy, calm. China has treaded a careful line in discussing the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, a conflict it says it opposed from the beginning. The closest Mr. Xi has come to criticizing Mr. Trump, without naming him, was to denounce the flouting of international law as a “return to the law of the jungle.”
The effort to play nice, for now, could explain why Chinese state news outlets have been guarded in their comments about America’s military vulnerabilities as a result of the war in Iran.
Reports and commentaries note the depletion of missiles and shifting of U.S. resources, but generally stop short of framing the war as strategically beneficial for China, said Manoj Kewalramani, the head of Indo-Pacific studies at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore, India, who monitors Chinese media.
One notable exception was an essay in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s leading theoretical journal, which argued that “the conflict has overdrawn U.S. strategic resources, potentially leaving the country in a precarious position.” Another was an editorial from Global Times, a Communist Party-controlled nationalist newspaper, that said if the U.S. military was unable to deploy weapons around the world, it would be a “giant with a limp.”
Hu Xijin, the influential former editor of Global Times, said the U.S. munitions supply chain challenges that the war had exposed gave Beijing not only a material edge, but also a psychological one in any potential war over Taiwan.
“If we view the situation as a strategic game of confidence between China and the U.S. over the Taiwan Strait — a game of chess, so to speak — the United States is on the verge of losing all its pieces,” Mr. Hu said in an interview.
But China’s Military Has Problems, Too
The White House and American military officials reject the notion that operations in the Middle East have undermined Washington’s posture in Asia. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that deterring China “through strength” was among the Defense Department’s four top priorities.
Asked during a Senate hearing last month if resources being diverted to the Middle East was weakening U.S. military readiness in the Pacific, Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, said, “I don’t see any real cost being imposed on our ability to deter China.”
To be sure, questions abound about China’s own military readiness. Not only has the People’s Liberation Army been untested in major combat for nearly five decades, its top leadership has been thrown into disarray by political purges and a crackdown on corruption.
By comparison, the U.S. military showcased its potency by killing Tehran’s leaders, establishing control of the skies over Iran and sending special forces into enemy territory to rescue a downed pilot.
“The United States has very successfully demonstrated its wartime capabilities in a way that China should consider credible,” said Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Mr. Thompson also cautioned against comparing the conflict in Iran to a war over Taiwan. In a defense of the island, the United States would largely rely on anti-ship missiles, which were used sparingly on Iran, to target a Chinese invasion fleet.
Sending a Message to U.S. Allies
Even without going to war, China can point to the complications the Trump administration is facing and argue to U.S. allies in Asia that Washington cannot be relied upon as a security guarantor.
“When allies face uncertainties over deployments and delayed equipment, it inevitably raises questions about the reliability and consistency of U.S. security assurances in the region,” said Wang Dong, executive director of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Peking University.
The United States, he added, “is encountering the limits of its global military footprint”
China may ultimately be emboldened by the war in Iran to become more assertive in Asia using gray-zone tactics — aggressive moves that fall short of inciting all-out war. Over the last few months, for example, China has been building an island in disputed waters off the coast of Vietnam that will help it gain more control of the South China Sea.
Beijing is unlikely to expedite plans to invade Taiwan, said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Any such plan would be based primarily on “political factors” like a sudden move by the island territory to declare formal independence, he said.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Berry Wang is a reporter and researcher for The Times in Hong Kong.
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