What the China system likes more than anything else is certainty, but the war in Iran is creating situations that are very hard to predict. Beijing has on one level been interested in playing a middleman role, and just a few years ago, very prominently arranged for a detente of sorts between Saudi Arabia and Iran with a handshaking ceremony between the foreign ministers of those two countries. One another level, in recent years Beijing has also been aligned with Iran in various ways for various reasons. But these guys are… pragmatists, and it is reasonable to assume that the Iranian attack on the Qatar liquid natural gas facility will have probably been a key moment in terms of the calculations as to what to do. They have to make a decision about their long-term options in that part of the world, and they have to back the winning horse.
That requires an assessment of what the likelihood is in terms of a conclusion to the Iran war. If it ends with the Iranian government basically still in place, then China will be presumably continuing its fence-sitting approach. But if the American and Israeli assaults are going to be sustained and result in the effective destruction of the Iranian polity as it currently exists, then the assumption is that the Chinese will respond accordingly.
The smart thing for the Iranians to do was definitely not to attack that Qatar LNG facility. But who can work out the motives behind any of these actions? This war appears to many to have no clear exit. But that may be wrong. The exit could be simply massive destruction of the Iranian political and military infrastructure regardless of what the domestic political consequences are for Iran. In that scenario, Iran one way or another would be an irrelevancy in terms of the geopolitical jigsaw puzzle of that region, for a long time to come. Maybe that meets Netanyahu’s requirements.
Another way of looking at all of this is that Arab money is on the ascendant. An immense amount of Arab money has poured into the world of Trump in the past year and more, it would seem, including that incredibly high-profile airplane worth $400 million, which was donated to Mr. Trump by Qatar. Is it reasonable to see the major winner in this war as being not America and not Israel, but Saudi Arabia? Possibly.
For China, that is something of a negative in that Iran has been by all appearances working on the same side of many global issues. And it has also been an important source of oil. But China has the money to buy oil from the Saudis or others. And Iran is not as important to the future of the system as Russia is. So, if the Americans are willing to spend the amount of money that it will cost to continue this war for another period –two weeks? A month?—at some point the Iranian structure is going to collapse. And regardless of whatever happens as a follow-on to that, if that is how it plays out, what Beijing wants is to create the best scenario possible for the system, and to ensure the continued flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, from whomever is selling it. It will all make a fantastic video game in due course.
Have a great missile-free weekend.