The Iran War Is Not Part of a Grand Strategy Targeting China

Grand strategy works in video games. Reality doesn't have a national focus tree

As a veteran player of Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis, I have spent well over a thousand hours in front of a screen planning grand strategies that span decades, from allocating resources, clicking through national focuses, to making every move serve a long-term objective. In these games, you stop playing as a person. You become a rational state actor, unencumbered by factional infighting, domestic politics, incomplete information, or personal interest. Every decision has a long-term purpose, and you can execute it without interference. If monarchy doesn’t serve your goals, switch to a republic; it’s just as simple as a click of the mouse.

But reality runs on an entirely different logic. It is precisely the fantasy of a “master designer behind the curtain” that makes grand strategy so dangerously misleading. As Secretary of Defense Rock argued in his essay

Grand strategy is not a coherent phenomenon states possess or execute, but a retrospective genre and institutional language that imposes order on political behavior that is, in practice, fragmented, contested, and improvised.

The Trump administration’s military campaign against Iran has proven the point once again. Two weeks after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, the White House still cannot offer a consistent explanation for why the war was started. And not surprisingly, within this strategic no-man' s-land, one narrative has already surfaced: It’s all about China.

The argument originates from a report by Zineb Riboua of the Hudson Institute. She contends that by striking Iran, Trump is dismantling a pillar of China’s regional architecture. She claims that “Trump’s strikes are the first move by an American president who appears to understand that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran,” and declares Operation Epic Fury “the opening act of the Indo-Pacific century.”

It’s a really telling story—exactly the kind of move I would make in Hearts of Iron: clear the minor threat first, then concentrate forces against the main rival. Textbook grand strategy. But the problem is that the real world offers no omniscient perspective, and the White House can’t click a button to switch its national focus.

A War Without a Plan

Before we debate whether this war serves some grand China strategy, a more basic question needs answering: do the people who launched it even know what they are doing? I don’t think they do.

Two weeks in, the U.S. government still hasn’t produced a coherent narrative on war objectives. When the joint strikes first began, Trump claimed the purpose was to “eliminate the imminent threat posed by the Iranian regime.” The Pentagon, however, indicated there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was planning to attack U.S. forces. Secretary of State Rubio tried to patch the hole by offering a second version of “imminent threat” that Iran would retaliate against American troops once Israel struck. But Trump himself contradicted Rubio’s framing outright: “No, I might’ve forced their hand.” In short, the U.S. government cannot agree internally on the objective of its own war, and Trump himself has been self-contradictory.

The administration’s posture on negotiations has been equally bewildering. Oman’s foreign minister revealed that “before the war began, A peace deal is within our reach … if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.” But Trump said he was “not satisfied” with the talks and launched strikes. On March 1—the day after the war started, he announced he agreed to continue negotiations with Iran. Just two days later, on March 3, he wrote on Truth Social: “They want to negotiate. I said, ‘Too late!’” By March 7, “too late” had escalated to “unconditional surrender.”

So when someone tries to fit this war into a carefully designed anti-China chessboard, the first fact we must confront is this: the person supposedly playing chess can’t even agree on the objective of the game within two weeks. A government that cannot articulate why it went to war lacks the capacity to execute a grand-power strategy that demands the highest degree of coordination.

A Narrative That Doesn’t Survive Scrutiny

Setting aside the U.S. government’s internal contradictions, let’s examine the argument on its own terms. It rests on three assumptions. I don’t think any of them hold up.

Assumption 1: Beijing and Tehran Are Allies

For many analysts, China's failure to provide military assistance to Tehran during the Iran crisis proves that Beijing is an unreliable ally—that it failed to do what a great power "should do" when a partner is under pressure. But the premise is wrong. Beijing is not Washington. It is not in an alliance with Tehran.
My friend Zichen Wang’s piece in Foreign Policy already laid this out well. As he wrote: "Modern China’s political identity was forged through invasion, coercion, and national humiliation. A country with that experience is less likely to romanticize the idea that strong states should travel abroad to reorder weaker ones by force."

What I’d also want to add is that the concept of 以我为主 yi wo wei zhu" with ourselves as the principal—has long been, and remains, the most fundamental principle of Beijing’s foreign policy. It means that domestic affairs occupy a higher priority, and that foreign policy is driven by internal needs. This is also a natural condition for any great power.

Assumption 2: Iran Is a Pillar of China’s Regional Strategy

China’s approach to the Middle East has never been about betting on a single country. Beijing simultaneously maintains active economic and diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, and others. China is Saudi Arabia’s largest oil export destination, the UAE’s largest non-oil trading partner, a major infrastructure investor in Egypt’s Suez Canal Economic Zone, and a growing trade partner for Turkey.

China’s brokering of the Saudi-Iranian diplomatic reconciliation in 2023 illustrates the point. A country that viewed Iran as a strategic pillar would not actively facilitate its normalization with a regional rival—doing so would diminish Iran’s value as an exclusive partner. But Beijing did exactly that, because its interest lies not in Iran’s dominance or isolation, but in being a participant that maintains connections with all regional stakeholders. I think a portfolio logic captures Beijing’s Middle Eastern approach far better than a traditional alliance logic. Beijing prefers to diversify risk through a range of partnerships rather than staking everything, like a gambler, on a single country.

Assumption 3: Striking Iran Weakens China

This is the weakest link in the argument. Compared to the damage inflicted on China, this war is far more costly to the United States itself.

From a military resource perspective, the sustained campaign against Iran is draining American combat capacity at a serious rate. As Iranian retaliation escalates, U.S. stocks of interceptor missiles and other critical munitions are under enormous pressure. Ironically, the United States has begun redeploying the THAAD anti-missile system from South Korea to the Middle East, which caused a huge diplomatic stand-off 10 years ago between China and South Korea. If the purpose of this war is truly to clear the deck for competition with China, then pulling military assets stationed on China’s doorstep and shipping them to the Middle Eastern theater is self-defeating.

From a political standpoint, the United States launched a massive military strike without a clear imminent threat, without bothering to ask its allies, and even after the other side had signaled willingness to negotiate. The message this sends to the world is certainly not one of stability. It reminds me of a conversation I had last year with a professor at a top university in US. His assessment is that the current U.S. government is worse than the law of the jungle, because in the jungle, a lion stops hunting once it’s full. The current US administration expands even when there is no need.

Back to the report itself. The author claims that striking Iran is “the opening act of the Indo-Pacific century.” But the reality is: a government that still can’t produce a consistent war objective two weeks into hostilities; a China-Iran relationship mislabeled as an “alliance”; and a war whose costs to America far outweigh any damage to China. This is not grand strategy. This is action first, meaning later, as we say in Chinese, 大棋党思维: “it’s all part of the master plan.”

This kind of retroactive sense-making has a long tradition, not just in the United States, though Washington has arguably perfected it. The Iraq War was cast as the beginning of the Middle East's democratization. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was framed as a prelude to the strategic pivot to Asia. None of these narratives, in hindsight, survived the test of time. Their function was just to package messy decisions into a coherent strategy and to make disorder look logical. This meets human cognitive needs, but it's also just wrong.

What's more dangerous is that such narratives reshape future decisions. My favorite metaphor is a drug dealer who starts using his own supply and ends up dealing just to feed the habit. Once “striking Iran is step one of the grand China strategy” become a widely accepted story, it generated path-dependence. Since the first step has already been taken, it becomes a sunk cost. Escalation becomes easier to argue for, and harder to walk back — because no one wants to admit the master plan never existed.

And those who declare after the fact that everything went according to plan are doing something not different from what I used to do sitting in front of my screen—except they’re not using a mouse. They’re using think tank reports and op-ed pages.