Trump Hit Iran, So Will China Attack Taiwan? by Gordon G. Chang
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21699/iran-china-taiwan
- [E]xpect Xi to up the pressure on Taiwan and others in coming weeks.
- Xi fully backed Iran and its three main proxy terrorist groups — Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis — against Israel, with Beijing providing economic, diplomatic, propaganda, intelligence and weapons support.
- For a time, Beijing looked as if it was driving events with its sly proxy war conducted by Iran. Now, China’s Iranian proxy, and its proxies in turn, are being decimated, and Beijing cannot respond other than by cutting and running. The mighty People’s Republic of China is bugging out of the Middle East.
- But China is not entirely out of the fight. In addition to the renewed air campaign against Taiwan, Beijing has upped the pressure against the Philippines in the South China Sea. On June 19, the same day China started its most recent air campaign against Taiwan, the Philippine Coast Guard announced that more than 50 of China’s maritime militia vessels moved close to Iroquois Reef in the South China Sea, a feature within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. A Philippine Coast Guard spokesman correctly called the Chinese action an “illegal swarming.”
- China claims most of that crucial body of water, including features such as Iroquois, which are far from recognized Chinese shores.
- This we learned on June 21: The United States is truly a great power — and China is not.

China apparently tried to protect Iran, its client state, with a threat against Taiwan in the days preceding America’s destruction of Iranian nuclear sites on June 21.
Beijing’s gambit failed. President Donald Trump, from all indications, stared down Xi Jinping.
Nonetheless, expect Xi to up the pressure on Taiwan and others in coming weeks.
Beginning late June 19, China sent 74 warplanes near Taiwan’s airspace. Sixty-one of the craft crossed the median line, the unofficial boundary running down the middle of the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese provocation came after a long period of quiet in the skies over that contested body of water.
Then, on June 21, the Pentagon told Reuters it had sent B-2 bombers to Guam. At the time, many saw the development as a final warning to Iran.
The Guam news was curious because these planes were not necessary for a strike against Iran. B-2s often start and end their missions at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, as did the seven planes that struck Iran on June 21. Moreover, the Pentagon in April positioned at least six of the planes close to Iran, in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean.
I think the curious Pentagon announcement was Trump’s way of telling China’s leader to leave Taiwan, not to mention other American allies and friends in the region, alone.
So far, Beijing has heeded Trump’s implicit B-2 threat. China’s rhetorical reaction to America’s June 21 destruction of three Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — was swift and harsh, but so far Beijing has done nothing to back up its words.
“China strongly condemns the U.S. attacks on Iran and bombing of nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the IAEA,” the Chinese foreign ministry stated, referring to the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “The actions of the U.S. seriously violate the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter and international law, and have exacerbated tensions in the Middle East.”
The destruction of Iran’s main nuclear sites reveals that China, despite its image, is weak. Beijing did not, for instance, protect its client state from attack. It does not have many military assets in the region — primarily a few intelligence-gathering ships — and it did not have the political will to base troops in Iran as a tripwire.
China does have crucial interests in the region, however. For instance, it buys more than 90% of Iran’s exports of crude oil, almost all purchased at a discount to the market price. More important, about half of the country’s oil transits the Strait of Hormuz, which flows between Iran’s southern coast and the Arabian Peninsula.
Nonetheless, Beijing quickly abandoned Iran when the United States got serious about ending the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
For decades, Chinese policymakers had maintained a “balancing act,” as Afshin Molavi, senior fellow of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, characterized it in comments to me last year. Beijing, nurturing relationships with all sides, stayed clear of the region’s multiple conflicts.
About two years ago, however, Xi changed course and adopted a far more assertive approach. The result was two landmark deals it brokered, one in March 2023 between Riyadh and Tehran and the other in July 2024 among 14 Palestinian factions, the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity.
That declaration — and China’s broader plan for the Middle East — are now in ruins. A week after Beijing’s triumph with the Palestinians, a bomb planted in a Hamas guest house in Tehran killed Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s political leader. “Haniyeh was being groomed to be the man who would take over the Palestinian Authority in the coming years,” wrote the Jerusalem Post‘s Seth Frantzman. “October 7 was designed to catapult Hamas from its isolation in Gaza to controlling Ramallah and the West Bank, uniting the Palestinian fronts.” China, according to Frantzman, was one of the countries that had concocted that plan.
In short, Xi fully backed Iran and its three main proxy terrorist groups — Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis — against Israel, with Beijing providing economic, diplomatic, propaganda, intelligence and weapons support.
For a time, Beijing looked as if it was driving events with its sly proxy war conducted by Iran. Now, China’s Iranian proxy, and its proxies in turn, are being decimated, and Beijing cannot respond other than by cutting and running. The mighty People’s Republic of China is bugging out of the Middle East.
But China is not entirely out of the fight. In addition to the renewed air campaign against Taiwan, Beijing has upped the pressure against the Philippines in the South China Sea. On June 19, the same day China started its most recent air campaign against Taiwan, the Philippine Coast Guard announced that more than 50 of China’s maritime militia vessels moved close to Iroquois Reef in the South China Sea, a feature within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. A Philippine Coast Guard spokesman correctly called the Chinese action an “illegal swarming.”
China claims most of that crucial body of water, including features such as Iroquois, which are far from recognized Chinese shores.
Perhaps Beijing, by upping the pressure on its neighbors, seeks to make gains while the world is focused on Iran, but whatever its motivations, East Asia can expect Xi to create even more friction on China’s periphery soon.
Yet Xi should remember that Trump is not afraid of using American power to keep bad actors, including China’s friends, in line.
This we learned on June 21: The United States is truly a great power — and China is not.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
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