Lyle Goldstein, the director of Defense Priorities’s Asia Program and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, said the Iran conflict doesn’t substantively alter the Indo-Pacific calculus, given how outgunned the United States already was in the theater.
He told the Washington Examiner that some war gamers “have long believed that the carrier is really not of much concern to China,” as “China has for decades worked on how to destroy it.” Goldstein cited a 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies war game that showed two U.S. carrier groups being destroyed within the first 10 days of a potential hot war with China.
Furthermore, he claimed that the U.S. Navy, even before the start of the Iran war, simply did not have the firepower to sink a Chinese fleet totaling between 5,000 and 10,000 ships that experts see Beijing mobilizing in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.
Still, Goldstein raised concerns that the Iran war is “revealing” to China an American pattern of “poor decision-making, poor planning, vulnerability of bases, and an overall lack of munitions,” on top of “a lot of angst in the American body politic.”
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