The U.S.-China summit ended without any discernible progress on the twin urgent security issues dividing the two superpowers: Iran and Taiwan.
Some speculated that a deal was in the offing that would trade the island for Chinese pressure on Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. That did not materialize, but such a hypothetical deal is not the only plausible connection between these two volatile security issues.
Washington’s military campaign against Tehran, a middle power, is raising critical questions of just how successful the U.S. would be in a war against China, our only near-peer rival.
This conversation has also been prompted by America’s massive expenditures on high-tech munitions—an arsenal thought needed to defeat a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan. As my colleague Jennifer Kavanagh wrote recently in the New York Times, “the United States finds itself facing strategic defeat by a weaker adversary” in Iran.
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