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With Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, in flames after Saturday’s US-led attack, China’s energy lifeline is going up in smoke.
Ignoring international sanctions, oil-thirsty China had long been the Ayatollah Khamenei regime’s main buyer.
To be sure, China was a cheap customer, paying well below the going market price for Iran’s bootleg oil.
Not only that, it insisted in paying in Chinese yuan, not dollars, ensuring the money would flow back to China.
Beijing’s slick sales pitches convinced the Iranians to spend their oil billions buying China’s military and telecommunications equipment — like the “state-of-the-art” radar systems that now lie in smoldering ruins after failing to detect the incoming American airstrikes.
But the decapitation of Iran’s leadership and the destruction of its Chinese-made defense arsenal aren’t the worst of Beijing’s Middle East woes.
Iran’s reckless missile barrages have united the entire region against it — causing an enormous loss of face for its chief international backer.
Two years ago, China was riding high in the Arab world.
In March 2023, it brokered a normalization agreement between Shiite Iran and its longtime Sunni adversary Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih praised the new Middle Eastern power broker.
A multipolar world had emerged, he declared — and cooperation between the Gulf states and China would be “a significant part of the new order.”
A year into President Trump’s second term, China’s role in that new order seems to be shrinking by the day.
It’s not just that Iran, the anchor of China’s Middle East ambitions, is now an international pariah.
That’s only the latest in a long series of recent geopolitical setbacks for America’s chief adversary.
China’s woes began soon after Trump returned to office, as his tariffs took a huge bite out of Beijing’s predatory trade profits.
Then Trump took aim at China’s inroads into Latin America, starting with the Panama Canal.
He put the government of Panama on notice: If it didn’t secure this vital strategic waterway, Trump would.
The Panamanian Supreme Court has just terminated the leases of the Chinese company running the Atlantic and Pacific ports, ending China’s ability to shut down the Panama Canal at will.
Venezuela was next.
The famous raid that captured the country’s drug kingpin also cut off China’s supply of cheap Venezuelan oil.
On top of that, it obliterated billions in Chinese-made military equipment — and effectively ended China’s influence over the rump regime.
Then came Greenland, toward which China was already making overtures.
Asserting that control of the giant island was vital to the defense of the United States, Trump shrugged off the alarm of European elites that tiny Denmark would be dispossessed of its colony.
His heated rhetoric got what he wanted all along: effective sovereignty over the parts of the island needed for missile defense or resource development.
This will surely encompass any areas that China might now, or in the future, cast envious eyes upon.
With the US cutting off oil supplies to the island nation of Cuba, the liberation of another key client state of China’s has just begun.
It’s almost inevitable that this story will end not with an invasion, but with a compliant Cuban regime eager to cooperate with the United States — if only to keep the lights on.
And, by the way, with another geopolitical setback for China.
See the pattern yet?
From Panama to Venezuela, from Greenland to Iran, the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.
Trump is thinking very bigly.
As US energy production ramps up, China is not only deprived of cheap oil from Venezuela and Iran, but the ability to pay for it by printing renminbi.
Beijing will be forced to pay full price for its oil to US-owned refineries, in US dollars.
The effort led by China and Russia to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is dead.
As Trump strengthens alliances with Japan and other Asian countries, China is losing allies that can cause the US problems — and losing control of vital sea lanes, too.
Iran is not the opening act in the larger contest against China: Trump is already in the fourth or fifth round of dismantling Beijing’s strategic architecture wherever it exists.
His goal is to transform the global order to America’s advantage — which necessarily means greatly reducing the malign influence of Communist China.
“Winning without fighting is the acme of warfare,” the ancient Chinese strategist Sunzi famously said.
And where China is concerned, it seems that one of Sunzi’s best students is a yangguizi — a “foreign devil” by the name of Donald J. Trump.
Steven W. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “The Devil and Communist China” (Tan Books).