On Monday, China’s Xi Jinping let the mask slip.
After weeks remaining largely absent from the diplomatic picture as the US conducted Operation Epic Fury against Iran, Xi called Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman to publicly urge a peaceful reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
The pressure on Beijing is showing.
At least five Iranian-linked tankers heading from the Gulf of Oman to Malaysia have changed course after the US Navy warned that ships carrying Iranian oil would be intercepted anywhere in the world.
And now, every concession the IRGC withholds costs it more than the one before.
Operation Epic Fury destroyed the military capacity Iran has used to threaten to close the strait, and dismantled the architecture the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps built to survive the decapitation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
What remains is a rump regime without the arsenal, command or finances that lent its threats weight.
President Donald Trump should read this as the strongest card he holds against Beijing.
Xi spent a decade cultivating the Islamic Republic as the armed underwriter of Chinese influence in the Middle East.
Its erosion in this campaign hands Washington immense leverage.
Three fronts establish the stakes.
The first is military.
The US campaign dismantled the arsenal that Chinese industrial networks spent years building.
China had emerged as the principal external supplier of Iran’s ballistic-missile program, providing chemical precursors for solid rocket fuel as well as satellite intel and navigation systems.
Indeed, the Treasury Department sanctioned several Chinese entities for supplying the Revolutionary Guard with chemicals used in missile-fuel production, and US intelligence documented Iranian cargo ships unloading sodium perchlorate at Bandar Abbas in quantities sufficient to fuel approximately 800 new missiles.
Beijing was also negotiating the sale of CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers.
In December, US special forces raided a merchant vessel in the Indian Ocean carrying Chinese cargo bound for the Revolutionary Guards.
The second front is financial.
Iran served as China’s proving ground for sanctions evasion, the laboratory in which Beijing refined the techniques it expected to deploy at scale against US sanctions.
“Operation Economic Fury” has contested it.
The Trump administration sent letters to financial institutions in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and China, citing evidence that these institutions moved Iranian funds linked to illicit activity.
The letters are reportedly the first step toward secondary sanctions that would sever those institutions’ ties to the US financial system.
The third front is diplomatic.
Beijing brokered the Iran-Saudi normalization in March 2023 and presented it as evidence of a new Chinese diplomatic order.
The missiles and drones Iran fired at sites throughout the region during the recent conflict exposed the agreement as a paper arrangement that Beijing couldn’t enforce.
The damage deepened when the United Arab Emirates aligned with the US-led coalition and called for the reopening of the Strait, while Beijing remained silent on the weaponization of the waterway that carries its own energy imports.
The Gulf monarchies now know what a Chinese security partnership amounts to when Iranian aggression reaches their territory.
The same pattern holds for the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela’s dictatorship has fallen, Nicolás Maduro is in US custody and Beijing’s position in Latin America has collapsed.
Within months, Washington has broken the two regimes through which Xi projects influence into the regions that matter most to the United States.
Washington is already collecting the gains in Asia.
Indonesia signed the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership on April 13, pulling Jakarta into the American security architecture through a framework for military modernization and professional military education.
The Philippines has joined that architecture and will host a 4,000-acre industrial hub anchoring supply chains that Washington intends to build outside Chinese reach.
The geography of those partnerships carries its own message.
Indonesia flanks the Strait of Malacca, through which the bulk of Chinese energy imports travel.
Washington has just demonstrated in the Strait of Hormuz the operational template for denying a chokepoint to a state that depends on it.
Beijing will draw the inference without being told.
Trump postponed his visit to China and refused the supplicant’s role Beijing had prepared.
He’ll travel on his own timetable, with those facts established before the first handshake.
Tehran saw the Strait of Hormuz as its ultimate coercive instrument, yet US power exposed it as a threat it can fairly easily overcome.
Xi Jinping will open the conversation knowing that Washington has broken his proxies, closed his laboratory and reduced to rubble an arsenal he spent a decade underwriting.
The card is in Trump’s hand. The administration has already begun to play it.
Asia is where the greatest returns are landing, and Beijing is where the reckoning comes next.
Zineb Riboua is a research fellow at the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.
