There’s probably no foreign leader who is paying more, is looking more intently about Putin’s experience in Ukraine over the last 11 and a half months than Xi Jinping. I think he was surprised and unsettled, to some extent, by the very poor performance of the Russian military, of many Russian sophisticated weapon systems as well, and trying to draw the lessons from that about his own military modernisation and on specific issues like Taiwan. CIA Director Burns, 2 February 2023, J. Raymond “Jit” Trainor Award Ceremony, Georgetown University.
Just as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided China with a real time laboratory on the political and military lessons of modern war, so too the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is providing Beijing with real-time insights into how American power is exercised. This includes the military domain, how U.S. alliances function under stress, and how the information environment shapes perceptions of conflict. For President Xi Jinping, who has talked constantly about China’s unfinished business in Taiwan, the lessons are crucial.
However, while the war may prove encouraging lessons for Xi, particularly with regards to American strategy development and execution, other aspects will be more discouraging for the Chinese. It is important that we understand what Xi might learn from the Iran War because it will shape allied deterrence efforts in the Pacific to limit Chinese military aggression, including diplomatic, information, technological and military efforts.
This assessment examines key strategic insights that China’s leadership might extract from the Iran conflict, before evaluating whether these insights affect the probability of Xi ordering a military blockade or invasion of Taiwan in the short term.
An important insight for Chinese strategic planners is the extent to which the Iran conflict has consumed American political bandwidth. Washington is concurrently managing a war with escalating costs, a volatile oil market, a fractured NATO alliance, and simultaneous trade tensions with China. The PLA has been watching closely how the U.S. political system struggles to maintain strategic focus across multiple theatres.
The lesson for Taiwan: a deeply distracted United States, fighting a war it did not fully anticipate, with a president who has publicly stated he doesn’t need allies, may have a diminished capacity to pivot rapidly to a Taiwan contingency. Even if the war in Iran ends, a Trump administration absorbed by a campaign against Cuba or mid-term or Presidential elections might equally struggle to reorient to a Chinese military campaign against Taiwan.
The Iran conflict has ignited oil prices and disrupted global shipping, raising the fundamental question: in a contest of economic endurance between China and the United States, who blinks first? China is also heavily dependent on the Strait of Hormuz, which complicates its strategic calculus. Trump asked China to send warships to help police the strait—China refused.
Beijing is observing that its refusal to cooperate carries no immediate cost. Xi’s lesson from the Iran war, however, is that Washington can absorb economic shock in the short term if a president is willing to accept political pain. But the Iranian precedent, with oil at over $100 a barrel, global supply chains disrupted, and allies alienated, is beginning to show the limits of American economic endurance when policy is made impulsively.
Iran was conducting negotiations through Oman when the U.S. and Israel struck. The PLA has probably concluded that Trump will act regardless of whether diplomatic channels are open. This has a specific implication for Taiwan: China cannot rely on a diplomatic off-ramp to prevent U.S. military intervention, but it also cannot rely on Trump to behave predictably as a deterrent.
Trump’s impulsiveness cuts both ways for Beijing. It is a risk—he might act on Taiwan more forcefully than any previous president. But it is also an opportunity: a president who acts without consulting allies, who publicly attacks NATO while demanding their help, and who measures success in terms of personal narrative, is one whose strategic red lines are opaque even to his own government. Xi may calculate that Trump can be managed through flattery, deals, and economic incentives in ways that a more institutionally constrained president could not.
Critically, Trump told reporters his trip to meet Xi would take place in approximately five or six weeks—signalling that personal diplomacy between the two leaders remains a live channel even as the Iran war rages. Xi understands that Trump’s personal relationships can serve as a strategic buffer.
One of the most underappreciated insights from the Iran war is that America’s strategic decision-making apparatus does not need to be deliberately compromised to produce poor outcomes. It is doing that on its own. The Trump administration has transformed the National Security Council from a sophisticated interagency coordination mechanism into a thin shell around presidential instinct. The Iran war is the first major live test of this hollowed-out architecture. Three shortfalls stand out:
For Xi, this is deeply reassuring. He does not need to hack U.S. decision-making systems or run elaborate influence operations. The system is already generating strategic noise and confusion at scale.
The Iran war has again exposed America’s extraordinary weakness in the information domain. The PLA’s own published analysis explicitly identifies “the illusion of victory” as one of its key lessons—acknowledging that propaganda cannot win modern warfare. Yet China’s relative disadvantage here is dwarfed by America’s self-inflicted wounds on information credibility.
Trump has consistently provided embellished descriptions of Iranian destruction, coalition support, and military progress. Claims about numerous countries joining a coalition were made without evidence; NATO allies rejected the characterisation outright. These embellishments have been compounded by AI-generated videos posted on official White House social media that have been described as “demolishing decades of presidential decorum around wartime messaging”. The result is a global audience that is increasingly discounting American official narratives by default. This creates an enormous opportunity for Chinese information operations in a Taiwan contingency: if Beijing can frame a Taiwan blockade as a defensive operation against U.S. provocations, a significant portion of the Global South—already accustomed to American narrative inflation—may be receptive.
China has spent years building alternative media infrastructure, cultivating relationships with Global South governments, and framing Western security concerns as imperialism. Beijing has already condemned the Iran war as a violation of international law. In a Taiwan scenario, it would amplify this framing globally, positioning any Chinese action as a domestic matter and any U.S. response as unprovoked aggression by a country that just bombed a third country while negotiations were ongoing.
