Is China helping Iran by not intervening?
I keep seeing scores of people on Twitter saying that unless China intervenes in the Middle-East, it will somehow be their end. Like this guy 👇
Or this guy 👇
Meanwhile, fascinatingly, here’s what Oriana Skylar Mastro, who used to be the Pentagon's top strategic planner on China and is now a professor at Stanford, has to say about it 👇. She is widely recognized as having been one of the best strategists in the Pentagon and won multiple awards recognizing her as such. [video]
In a nutshell, she says that the U.S. would love nothing more than to “drag” China into conflicts like that with Iran - and she herself has “often tried to articulate recommendations” to trap China in that way - but China never takes the bait, which in her view shows that they're “very strategically disciplined”.
It also reflects the fact that China, unlike the U.S. obviously, “do not believe in foreign military intervention as a tool of power”: they believe in “using political and economic tools."
She asks rhetorically: “the war in Afghanistan cost the equivalent of 10 Belt and Road initiatives. So which one is more impactful on the world?”
She is adamant that the U.S.'s renewed involvement in the Middle East is an unequivocal mistake. As she explains, not only it will prevent once more the mythical “pivot to Asia,” which is obviously in itself in China's interests, but it will only further deplete U.S. resources without much to show for it in the end.
Effectively, according to her, China gets exactly what they want: the U.S. repeatedly getting baited and exhausting itself into costly military interventions with little strategic rationale. As she puts it: “that's how great powers decline.” In fact, it's exactly the type of strategic overextension that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So, who’s right? The Twitter crowd or Pentagon Oriana?
First of all, let’s be clear, it’s not like China hasn’t helped or isn’t helping Iran at all.
For one, they’ve been buying over 90% of Iran’s oil and have therefore effectively been Iran's principal economic lifeline for years. That’s pretty helpful in my book…
They've also famously reconciled Iran and Saudi Arabia, when the two countries had been the Muslim world’s biggest foes for decades. Also objectively very helpful.
But they do draw a hard line at military involvement, that’s true. Let’s try to understand why.
Avoiding the 'Autocratic Quad' trap
Let’s start with a story, which I recently retold in my article The Audacity Of Restraint.
In 288 BC, China had two dominant states: Qin and Qi. Qin was relatively brutal, while Qi was more benevolent, and smaller states feared Qin but favored Qi. The king of Qin proposed to the king of Qi: “Now that we are the two strongest powers in the world, let's stop calling ourselves kings and instead proclaim ourselves emperors. I'll be the Western Emperor, ruling the western states, and you'll be the Eastern Emperor, ruling the eastern states.”
The king of Qi thought it was a good idea and agreed. However, soon after both declared themselves emperors, the smaller states that once favored Qi no longer supported him and instead followed Qin's orders. A strategist later explained to the confused king of Qi: “Since you and Qin both declared yourselves emperors, Qin's misdeeds have been done in the name of both of you. The smaller states know you can no longer help them, so they have no choice but to obey Qin. You've been isolated.” The king of Qi quickly abandoned the emperor title, but it was too late. In the end, Qin defeated all the states, including Qi, and unified China.
See any parallels with today?
People in the “Twitter crowd” make the point that China needs to start defending its “allies” just like the U.S. does, or it will otherwise lose its legitimacy. But in fact the opposite is far more likely to happen, as the Qi-Qin story illustrates.
If China starts intervening militarily like the U.S. does, it becomes a "co-emperor" in the same hegemonic system it criticizes, legitimizing the very approach that has made America so unpopular globally. Just like ancient Qi, China would find itself tainted by association with the methods of its “co-emperor.”
The Global South - which currently sees China as offering a fundamentally different model of international relations - would suddenly view China as just another military hegemon playing the same old imperial games. Many countries couldn't avoid the conclusion that China's promises of non-interference and respect for sovereignty were just empty words, no different from America's rhetoric about democracy and human rights. And, if that were the case, if China is going to be just as hypocritical as the U.S., why not stick with the devil you know?
This is what Mastro means when she talks about the "autocratic quad" trap that China desperately wants to avoid. As she explains, Chinese officials explicitly tell her they "do not want that bloc," precisely because what China wants is to move beyond bloc politics.
I’m not making it up, it keeps appearing over and over in top Chinese declarations. For instance, in his speech marking the 70th anniversary of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, Xi Jinping said that China opposes "obsolete, narrow-minded, antagonistic and confrontational mindsets such as bloc politics and sphere of influence." The Global Security Initiative, China’s strategic vision for the future security of the global order, also states that "Cold War mentality, unilateralism, bloc confrontation and hegemonism contradict the spirit of the UN Charter and must be resisted and rejected."
As such, China suddenly putting all of this aside would represent nothing less than the death of the alternative world order that China has been patiently building for decades. China won’t gain legitimacy if it “defends its allies” as the Twitter crowd would have it - it would on the contrary destroy its moral authority and become just “America 2.0”.
Strategic discipline vs. strategic overextension
Let’s talk international relations from a purely realist perspective.
On one side, it’s pretty unarguable that China has had a strategy for 30 years that has enabled it to become the most formidable peer competitor that the U.S. has ever faced. The only great power to reach a status of parity with the U.S. in most domains since WW2.
This happened not only because China’s strategy was effective, but also because American strategy was lacking.
So far, I imagine that’s pretty uncontroversial.
So I'd love for someone to explain why China, when seeing the U.S. making yet again the very same mistake that has been undermining American power for decades, should suddenly abandon its winning formula and copy the losing one?
Because that's essentially what the Twitter crowd is asking for. They want China to start behaving exactly like the power that China has been successfully outcompeting for three decades.
The Soviet Union provides another telling example. Moscow tried to maintain a global military presence, fought its own disastrous war in Afghanistan, and supported proxy conflicts from Africa to Central America. All while neglecting domestic development and exhausting its economy on military adventures that produced questionable results.
Sound familiar?
China watched this unfold in real time. They saw how the USSR's attempt to project power globally ultimately bankrupted the country and contributed directly to its collapse. And now they're watching the United States repeat many of the same patterns - endless wars in distant theaters, military commitments that drain resources without clear strategic gains, and a foreign policy that prioritizes military solutions over economic and diplomatic tools.
China's restraint isn't weakness. Every dollar the U.S. spends on Middle Eastern interventions is a dollar not spent on competing with China in Asia, a dollar not invested in American infrastructure, a dollar not used to strengthen America's actual competitive advantages.
Why on earth would China want to start doing the same thing? It’d be extraordinarily foolish.
The curse of superpower “help“
Last but not least, there’s a very good case to be made that a China intervention would actually make things far worse than they already are for the Iranians or the Palestinians.
Think about it: would it really serve the Palestinian cause to transform it into a China-US proxy war? The Palestinians, even though this is admittedly of little concrete help to them right now, are actually winning in the court of worldwide public opinion, precisely because what’s happening to them is so unjust and so disproportionate. They are David and Israel is Goliath.
The moment China would get involved, the narrative would no doubt transform from a struggle for human rights and justice into just another episode of superpower rivalry - and the world would stop seeing Palestinians as victims seeking justice and start seeing them as pawns in a game they don't control.
Same thing for Iran: look what’s happening to Ukraine as a proxy in the broader NATO-Russia confrontation. Have they been helped by the fact they were backed by NATO the way the Twitter crowd presumably wants Iran to be backed by China? Is that really how China can be “helpful”? The moment you become a proxy, no matter which “side’s”, you get dragged into escalations you didn't choose and conflicts that serve others’ interests rather than your own.
China is actually far more valuable to Iran and Palestine precisely because it remains above the military fray.
Look, for instance, at the reconciliation that China managed to broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia: it was only possible because China is a credible neutral mediator.
Same thing for Palestinians. China managed to reconcile the 14 different Palestinian factions with the 2024 Beijing Declaration, including Fatah and Hamas, precisely because it doesn't explicitly pursue its own military agenda in the region and is therefore seen as genuinely interested in Palestinian unity rather than using Palestinians for its own strategic purposes.
More broadly, China is helpful to the Global South as a whole because of its credibility as a different kind of great power, one that might actually change the rules of the game rather than just playing it more aggressively.
The irony is almost painful: the Twitter crowd demanding Chinese military intervention is essentially asking China to destroy the very thing that makes it uniquely valuable to the causes they claim to support. They want China to stop being the alternative to American hegemony and become just another version of it - which would help absolutely no one except, perhaps, the United States itself.
What they need to understand is that by refusing to be dragged into military quagmires, China preserves its ability to offer what the world actually needs: an alternative model of international relations.
Overall conclusion: be careful what you wish for. I completely understand the desire to see someone, anyone, stand up to Western aggression. I very much feel it myself. But however justified this anger is, it shouldn't lead us to advocate for perpetuating the exact system that created these tragedies in the first place.