China smiles as the US gets locked in Iran war

There is an old Chinese proverb: Sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight.

- Raghu Raman

Itis not merely a saying. Itis, and has always been, a strategy. As the US and Israel carry out their campaign against Iran and demolish the rules-based order, China is conspicuously absent from the battlefield but is gaining far more from the sidelines than any frontline could offer. Every week the war continues, Beijing’s strategic position improves. Every bomb dropped on Tehran advances Chinese interests more reliably than any diplomatic initiative could. This is the historical pattern of how every previous superpower transition has occurred: Not through the defeat of the old hegemon on the battlefield, but through its exhaustion and overreach. China is following a very old script — one, ironically, that the US itself used.In 1939, Britain was the world’s dominant power. Six years later, it was broken. Not defeated in battle, but bled dry by the cost of victory. Britain barely won the war while the US seized the peace. The transfer of global primacy was simply the result of British exhaustion. The same dynamic played out in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. The US did not defeat the erstwhile Soviet Union in open battle. It armed the mujahideen, sustained the conflict, and watched as the USSR bled itself across a decade of unwinnable war. The Soviet withdrawal was followed within two years by the collapse of the Soviet State itself. America spent relatively little. The Soviets spent everything. China is now using the same playbook against the US. It needs only to ensure that the US keeps firing. The objective is American exhaustion across four simultaneous pressure points, each calibrated to erode support for a conflict the US can neither win cleanly nor exit gracefully.