The increasingly intractable conflict between the U.S. and Iran is exposing American military and strategic vulnerabilities and offering important lessons to its arch-rival.
China is watching as the U.S. fails to break through an Iranian blockade and uses heavy firepower, the Trump administration struggles to extricate itself from an unpopular war, global gas prices are rising, and Pentagon strategy documents reveal that fending off Beijing is no longer a top priority.
As President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepare for a high-stakes meeting next week, the U.S. is trapped in a fragile truce. With disillusioned allies refusing to help and a war that is creating political problems for Trump at home, current and former U.S. defense officials fear that China will hold the cards at the meeting.
"The Chinese would rightly say, "What do you have left to build deterrence?", said a former defense official. "For a big deal to work, you have to have the power to back it. You can't bluff on that."
The meeting between the two leaders comes two months after Trump postponed an initial meeting in Beijing because he needed to focus on the then-burgeoning war. But the focus of the U.S. military campaign appears to have shifted from destroying Iran’s nuclear programs to a more chaotic and protracted conflict over who controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies pass.
“The Chinese military is closely studying our operations against Iran to find vulnerabilities that it could exploit in a conflict with the United States,” a defense official said.
He said China is monitoring how U.S. military commanders plan operations and execute their plans, down to the pace of missile strikes and intelligence gathering.
Beijing, which is rapidly stockpiling long-range missiles and drones, has almost certainly noticed that the United States is struggling to reopen the strait or stop Iranian attacks on Navy and allied ships throughout the region. The redeployment of ships, air defenses and troops from the Pacific to the Middle East is also a sign that the US arsenal is not unlimited.
The Pentagon "is still showing strong tactical results," a defense official said. "But without a clear policy and strategy, we are suffering at the operational level of warfare." The question they must answer is whether this is just a problem for the current administration or a broader problem in American warfare.
US defense officials have publicly insisted that the relocated assets, which include an aircraft carrier strike group and several Navy ships with 2,500 Marines, have not reduced US combat readiness in the Pacific.
"I don't see a real cost to our ability to deter China," Admiral Samuel Paparo, who heads the military task force monitoring the Pacific, told lawmakers last month.
He said the operational and combat experience gained by the crews of US ships would be invaluable, especially compared to Chinese forces, which have less experience in defending themselves.
Chinese forces are far more advanced than Iran, but Tehran has proven itself to be particularly adept at using cheap kamikaze drones to carry out large-scale attacks and overcome some air defense systems.
China’s missile arsenal is likely much larger than Iran’s, so “they could treat some of their missiles the way Iran treated their drones,” warned Becca Wasser, a defense strategy expert who served on the congressionally appointed National Defense Strategy Commission.
“They don’t need to use drones to confuse air defense radars and overload systems in the same way,” she said. “So there’s no real asset management, at least in the early stages of a potential war with the United States.”
Beijing is fighting its own battles. China has not fought a war since the 1979 invasion of Vietnam and is in the midst of a sweeping military purge that this week led to the death sentences of two former defense ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Feng. The crackdown has led to the dismissal of more than 100 senior military officers since 2022.
But just as the United States has watched Beijing’s military buildup, the Chinese government has been closely monitoring U.S. forces for decades. It dates back at least to Operation Desert Storm, when the United States first used precision weapons. China began launching its first aircraft carriers after the global financial crisis in 2008 and has invested heavily in long-range missiles to keep American forces at bay.
“They know how we project power,” said a second former defense official. “They know our reliance on tankers, on bases, how we conduct our airstrikes, our non-kinetic strikes, our use of electronic warfare, our use of cyberwarfare. They study all of that very carefully. It’s an opportunity for them to learn the American way of waging war.”
China is also likely watching how quickly America is using up its high-end missiles—from the Tomahawk to the to the Patriot air defense.
"They know that any missile used in Iran is a missile that cannot be used for deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region," the former official stressed.