Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, has been widely described as an extraordinary assault on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. That is true, but it misses a critical dimension.
Let me explain why.
For years, Beijing has spent billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture. In late December 2025, the largest protests since 1979 erupted in Iran, fuelled by economic free fall and a population that no longer believed in the regime’s strength.
The government responded in January with massacres that killed tens of thousands, prompting the European Union to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization and further increasing the isolation of the regime. But President Trump didn’t launch Operation Epic Fury only to punish Khamenei for his massacres.
Trump launched it because every year Washington spends focusing on managing Tehran is another year Beijing gets to build control in the Pacific. At the same time, Beijing is providing the Islamic Republic with the tools to survive its own population’s rejection. Why?
Because a dependent Iran is a useful Iran. China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports at steep discounts. The shipments travel on a ghost fleet of tankers that switch off their transponders and relabel their cargo as Malaysian or Indonesian to circumvent American sanctions. Since 2021, the cumulative value of these purchases has exceeded $140 billion. This makes China the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt.
Good for Beijing. It gets cheap oil for its industrial base, saving billions annually compared to market-rate suppliers. And in exchange, China acquires influence over a nation of 90 million people sitting astride the world’s most consequential energy corridor. Meanwhile, Tehran, increasingly cut off from every other major economy, has nowhere else to turn.
Now the question is: will the orientation of the Middle East determine whether the U.S. can prevail in the defining confrontation of this century: a Chinese move against Taiwan?