Draws in China and Russia.
Christina Lin, 8-1-2018, Visiting Scholar at the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on China-Mediterranean/Middle East relations and ways for U.S.-China cooperation in a changing international order. Specific areas of interest include China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its rising role in the Middle East’s economic and security landscape, and the interplay between regional security architectures such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Organization for Security Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) as an evolving paradigm of China-U.S./West relations in a multi-polar world. Lin holds a Ph.D. in International Political Economy and Security Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is a former Transatlantic Academy Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Fellow at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University "What Would a U.S. War—or Peace—with Iran mean for China?," ChinaFile, https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/what-would-us-war-or-peace-iran-mean-china, KL
Trump’s tweet set off a barrage of heated discussions on long-standing U.S. regime change policy toward the Middle East, with some pundits such as retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor predicting a possible war with Iran that could draw in China and Russia.
Indeed, China has large stakes in Iran’s stability. It is the largest buyer of Iranian oil, and its largest trading partner, while Iran is a key strategic node connecting Asia and the Middle East on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Additionally, after decades of overthrown governments precipitating failed states and rising terrorism, China is against further Western-sponsored regime change in the region.
According to Sinologist John Garver, China’s proactive efforts in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal and peacemaking diplomacy in the Mideast is to prevent Iran’s collapse. China learned a harsh lesson from Iraq’s experience, which was transformed from a major regional power in the 1980s to a failed and fragmented state due to two lost wars with the U.S., in 1991 and 2003. Chinese strategists realize a war between the U.S. and Iran would leave the country in ruins and destabilize the entire Persian Gulf, threaten China’s access to energy sources for continued economic growth that undergirds the Communist Party’s legitimacy, jeopardize its flagship BRI project the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor by the Strait of Hormuz, and expand a larger swath of ungoverned space in the greater Middle East for terrorist actors to thrive.