Wilder: China's War On The U.S.

John Wilder's latest piece is "China’s Unrestricted Economic War on America." He notes that in 1999,  two PLA colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, wrote a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare describing how to take down the U.S. without open warfare. And they have been following it since. He explains:

    The idea was simple: use every possible tool to erode the enemy’s strength while pretending you’re just a friendly neighbor.

    How many of those boxes have they checked?

• Trade warfare? Done. They flooded our markets, stole our manufacturing base, and used the WTO like a Trojan horse.
• Financial warfare? They’ve been buying up U.S. debt, manipulating currency, and positioning themselves to pull the rug out when the time is right, which might be now.
• Ecological warfare? See the citrus groves and the poultry barns and the Michigan fungus folks.  Introduce a pathogen here, a pest there, and watch the food supply strain.
• Smuggling warfare?  Fentanyl, anyone?
• Cyber and network warfare?  Constant hacks, intellectual-property theft, missing hard drives from Los Alamos, and infrastructure probes that never quite rise to the level of “war.”
• Psychological and media warfare?  Want to bet that China was stoking the fires on both sides in Minnesota during George Floyd?   

And this doesn't even include China buying up U.S. farms and ranches, buying up land abutting U.S. military bases, and flying drones over sensitive locations.  

    I know that a lot of readers probably disagree with the war against Iran, but it is important to understand that Iran is just a pretext. If it were just about Iran and its nuclear arsenal, the Democrat leadership--at the least the ones that matter--would be all for it. But the real target of the war is China. 

    Zineb Riboua, in an article penned for The Free Press, explained at the beginning of March:

    Operation Epic Fury, this weekend’s 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. 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 other words: This is all about China.

She continues:

    Iran’s value to China also extends to proxy warfare. When Iran’s Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in late 2023, the consequences rippled across the global economy. Container traffic through the Red Sea fell by 90 percent within three months. Goods worth roughly $1 trillion were disrupted in the first seven months. The rerouting of ships around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope added nearly two weeks and about $1 million in fuel costs to every voyage, driving freight rates between Asia and Europe.

    The U.S. bore the heaviest burden of response. Carrier strike groups were deployed, air campaigns were sustained for months, and precision munitions costing between $1 million and $4 million per interceptor were expended at a rate that, by mid-2025, had consumed roughly a quarter of America’s high-end missile interceptor inventory. Last week, it was reported that Tehran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-made supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, capable of threatening American carriers now massing in the Persian Gulf. Earlier, Chinese suppliers shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a key missile propellant ingredient, to an Iranian port, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that Israel spent 12 days destroying. Why would Beijing do this? And what does that mean for the United States? Answering those questions requires looking beyond Iran and toward the broader global contest in which Iran plays a role.

    Start with oil, because oil is where the entire relationship begins. 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.

    The arrangement works beautifully 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. When Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei received Chinese president Xi Jinping in Iran in 2016, he praised the 25-year strategic partnership as “totally correct and endowed with wisdom,” adding pointedly that “Western governments have never been able to win the Iranian nation’s trust.” Khamenei was not merely flattering a guest. He was describing a structural reality: Iran’s economy now runs on Chinese money, and both capitals know it.

    In 2021, the 25-Year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership committed China to invest an estimated $400 billion across Iran’s energy, banking, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors, formalizing a relationship that was already underway. The deeper this integration runs, the less leverage anyone else has over Tehran, and the more leverage Beijing accumulates.

    Meanwhile, Chinese-flagged ships sailed through with less interference. Beijing contributed no vessels to the multinational protection force and issued no condemnation of the attacks. In fact, Chinese satellite companies were providing the Houthis with intelligence to enable their targeting of commercial vessels.

    The logic here is simple. Every dollar the United States spends defending Red Sea shipping lanes is a dollar unavailable for submarine production, Pacific bases, or Taiwan contingency planning. Every carrier group stationed in the Gulf of Aden is a carrier group absent from the Western Pacific. Iran’s proxies, armed with Iranian weapons and supported by Iranian intelligence, function as a mechanism of American strategic attrition, and the costs fall entirely on Washington while Beijing accumulates strategic gains. 

Real Clear Defense similarly noted in mid-March that the war is really about China, explaining:

    Iran is a theater, but it does not hold the final stage. The real battlefield lies within the larger contest between the United States and China over the architecture of the international order.

    Seen through that lens, American military pressure on Iran—and earlier actions against Venezuela—assume wider significance. These moves do not merely punish hostile regimes. They strike at elements of the geopolitical framework Beijing has spent decades constructing.

    China’s rise has depended not only on domestic economic growth but also on the steady expansion of influence abroad. Beijing has cultivated relationships with states willing to trade with China, align diplomatically with China, or simply welcome a world less dominated by Washington.

    Iran occupies a crucial place in that system.

    The oil that sustains Tehran’s economy has long flowed eastward to China, often at discounted prices. Countries now under American pressure have supplied nearly 17 percent of China’s imported oil, providing Beijing with a quiet but significant buffer against Western leverage.

    To remove Iran from that equation—or even threaten doing so—is to reach directly into China’s long-term energy planning and development strategy.  

    Iran's importance to China is reflected in the assistance China has given Iran. The Strategist reports:

    Several reports in recent weeks have revealed the extent of China’s active support for Iran. The Financial Times reported on 15 April that China had given Iran a commercial reconnaissance satellite, providing Tehran with precise targeting information to hit US military facilities in the Middle East. A Chinese company, Earth Eye Co, reportedly built and launched the TEE-01B satellite and provided in-orbit delivery to Iran. Another Chinese company, Emposat, also supplied Iran with satellite data and control services. These must have helped Iran target US bases in the war.

    Other reports point to a Chinese geospatial AI and software company, MizarVision, which published satellite imagery with tagging data on several US military facilities prior to and even during the war.

    On 12 April, CNN reported that China was providing Iran with new air-defence systems in the coming weeks. These were shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, CNN said. These are relatively short-range systems, but they still represent a serious danger to both helicopters and low-flying combat aircraft. The US-built Stinger is a good example, and its earlier version was credited with playing a major role in defeating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. CNN’s sources said that China was shipping the weapons through third countries to hide their origin. China has denied the report.

    A 3 April Telegraph report revealed that China was providing Iran with chemicals for fuel for ballistic missiles. The report added that four sanctioned vessels were at Iranian ports, with one more ship waiting offshore. They’d come from China’s Zhuhai Gaolan port and were transporting sodium perchlorate, a precursor material for solid-fuel rocket propellant. The quantity is reported to be enough for hundreds of ballistic missiles. The five ships reportedly belong to the Iran Shipping Line Group, which is under sanctions by the US, Britain and the European Union.  

    So how long should we expect the war to continue? That's hard to say, but one data point has to do with China's strategic oil reserve.  Prior to the war breaking out, "China surged oil imports in January and February alone by 16 percent, with Russia exporting around 300,000 additional barrels per day to China," and "China’s combined strategic and commercial reserves now stand at 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion barrels, covering roughly four months of imports." That means that the U.S. blockade may need to go on for more than four months to be effective. But even that may be in doubt, as China expects to benefit from the UAE leaving OPEC. 

     I fully expect things to get spicy this summer as China begins to feel the bite of sanctions. First, China's Leftist tools will be working overtime to protest and disrupt life in the U.S. and prepare for cheating in the fall elections. Second, we should see China step up its modes of attack outline in Unrestricted Warfare. In that regard, it is notable that a synthetic opioid, cyclorphine, has started showing up on American streets.