The Memo: Iran war roils Trump’s relations with China in advance of high-stakes trip

The war in Iran — and President Trump’s shifting tactics in fighting it — are roiling relations with China, just weeks before the president is to make a high-stakes trip there.

The complicated dynamics have a straightforward core. 

China has numerous ties with Iran, economically and strategically. At the same time, Beijing has zero interest in getting involved in an all-out conflict with the United States merely to prop up the Islamic Republic — a cause that is incidental, at best, to its larger priorities.

Experts say that Beijing is far more focused on the long-standing issue of Taiwan — and the bigger question of China’s position in the world — than the minutiae of the Iran conflict.

That said, China is not shedding many tears over Trump’s decision to launch a war in the Middle East where the prognosis now looks uncertain and there is at least some plausible chance that the U.S. could get further bogged down.

“The war in Iran has presented China with a significant strategic opportunity,” Henrietta Levin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told this column.

Levin, a senior fellow with the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, said that this general belief is “exacerbated by the fact that the United States is drawing down its missile [stock] so rapidly, moving missile capacity from Asia to the Middle East. I mean, that’s a dream for China!”

Levin emphasized, however, that this did not mean China would provide overt backing for Iran to prolong the war. She noted that China’s relationship with other Gulf nations is in fact deeper than its more “transactional” dynamics with Iran.

China is attempting to thread the needle through this complicated strategic landscape. 

Its approach has amounted to an effort to continue some measure of........

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