Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet at Gimhae International Airport in October 2025. US-China competition cannot escape the repercussions of the US-Iran War. (Shutterstock/Carlos110)

How the Iran War Will Undermine US Competition with China

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A war with Iran will be a disastrous strategic detour for the United States as it seeks to compete diplomatically, economically, militarily, and technologically with China.

In the span of a few months, President Donald Trump has threatened to seize Greenland, staged a military raid on Venezuela—hauling its president to New York to face trial and claiming its oil fields as the spoils—and has now launched a war with Iran aimed at dismantling its nuclear and missile programs and toppling its government. His defenders call this strength. His critics call it recklessness. Both are missing a more fundamental problem: these moves reflect a worldview built for a world that no longer exists.

President Trump sees power the way some 19th-century geostrategists did, in terms of territory, fossil fuels, corruption, and coercive military dominance over rivals. Control the Arctic routes. Control the oil. Suppress a hostile regime’s most dangerous capabilities. Each of these objectives has a certain logic. The problem is that logic made more sense in a different century, not the current one.

What’s conspicuously absent from the Trumpian strategic posture is anything that will actually determine American power and prosperity over the next 50 years: semiconductor supply chains, artificial intelligence, clean energy manufacturing, American workforce development, and the allied economic architecture and technological ecosystem needed to compete with China. These don’t register in Trump’s worldview because they don’t fit his Phil Leotardo (from The Sopranos) mindset. You can’t bomb your way to chip fab dominance. You can’t coerce your way to a resilient supply chain.

This isn’t an argument against hard power or the moral deficiencies of the regime in Tehran. Military strength matters, and there are circumstances in which force plays an essential role in American strategy. The question is whether force is being used as an instrument within a coherent and integrated national security strategy, or as a substitute for one. 

What we’re seeing from this administration looks much more like the latter. Air strikes without a strategic end-goal or theory of victory. Diplomacy without a clear purpose. Coercion without coalition-building. Military action that consumes the fiscal, political, and strategic bandwidth needed for the competition that actually defines this century.

That bandwidth problem is more serious than it appears.........

© The National Interest