The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him.

For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East. Russia waged war on Ukraine with Chinese materiel support, a gamble that was supposed to cement a powerful anti-western axis but has instead bled Moscow into dependence on Beijing. Regional proxies from Lebanon to Gaza added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China. The Chinese Communist party (CCP) propped up Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, too, as it funnelled narcotics and other ills into America.

The view in Beijing has been that the West is declining. Xi built his foreign policy on that premise

The view in Beijing has been that the West is declining. Xi built his foreign policy on that premise

That network has now suffered damage so severe that no trade deal – no matter how many soybeans China agrees to buy from the US, or how many Boeing jets it orders – can disguise the devastation. And at the end of this month, Xi must sit across from Donald Trump, the man who greenlit the strike on the Ayatollah in Tehran and the seizure of Maduro in Caracas.

Trump flies to Beijing on 31 March for three days of talks. It will be the first visit by an American president since 2017. The summit was designed to extend the one-year trade truce both sides struck last October, with its lower tariffs, soybean purchases and standoff over rare earths and chip exports. Both sides had been preparing for weeks. Then Khamenei was killed and everything else became secondary.

China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil on Earth. It imports more than 70 per cent of the crude it burns, and Iran has been one of its cheapest suppliers. Khamenei’s death throws the terms of that arrangement into doubt and the US is now threatening tariffs on any country that trades with Tehran. Beijing has yet to find a coherent response.

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