The Chinese famously play the long game. The high priest of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, coldly noted, “China’s leaders avoid direct confrontation and prefer to achieve their objectives indirectly.” Basically, in every international conflict the Chinese frame a position but never actively participate in any war directly. This allows them to provoke from the sidelines, but never commit to any boots-on-ground or risk any sovereign wherewithal. If anything, the Chinese gain commercially by selling weapons to one side or the other in the conflict.

The last three decades have seen major global conflicts in the Middle East theatre (Gulf War-1, Gulf War-2, ISIL and other terror group wars, Syrian Civil War, Yemen Civil War, and most recently, in Iran), Ukraine War, African conflicts (Congo, Darfur, Somalia, Libya, Mali etc.,), Balkan Wars, and Afghanistan. All these bloody conflicts have entailed the active military participation of the United States of America. Besides the obvious human costs, Brown University estimated that the total financial cost to the USA was about $8 trillion for only the post-9/11 wars ~ not including the very expensive ongoing war with Iran.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have literally staked nothing in terms of human costs or financial costs, save for earning from each of these conflicts, by selling weaponry. On the contrary, the Chinese have steadily and increasingly been upping their investments in developing new military technologies, platforms, and capabilities, without risking any damage to their military infrastructure. Conservative estimates of about $5 trillion investment in the Chinese military in the commensurate three decades, without including “off-budget” defense-related expenditures, tells a parallel story.

While this figure of investment still makes China the second biggest spender on the military behind the USA ~ the investments in the defence budgets of the USA are getting neutralized by the expenditure outflow incurred in participating in global conflicts. The USA’s longest (for twenty years) and most expensive (approx. $2 trillion) war in Afghanistan (2001- 2021) personifies this conundrum. Launched to remove the Taliban from ruling Afghanistan, it ended twenty years later with the humiliating abandonment of the Afghanistan theatre, and the successful return of the Taliban government. Neither was the long-term transformation of Afghan governance achieved, nor was the sustenance of democracy.

Meanwhile the wily Chinese, who share a physical border with Afghanistan (the 76-kilometer long Wakhan Corridor) connecting China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province, sat out of the conflict for those twenty years. They simply pursued their patent “non-intervention”, economic opportunism, and simple security containment (to deter the likes of China-facing groups like East Turkestan Islamic Movement), at the Wakhan Corridor.

At the end of twenty years, the Chinese have kept their embassy open in Kabul and accepted a Taliban-appointed Ambassador to Beijing, thereby signaling de facto normalcy with the Afghan Taliban government. After all these years of human and financial investments, the USA remains officially shunned in Afghanistan. This Chinese ingression into the Afghan narrative without committing anything substantial fits aptly with Sun Tzu’s treatise in The Art of War, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. Today, the USA finds itself committed to yet another conflict in Iran, while China is content to sit out and perhaps cut a few lucrative arms deals.

In the first 24 hours of the Iran operation, the USA is believed to have spent $779 million on air strikes, bombs/missiles and other operational and logistics costs. While there is no clarity on the final outcome of the conflict, analysts like Kent Smetters of the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimate that a prolonged war (as is most probable given the current trajectory) could cost upwards of $95 billion to the US. This obviously does not weigh in other macro-economic impact like energy implications, trade disruptions, and breakdown of global supply chains, all of which could take up the bill to well above $210 billion for the US.

Recent history of all major US militaristic interventions with far less accomplished (and even determined) opposition in the swathes of Iraq-Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, or even Libya, do not augur well for the final outcome of the war in Iran for the US. Irrespective of the outcome, the drain on the US economy is bound to bleed its already stretched coffers and strained economy ~ the Chinese are yet again sitting out of the conflict militarily, and protecting their economy (barring the global impact) and also their military wherewithal. If anything, the Chinese are also milking the opportunity afforded by the Trump-Netanyahu brazenness to take a rare moral high ground.

The attack on Iran has further strengthened the Chinese equation with Russia, as they jointly call out the unwarranted belligerence by the US. Meanwhile, Delhi remains awkwardly silent after having just concluded a badly timed Prime Ministerial visit to Israel, just days before the attack on Iran. The restrained diplomacy and cautiously pro-Iranian position could further bolster China’s stand (after the conflict) on the high tables of international diplomacy, as countries across the globe will grapple to make sense of Donald Trump’s incorrigibility and unpredictability.

A long-drawn US engagement in Iran (as is likely) will tie down US resources to the advantage of the Chinese. Analysts believe that the ability of the US to maintain its offensive (or even defensive) posture in the Indo-Pacific (especially around the South China Seas or Taiwan) will get severely compromised. Going forward, Iran will get more decisively pushed into the Chinese “camp” as the only alternative. Continuing sanctions of Iran will make it even more reliant on China economically and diplomatically and open a big market for Chinese wares.

All this could be achieved by the Chinese without firing a single shot. Commercially, serious murmurs of the Chinese peddling their CM-302 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles are already doing the rounds. While the US economy remains structurally stronger than the Chinese, the Chinese are growing at 4-5 per cent, while the US is slower at 2-3 per cent. The US is suffering high federal debt (100 per cent of GDP), while the Chinese have lower central government debt. On the critical innovation and technology front, the Chinese are regularly stunning the American with their advancements. With this background, the costly US war in Iran will only bleed the Americans even further, while the wily Chinese continue to secure and protect their interests relatively better.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)

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