By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The grinding war in Iran has so drained American firepower that ahead of Trump’s forthcoming visit to China, geopolitical analysts are questioning the U.S.’s ability to defend Taiwan (NYT, May 9-10).

The NYT’s columnists David Pierson and Berry Wang maintain that this shifting calculus threatens to undercut Trump’s leverage in his high stakes summit.

Since the war began on 28 February, the United States has burned through around half of its long-range stealth cruise missiles and fired off roughly 10 times the number of Tomahawk cruise missiles it buys each year.

To some Chinese military and geopolitical analysts, the war has done even more than deplete U.S. munitions stockpiles.

It has also shattered America’s auro of dominance.

They argue that it has exposed a major flaw in U.S. war strategy: its inability to make weapons quickly enough to replenish its arsenal in a sustained, intense conflict.

This depletion “has significantly diminished the U.S. military’s ability to project its combat power, laying bare the shortcomings of its global military hegemony,” said Yue Gang, a retired colonel of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The NYT- columnists write that such arguments help fuel a narrative among hawkish Chinese commentators, and potentially in the government itself that “American forces could no longer effectively defend Taiwan should the United States and China ever go to war over the self-governing island.”

The logic of the ultra-nationalist Communists is that since the United States has been unable to achieve a quick victory against Iran, a regional military power, it would most likely have even less success against China, which the analysts see as a peer competitor.

From this Chinese perspective, the U.S. impasse with Iran weakens Trump’s position going into talks with Xi Jinping.

“Trump originally intended to visit China with the air of a swift victor, leveraging his position to increase pressure on China,” Yue said.

“Now, however, with the conflict deadlocked and the military campaign stalled, he finds himself in a difficult position.”

Trump, he added, “ will be unable to project the same arrogance.”

Trump is expected to seek deals with Xi to help reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China.

That could include pledges by China to buy more American soybeans and Boeing planes.

Trump will also press Xi about China’s continued purchases of Iranian oil, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said.

China, for its part, wants to stabilize ties with the Trump administration and extend the trade truce in order to focus on revitalizing its economy and developing its own technologies.

Beijing wants the Trump administration to reduce its support for Taiwan.

Xi warned Trump in February that China would “never allow Taiwan to be separated from China,” as he urged him to handle U.S. arms sales to the island with “prudence”.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, has hinted that Beijing could be seeking some kind of a breakthrough.

In a phone call last month with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Wang called for China and the United States to “open up new space” on the Taiwan issue, though he did not go into specifics.

A “Giant with a Limp”

Ahead of the summit, both countries have tried to maintain a neutral, if uneasy, calm.

China has trod a careful line in discussing the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, a conflict it says it opposed from the beginning.

The closest Xi has come to criticizing Trump, without naming him, was to denounce the flouting of international law as a “return to the law of the jungle.”

The effort to play nice, for now, could explain why Chinese state news outlets have been guarded in their comments about American vulnerabilities.

Reports and commentaries note the depletion of missiles and shifting of U.S. resources but generally stop short of framing the war as strategically beneficial for China, said Manoj Kewalramani, the head of Indo-Pacific studies at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore, India, who monitors Chinese media.

One notable exception was an essay in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s leading theoretical journal, which argued that “the conflict has overdrawn U.S. strategic resources, potentially leaving the country in a precarious position.”

Another was an editorial from Global Times, a Communist Party-controlled nationalist newspaper, that said if the U.S. military was unable to deploy weapons around the world, it would be a “giant with a limp.”

China has problems too

The White House and American military officials reject the notion that operations in the Middle East have undermined Washington’s posture in Asia.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that deterring China “through strength” was among the Defence Department’s four top priorities.

Asked during a Senate hearing last month if resources being diverted to the Middle East was weakening U.S. military readiness in the Pacific, Admiral Samuel Paparo Jr., the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, said,” I don’t see any real cost being imposed on our ability to deter China.”

However, questions abound about China’s own military prowess and readiness.

The PLA has not been tested in major combat for nearly five decades – the last time losing to Vietnam.

In addition, its top leadership has been thrown into disarray by recent political purges and a crackdown on corruption.

NYT-columnists insist that by comparison, the US military showcased its potency by assassinating Tehran’s leaders, establishing primacy over Iran’s skies and sending special forces into enemy territory to rescue a downed pilot.

“The United States has very successfully demonstrated its wartime capabilities in a way that China should consider credible,” said Drew Thompson, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Thompson also cautioned against comparing the conflict in Iran to a possible war over Taiwan.

In a defence of the island republic, the United States would largely rely on anti-ship missiles, which were used sparingly on Iran, to target a Chinese invasion or blockading fleet.

A message to U.S. Allies in the Asia-Pacific

Even without going to war, China can point to the complications the Trump administration is facing in the Persian Gulf region and argue to U.S. allies in Asia [foremost Japan, South Korea, Philippines] that Washington cannot be relied upon as a security guarantor.

“When allies face uncertainties over deployment and delayed equipment, it inevitable raises questions about the reliability of U.S. security assurances in the region,” said Wang Dong, executive director of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Beijing University.

The United States, Wang added,”is encountering the limits of its global military footprint.”

China may ultimately be emboldened by the war in Iran to become more assertive in Asia using gray-zone tactics – aggressive moves that fall short of inciting all-out war.

Over the last few months, for example, China has been building an island in disputed waters off the coast of Vietnam that will help it gain more control of the South China Sea.

Beijing is unlikely to expedite plans to invade Taiwan, said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Any such plan would be based primarily on “political factors” like a sudden move by the island territory to declare formal independence, Hart said.

The writer can be reached at:

shashimalla125@gmail.com