China Is Scrambling?

Three Reasons Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic for Xi

First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior Party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” that America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of CCP’s dogma of inevitability, which rested on Iran’s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.

Khamenei was the man who made the thesis feel real. Beijing’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei’s survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and he was still giving Friday sermons. Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.

Second, Xi’s own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people, that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection, does not match what happened in seventy-two hours over Tehran. State media can suppress the footage and the censors can scrub Weibo, but the ones who matter most, the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living, know what they saw. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether it was ever right about anything else.

Third, the energy math turns against Beijing. China bought 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and takes over 80% of everything Iran ships. Half of China’s total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. With Ayatollah Khamenei now dead and Iran’s military leadership weakened, the Gulf’s strategic balance shifts decisively toward Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the United States are strengthening. China’s old selling point was very simple and transactional: we buy your oil and never mention human rights. That pitch loses its utility when Gulf producers already feel protected by an American security guarantee that just proved, on live television, that it works.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-scrambling