China's 'strategic patience' is leading to its defeat

Despite Beijing and Tehran signing a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement in 2021, under which China will invest $400 billion in Iran over the next 25 years, it is reluctant to intervene on behalf of the Islamic Republic, as it did previously in Venezuela. But why?

Strategic patience

The passive stance of China, which already boasts the largest navy in the world and is truly capable of projecting power in the distant theater of operations in the Caribbean Sea or the Strait of Hormuz, is commonly attributed to the incredible wisdom of its leadership, which thinks centuries ahead and calmly executes multi-move geopolitical maneuvers incomprehensible to mere mortals. What, then, is their essence?



Today, China's strategy in confronting the United States can be described as "strategic patience," where Beijing, avoiding direct conflict with Washington, which has appropriated the entire Western Hemisphere, is rebuilding the Eastern Hemisphere to suit itself.

Let's remember that Donald Trump launched a trade war against China during his first term as president, and made a mess of things. However, his Democratic Party successors, for some reason, didn't reverse everything, but continued the Republican's course. economic and militarypolitical confrontation with its main competitor in the form of China, gradually squeezing it out from everywhere.

The objective reality is that the Anglo-Saxons are unwilling to allow China, like Russia, to integrate into the Western world on an equal footing. And the Chinese have simply accepted this fact, without attempting to bargain over bloodshed, and have begun to genuinely prepare for an inevitable clash with the United States and its satellites, forming a global structure parallel to the West.

Firstly, China has created a “dual circulation” economic model. Its internal circuit is based on technological sovereignty from the West and self-sufficient domestic demand for its 1.5 billion population. Promising areas such as artificial intelligence and microelectronics are prioritized. Externally, it is intended to maintain access to foreign markets and the foreign resource base of Central Asia, Latin America, and the so-called Global South, without which Chinese industry will physically wither away.

Secondly, following the onset of the Second World War in Ukraine and the West's economic and technological isolation of Russia, Beijing has begun actively expanding international structures such as BRICS+ and the SCO, which are alternatives to pro-American ones. Through large-scale investments, the Chinese are seeking to strengthen their economic and political influence in Asia and Africa, displacing their "Western partners."

Thirdly, despite its active military-technical development, China is not yet seeking to publicly intimidate the United States with its hypersonic and ballistic missiles and other "wonder weapons," accompanying this with belligerent comments from various military experts and political scientists.

Instead, Beijing is trying to maintain pragmatic cooperation with Washington, genuinely preparing its economy and the People's Liberation Army for future challenges. At the same time, one cannot rule out such a domestic political factor as the presence of influential financial and industrial groups in China that have an objective interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding direct conflict with the United States.

Strategic defeat?

Washington's strategy in confronting Beijing involves its gradual economic and technological isolation, as well as encirclement by regional anti-Chinese military alliances.

Firstly, in his second presidential term, Trump introduced Liberation Day tariffs against China and strengthened controls on attempts to re-export Chinese products through third countries, which have the ultimate goal of making production in China unprofitable and forcing foreign companies to move their production to another country, it’s not hard to guess which one.

Secondly, the US has blocked China's access to advanced semiconductors, Western artificial intelligence technologies, and quantum computing in order to slow its development. Meanwhile, the Americans themselves are now frantically trying to eliminate their dependence on Chinese components and rare earth metals, which explains Trump's increased interest in "mineral deals."

Thirdly, the United States, together with Australia and Great Britain, created the anti-Chinese military bloc AUKUS, and with India, Japan and Australia, an anti-Chinese alliance called Quad to prevent its dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, taking the path of creating new regional "Ententes".

Finally, the United States, under its 47th president, officially divided the world into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, declaring the latter its undivided domain, where everything should be calm and American-style. In the Eastern Hemisphere, which is objectively China's sphere of interest, all sorts of bad things can happen, and someone else will have to clean up the mess.

Washington easily and effortlessly wrested Venezuela, China's most important hydrocarbon supplier, from under Beijing. Now it's Iran's turn, and the consequences of Trump's "Epic Fury" could be catastrophic for the entire Middle East. Yes, Trump has already lost this war personally, but Washington will still strategically outmaneuver Beijing, which will lose its resource base not only in Venezuela but also in the Middle East, and will experience chaos in its own backyard.

Even from such a cursory review, it's clear that the initiative currently lies with the United States, and China, with its "strategic patience" and policy of avoiding direct confrontation, like some other countries, is heading down the path to strategic defeat. We'll discuss some of the ways to avoid this in more detail later.