China’s Gambit in the Gulf

In the United States, the democratic socialists and the Hamas sympathizers often march arm in arm. Abroad, news that China is exporting surface-to-air missiles to Iran reveals the extent of the alliance between Islamists and the Chinese Communist Party. The domestic red-green alliance threatens to immiserate a generation of Americans. The international variant could also do the same.

The extent to which Beijing coordinates with other anti-American capitals, such as Moscow and Tehran, has been the subject of considerable controversy for decades. Many point out there is very little ideological overlap between the mullahs, who believe the world should be governed by clerics, and aggressively atheistic Communists.

Others observe there are important strategic disagreements between them. China clearly intends to supplant Russia's traditional dominance of Central Asia, which alarms the Kremlin, and Tehran casts a wary eye on encroachments into its neighborhood. All three are significant producers of oil and gas, but China's massive manufacturing sector makes it the only net importer of the trio. Some hoped that China would moderate Putin's ambitions against Ukraine for fear of upsetting one of its largest export markets in Europe and would forbid Iran from blocking the Strait of Hormuz and thus driving up the price of oil.

Those thoughts and hopes appear to be the stuff of dreams, not reality. Beijing's statements about the Strait of Hormuz have not been enthusiastically supportive of the Iranian campaign. But the Chinese exports to Iran of ballistic missile technology before this year's fighting and continued exports today show that Xi Jinping is backing Tehran's moves much as he is supporting Vladimir Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine. There is little love lost between America's enemies, but their hatred and fear of American power so far outweighs other considerations.