Did China and Iran Just Bait the United States Into Its Final War?
On the uncomfortable question: "Where is China?"
Many of my readers will know that I have not been an easy ally on this question. Within the broad constellation of voices that constitute the anti-imperialist movement — a movement I have committed a significant part of my life and work to — I have been, for some time now, one of the few willing to ask a question that makes people uncomfortable: Where is China?
It is not a question that wins you friends. I have received no small amount of criticism for raising it — from colleagues I respect, from readers whose solidarity I value, from organizers who view any skepticism directed at the multipolar bloc as a concession to the imperial narrative. I understand the impulse. When you have spent decades documenting the crimes of Washington, when you have watched the machinery of American empire grind entire civilizations into dust, there is an understandable desire to see its challengers as uncomplicated forces for good. To question Beijing’s commitment, to ask whether China’s strategic patience is solidarity or something colder and more transactional — this feels, to many, like a betrayal.
But I have always believed that a movement which cannot interrogate its own sympathies is a movement already dying. If we cannot subject the powers we hope will counterbalance American hegemony to the same unsparing scrutiny we direct at Washington, we have not built an alternative to empire — we have merely chosen a different one to worship. The inability to critically evaluate the side you wish to see prevail is not loyalty. It is the same surrender of independent thought that animates every fascist movement in history, the same collapsing of moral reasoning into tribal allegiance. I strongly feel we must be better than that. We must demand more of ourselves and of those we champion, or we forfeit the moral authority that distinguishes dissent from propaganda.
So I have asked the hard questions. Publicly. Repeatedly. Often to my own detriment.
But I have also — always — kept searching. Searching for the evidence that might challenge my own skepticism, that might reveal a deeper architecture beneath what has often looked, from the outside, like Chinese indifference to the fates of those resisting American power. I do not ask difficult questions because I want to be right. I often ask them because I want to be wrong — because I want to find, beneath the diplomatic pleasantries and the trade agreements and the cautious abstentions at the United Nations, something that resembles a genuine strategy of resistance.
And now, thirty-two days into this war, I believe I may have found it.
The coordinated American and Israeli assault on Iran, initiated on February 28, 2026, bore every hallmark of the imperial playbook that has governed Washington’s conduct across West Asia for a quarter century: the decapitation strike against senior leadership, the sustained bombardment of military and civilian sites, the confident declarations from the Pentagon that the enemy’s capabilities were being systematically dismantled. The opening salvos killed the country’s Supreme Leader and triggered a region-wide conflagration that, thirty-two days later, shows no sign of abating. What was not discussed — what remains largely invisible beneath the fog of wartime propaganda — is the possibility, now approaching probability, that Beijing and Tehran both anticipated this moment, prepared for it, and constructed a strategic architecture designed to ensure that American aggression would become the very mechanism of American decline.
The Twenty-Five-Year Blueprint
The foundation of this convergence was never a secret. As the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has documented, Beijing and Tehran codified a sweeping 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership in 2021, covering economic integration, security cooperation, and technological exchange. Western commentators, when they noticed it at all, treated the agreement as a vague gesture of solidarity — two authoritarian states making noises for domestic audiences. This was a catastrophic misreading.
Beneath the diplomatic language lay the scaffolding of a military-technological ecosystem. Over the preceding decade, as the Small Wars Journal has detailed in its analysis of the current conflict, collaboration between Beijing and Tehran expanded steadily into missile development, satellite infrastructure, intelligence sharing, cybersecurity, and electronic warfare. Joint naval drills with Russia in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman, conducted annually since 2019, were not theater — they were rehearsals for a moment both capitals understood was coming. And when Iran hosted the first-ever Shanghai Cooperation Organization military exercise on its soil in December 2025, as MERICS observed, it sent a clear geopolitical signal about the depth of Tehran’s integration into the multilateral security architecture led by Beijing and Moscow.
The question that the credulous Beltway establishment refused to ask was a simple one: what was all of this preparation for?
