China Benefits from Iran’s Proxy War

Before Operation Prosperity Guardian — a multinational naval coalition tasked with restoring stability in the Red Sea, which has so far been an abject failure — another multinational naval force charged with deterring aggression and piracy around the Horn of Africa failed in a similarly spectacular and predictable fashion.

Combined Task Force 153 was established in 2022. This 39-nation organization was tasked with deterring piracy in the region and preserving the integrity of the U.S.-led regime that guarantees the free navigation of the seas. As events subsequently demonstrated, CTF 153 was a flop.

China was not a part of that coalition, but Beijing was believed to share the task force’s objectives. The People’s Republic maintains a support base in nearby Djibouti, and Beijing is interested in avoiding the conditions that forced it to abandon Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015. It was assumed that maintaining regional stability was in everyone’s interest. But then the Houthis started shooting.

It was conspicuous when, in late November, the People’s Liberation Army ships ignored distress signals from the commercial vessels that had come under regular Houthi attacks. “Supposedly, those ships are there as part of a counter-piracy mission, but they did not respond,” U.S. brigadier general Pat Ryder said at the time — with a palpable note of disappointment. But that was no momentary lapse.

In the month that followed, Chinese naval assets have shown utter indifference toward the terrorism campaign that has all but closed the Suez Canal to Western commercial shipping. Despite hectoring from the Biden State Department, China remains committed to “passivity,” lobbying instead for diplomatic initiatives that might “cool down the situation.”

Maybe. Or perhaps Beijing is one of the few nations that has little to fear from this Iran-backed terror campaign:

As Chinese university lecturer and military strategist, Yun Hua, gleefully observed in December, “China’s COSCO Shipping Holding has become the only major shipping giant able to navigate the Red Sea.” By “weakening the influence of American maritime hegemony and striking a blow to the U.S. hegemonic system,” Iran’s proxy forces in the region have produced a victory for the emerging alliance of anti-American great powers actively engaged in a conflict designed to put an end to the age of American dominance.

As I wrote for the magazine within days of the October 7 massacre, this is all one war:

The enemies of the United States do not observe the careful distinctions between them that advocates of a humbler American foreign policy often emphasize. Sunni terrorists and Shiite regimes are not at one another’s throats when they share a common enemy. The nominally Marxist regime in Beijing has no problem joining hands with an Islamist theocracy. Decades-old historical grievances deter neither Iran nor China from supporting Russia’s murderous military campaigns on Syria’s eastern plateau and the steppes of Ukraine. They are united in their foremost goal: ending the age of American dominance. Challenges to American hegemony anywhere are challenges to it everywhere. America’s enemies recognize that, even if its friends do not.

Geopolitics is a zero-sum game. In the eternal contest among nations, a hard-power victory for one is a hard-power defeat for another. China recognizes that inescapable reality. America had better come to terms with it, too. And soon.