There is an old Chinese proverb: Sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight. It is not merely a saying. It is, and has always been, a strategy. As the US and Israel carry out their campaign against Iran and demolish the rules-based order, China is conspicuously absent from the battlefield but is gaining far more from the sidelines than any frontline could offer. Every week the war continues, Beijing’s strategic position improves. Every bomb dropped on Tehran advances Chinese interests more reliably than any diplomatic initiative could. This is the historical pattern of how every previous superpower transition has occurred: Not through the defeat of the old hegemon on the battlefield, but through its exhaustion and overreach. China is following a very old script — one, ironically, that the US itself used.
In 1939, Britain was the world’s dominant power. Six years later, it was broken. Not defeated in battle, but bled dry by the cost of victory. Britain barely won the war while the US seized the peace. The transfer of global primacy was simply the result of British exhaustion. The same dynamic played out in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. The US did not defeat the erstwhile Soviet Union in open battle. It armed the mujahideen, sustained the conflict, and watched as the USSR bled itself across a decade of unwinnable war. The Soviet withdrawal was followed within two years by the collapse of the Soviet State itself. America spent relatively little. The Soviets spent everything. China is now using the same playbook against the US. It needs only to ensure that the US keeps firing. The objective is American exhaustion across four simultaneous pressure points, each calibrated to erode support for a conflict the US can neither win cleanly nor exit gracefully.
Casualties: US losses remain in double figures, painful but politically manageable. The country is, however, one incident away from catastrophe — a troop-carrying aircraft brought down or a mass casualty strike on US personnel. The moment the death toll crosses three digits, the political arithmetic changes irreversibly. China’s interest is in keeping the pressure simmering at precisely that threshold.
Oil: The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s supply transits, remains contested. Every week of disruption at the Strait drives energy prices higher, eroding the economic confidence that underpins US President Donald Trump’s base. China, which has secured energy arrangements with Russia and Iran, is largely insulated. The US’s allies aren’t.
Duration: What was sold as a swift campaign has now crossed three weeks. Public tolerance for conflict erodes with each passing week. The crossing of one month, a psychological milestone, transforms a military operation into a quagmire in the public imagination. The prolonged conflict is itself a victory for Beijing.
Denial of exit: Sustained Iranian capacity to strike Israeli cities, US bases, and the infrastructure of American allies, denies Washington the credibility of a successful withdrawal. Every time the US inches toward an exit, another strike reopens the wound. This is precisely what the US did to the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The US cannot sustain two simultaneous major conflicts across opposite ends of the Earth. The war in Iran is depleting the political will needed to mobilise a war-weary nation for a second front. The entire architecture of US deterrence in the Indo-Pacific is premised on Washington’s capacity to act. That capacity is being devoured in the Persian Gulf.
The real prize for China is Taiwan. If China moves on Taiwan in the coming months, Trump cannot rally a nation already exhausted by one foreign war for another. America’s allies in the Pacific, watching Washington’s credibility dissolve, will recalculate. The deterrence that has kept Taiwan safe for seven decades rests on the belief that the US will act. The US itself is dismantling that belief.
As Iranian energy is disrupted, China redirects Russian supply to cover its own needs, insulating itself from the oil shock simultaneously inflicted on the West. Russia gains fresh leverage over Europe, which has been arming Ukraine. The Ukraine détente Trump has been attempting to broker becomes entangled with the West Asian crisis. The war that was supposed to weaken the Russia-China-Iran axis has, through spectacular miscalculation, strengthened all three simultaneously.
The US will be seen as the power that “martyred” a religious leader, razed cities in an Islamic country, killed schoolchildren, and destabilised the energy markets on which the Gulf’s prosperity depends. That anger will outlast the conflict by decades. China, which brokered the Saudi-Iran normalisation in 2023, will broker the post-war regional architecture too, not because it is more virtuous, but because there is no one else left standing with clean hands.
Britain handing global primacy to America in 1945 was the unavoidable consequence of fighting a war it could not afford. Similarly, the US handing strategic advantage to China in 2026 is the consequence of the same delusion, that overwhelming firepower can substitute strategic wisdom.
Sun Tzu observed that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. China has not fired a single shot in this conflict. The dragon doesn’t need to fight tigers. It can wait until they exhaust each other and simply claim the prize.
In February 1945, then UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt and USSR Premier Joseph Stalin met at Yalta in Crimea to divide the post-War world. Stalin insisted the meeting be held on Soviet soil. Roosevelt sat at the centre. Churchill presided over the quiet dismantling of the British Empire. One wonders where America will be sitting by the time China is done.
Raghu Raman is founding CEO, NATGRID, and a former soldier. The views expressed are personal
