As the Iranian regime bottles up the Strait of Hormuz and President Trump pulls out all the stops to protect energy shipments and mitigate the damage to the global economy, doubts and fears about the latest stage of the war with Iran are growing. One increasingly common argument is that further operations against Iran weaken the effort to deter China from military aggression, so Trump should declare victory pronto and go home.
Since China is America's strongest adversary, deterring Xi Jinping is vital yet fiendishly difficult. Ending this stage of the Middle East war without sharply reducing Iran's ability to threaten U.S. interests would be a strategic defeat, and Xi would notice. Defeating Iran is not sufficient to deter China, but it is necessary.
Deterring China from attacking its neighbors, particularly Taiwan, is equally vital to our interests. A conflict in East Asia would devastate the global economy and domestic well-being: Bloomberg estimates the first year of fighting over Taiwan would slash global GDP by over 10 percent and cut nearly 7 percent off of American GDP. Losing a war with China would likely break our military, tear apart our alliance system, and leave Beijing as the sole master of Asia.
America's military is using weapons in Iran that would be handy to have against China: Along with our partners, we have probably launched more PAC-3 interceptor missiles in the past two weeks than will be made this year. The U.S. military is reportedly moving a prized air defense radar from South Korea to replace one the Iranians damaged in Jordan. It expended about $5.6 billion in munitions in the first two days of the war, and roughly the same amount in the following four days.
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