Iran now, Taiwan later
(Last of two parts)
The question that should keep foreign policy thinkers awake at night is not what the United States did in June 2025. It is what the escalation since then tells every other major power about what is permissible.
I was very suspicious of China’s measured response to the Iran strikes. Beijing waited hours before its first official position, expressed that it was “highly concerned,” called for dialogue, and then did nothing. Foreign Minister Wang Yi condemned the strikes as “unacceptable” and warned against “the world reverting to the law of the jungle.” But there was no material support for Tehran.
I suspected this was some sort of cynical calculation.
China, as Iran’s “comprehensive strategic partner” and the top importer of Iranian oil, buying some 1.4 million barrels a day, chose silence. Why? Perhaps because the relationship with Washington is more consequential than the relationship with Tehran, and because a Trump visit to Beijing is expected in April.
But there is a deeper reason. I suspect Beijing is setting up a quid pro quo, where China’s acquiescence on Iran purchases American, or at least Western, acquiescence if Beijing acts in its own backyard.
Most major countries, including the Philippines, operate under some form of a One China policy. If the principle emerging from Iran is that unilateral force is acceptable when you have the power to use it, what stops China from acting on Taiwan, something that a One China policy implies to be “an internal affair?”
The Quemoy and Matsu crises of the 1950s, following China’s seizure of Hainan, were the last time the US seriously gamed out whether it would fight a conventional war with China over islands off the Chinese coast. The answer was ambiguous then. After the Iran precedent, the strategic ambiguity that has governed Taiwan policy since is weaker than ever.
If the principle emerging from Iran is that unilateral force is acceptable when you have the power to use it, what stops China from acting on Taiwan, something that a One China policy implies to be “an internal affair?”
The perverse logic of proliferation
Perhaps the most consequential effect of the Iran escalation is the lesson it teaches every other aspiring nuclear state: get the bomb fast, get it before they can stop you, and once you have it, you are untouchable.
Look at the asymmetry. North Korea has nuclear weapons that can credibly threaten Tokyo, Seoul and even California. The US does not strike North Korea.
Iran, which the US intelligence community assessed in March 2025 was “not building a nuclear weapon,” has been struck with devastating force. The message could not be clearer: a non-nuclear state is vulnerable; a nuclear state is not.
US behavior in Iran will, ironically, inspire other regimes to pursue the nuclear option more aggressively.
The Iran strikes have not made the world safer from nuclear weapons. They have made nuclear weapons more attractive to every regime that fears it might be next.
The hope in American democracy
I still believe the American people, at large, are rational people. Even if their leaders sometimes make large geopolitical mistakes. I suspect that once the initial patriotic fervor has faded, the American public will come to realize that they are being drawn into a conflict where Armageddon cannot be entirely discounted as a possibility.
I suspect they will express their displeasure at the ballot box in the 2026 midterms, as we already see in the many state-level seats being flipped Democratic even in districts Trump won by 20 or more points.
Because if this behavior is not corrected by the democratic process, we will be living in a world in which there are no moral, no ethical and no rational red lines.
For a country like the Philippines, situated in the most contested maritime space on earth, the implications are direct. If the principle that emerges from the Iran episode is that overwhelming power justifies unilateral action, then our security in the West Philippine Sea rests not on international law, not on the 2016 Arbitral Award, not on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS, but solely on the willingness of the US to sustain its commitment in the Indo-Pacific.
And we have just seen how quickly American strategic attention can shift.
China is watching. It is patient. It plays the long game. And every precedent that weakens the principle of rules-based order and strengthens the logic of unilateral force works in favor of its revisionist ambitions.
If the law of the jungle returns, as Wang Yi warned, the smaller animals are always the first to be devoured.
The author is a former congressman of Albay and also previously served as its provincial governor. He also earlier served as chief of staff of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Before entering politics, he was an award-winning stock market analyst who headed the Philippine research team of UBS and ING. He currently chairs the Institute for Risk and Strategic Studies Inc./Salceda Research.
