‘Temu warfare’: China as next superpower?
Dubai—“The lesson from Tehran is that decapitation is not the end of the war,” argued Max Lo, executive director of the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society. “Iran shows that … the body can keep fighting even if the head is targeted.”
The spectacular failure of the joint United States-Israel attack to dislodge the regime in Iran has served as a laboratory for all sorts of frontline nations. It shows that even a Venezuela-style decapitation operation wouldn’t necessarily mark the end of collective resistance to colonization. Just hours after Iran’s top leaders were assassinated last month, regional commanders managed to strike a dozen Western facilities—thanks to the so-called “Mosaic” defense doctrine, driven by decentralized yet pre-coordinated military resistance against foreign aggression. But Taiwan is also rightly worried about how the extended conflict has imperiled US allies.
Analyses show that the US and Israel deployed over 5,000 munitions in the first 96 hours of the conflict. More than the tag price ($10–$16 billion), the bigger concern is replenishment, which could take years. The high burn rate—not to mention the unimaginable horror inflicted on the civilian population and critical infrastructure across Iran—could soon leave the US with a perilously diminished stockpile. German defense tycoon Armin Papperger recently warned that air defense stockpiles of Western powers are “empty or nearly empty”—underscoring that, should the war continue for another month, there will be “nearly no missiles available.”
The situation is particularly acute for Taiwan, where a national security official warned that the US “is spending too much time on other” battlefields, thus contributing to further “imbalance” in any potential future conflict between Taipei and Beijing. Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping has made it clear that the People’s Liberation Army should be operationally ready for a potential invasion of the self-ruling island next year, should he politically decide to do so based on his assessment of the balance of forces.
“No one really calculated in using up large portions of the inventory in an unrelated war, or a war of choice, especially one of this scale,” warned weapons expert Eric Heginbotham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referring to the rapid depletion of American Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles as well as ship-launched Tomahawk missiles in the past three weeks.
There is more in favor of China. After systematically dominating all global supply chains of critical minerals, China today fully dominates the production of the very raw materials that would be essential for the replenishment of American weapons systems in the future. Meanwhile, China continues to purchase discounted Iranian oil with minimal interruption. Having built massive renewable energy and nuclear power capacity at home, China—already one of the largest oil producers on Earth—is far less susceptible to energy shock than other key US allies with heavily privatized energy sectors and limited domestic power generation capacity.
Far from “shutting down” the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is now actively facilitating the passage of oil tankers relying on renminbi-based transactions, further enhancing Beijing’s “de-dollarization” agenda. China will likely have an expanded foothold in post-war Iran, which would use its expanding renminbi-based earnings to solicit Chinese assistance for reconstruction and industrial recovery.
And this brings us to China’s ultimate advantage, namely, manufacturing capacity. Over the past month, Iran has effectively reinvented 21st-century warfare by showing that “saturation strategy”—deploying a massive amount of cost-effective drones and missiles—can progressively exhaust even the most advanced and networked defense systems.
This explains why Iran has managed to strike US bases and billion-dollar platforms spread across the region with growing success. According to one authoritative analysis, Iran can produce lethal, modern drones with the price tag of a (sports) bicycle ($4,000-$7,000). Its domestically built air defense systems also managed another breakthrough recently, namely the first-ever successful targeting of the stealth F-35 fighter jet. Aside from deploying ostensibly hypersonic missiles, Iran also showed that it can target Western facilities as far as 4,000 kilometers.
Now, imagine what China—taking note of Iran’s operational successes, and possessing a far larger manufacturing base and more advanced drones and missiles—can achieve in future battlefields. If current trendlines continue, all Beijing might want to do is intimidate smaller neighbors and, accordingly, hope Duterte-like proxies take over governments from Manila to Taipei in the name of ”avoiding suicidal war.”
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richard.heydarian@inquirer.net
