The Iran War and Strategic Competition in Asia

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green. I'm joined by a friend, colleague, Professor Evan Medeiros. We're going to talk about the Iran War, but in the larger strategic sense. What does it tell us about China's influence and interests in the Middle East? What does it tell us about the impacts on strategic competition in Asia, the impact on allies and partners of the US, energy prices, military force posture of the US? A lot to go through. We're going to keep it at a strategic high level, but in some areas be able to go into detail because Evan Medeiros is a real expert on Chinese defense foreign policy in particular. Evan, thank you. Evan, people will know, is the Penner Family Chair in Asia Studies at the School of Foreign Service and the Kling Family Distinguished Fellow in US China Studies there at Georgetown University. He runs Asian Studies and took over that role for me three and a half years ago and is probably still cleaning up my mess. Hoya Saxa and thanks for that. Evan served for six years on the staff of the NSC. I did almost five years in it and it almost killed me. So well done. He started as Director for China, Taiwan, Mongolia and then was promoted as Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Asia and I had a similar trajectory there. We compared notes a lot. I worked for Bush. He worked for Obama. A lot more similarity and continuity than difference, frankly, especially compared to the role of the NSC now. But we'll save that for another podcast. Let's talk China, Iran, geopolitical competition in Asia. Evan, thanks. Great to have you back on the podcast.

**Evan Medeiros** (1:47)
Mike, thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. Your podcast is always at the top of my queue. I love it. And in particular, your podcast is the one that really touches on the big strategy questions in Asia. Balance of power, geography, relative military balances. You've got it all. It's great. Thanks so much for having me.

**Mike Green** (2:09)
Thanks. We'll try to stick to that because in the midst of this war, there's so much speculation, so much strategy about the long-term consequences. When actually war is not linear, we don't know what's going to happen and things that may seem important now may not be in a year, but others will be. So we'll try to sort out a lot of that with a particular focus on China. Let's start with China. You wrote your first book, really good book, looking at China's relationship with Iran, its adherence to international norms on export controls and so forth. You've been a deep observer of China's Iran relationship in particular. We'll broaden it, but let's start with Iran. Tell us a bit about China's historical relationship with Iran, with the Middle East and what you think Beijing is thinking right now as they watch this war.

**Evan Medeiros** (2:52)
So China's relationship with Iran, if you go back to the earliest days of the reform and opening period, the early 1980s was largely a transactional relationship. It was largely bilateral trade, and in particular, it was bilateral arms trade. When the Iran-Iraq War starts in the early 1980s, China ends up arming both sides. And this was a natural outgrowth of Deng's policies in which he put defense modernization as the last of the four modernizations and basically told the PLA, okay, you guys have to support yourselves. And so what happened was you had a combination of both the PLA selling weapons from its own stockpiles, principally through polytechnologies and a couple other interesting cutouts. And then you had the defense industry factories themselves selling stuff. So China's relationship with Iran in the reform period was very, very limited, narrow. I mean, when Chinese and Iranian leaders got together, they would love to talk in sort of grand historic terms. Those were both countries with thousands of years of history and deep cultural traditions. But the reality is, is their overlapping interests were actually quite narrow. And it wasn't until 1987, Mike, and you'll remember this during the tanker wars in the latter stages of the Iran-Iraq War, when Iran and Iraq were attacking each other's oil infrastructure.
In October of 1987, an Iranian-fired Chinese-made HY-2, Hongying-2, silkworm cruise missile hit a Kuwaiti tanker that had been reflagged under the US flag. This is when the US was running an operation to basically take reflagged tankers, principally Kuwaiti and Saudi tankers, and escort them through the Gulf, so they didn't come under Iranian attack. So it's not until October 87, the famous silkworm Chinese cruise missile, that sort of is the first time that the China-Iran linkage becomes an issue in the US-China relationship. And then subsequently you have, what happens after that is the Chinese realize, hey, we have a source of leverage with the Americans because the Americans do not like our relationship with Iran, so we can dial it up or dial it down with Tehran as a way to generate leverage with the Americans. And so while the proliferation issue is a very narrow issue, it was in the broader strategic context of Beijing negotiating with Washington. But the China-Iran relationship fundamentally changes in around 1993-1994, for one very significant reason. China at that time becomes a net oil importer. And China starts to meet its growing energy needs because reform and development is taking off. China starts importing oil from the region. And Iran becomes one of its principal energy sources very, very significantly. So while the relationship remains transactional, the significance of that transaction, buying Iranian oil, becomes much, much more important. And then, of course, the Chinese are supplying ballistic missiles to the region as well. That adds to the drama in the US-China relationship.