Trump's Grand Strategy: Iran, China & The New World Order | Kamran Bokhari

**Kamran Bokhari** (0:00)
And unfortunately, we're in an age where the amount of information available to people has just sort of exponentially increased and continues to increase, while our abilities, our collective ability to analyze in a sort of like a disciplined manner has tumbled significantly. And we now are more prone to conspiracy theories, politicized conversations, partisan discourses, fake news, and so on and so forth. It's a species level problem, and it is the biggest conundrum that the planet is facing, in my opinion, for the long haul.

**David** (0:40)
Bankless Nation, I'm here with Kamran Bokhari. He is a geopolitical analyst and foreign policy expert focusing on the politics of the Middle East and South Asia. He also serves as the senior director at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. Kamran, welcome to Bankless.

**Kamran Bokhari** (0:55)
Thanks for having me.

**David** (0:57)
Kamran, there are a bunch of questions that I have that I'll kind of categorize as the second order and order consequences with the fallout of the war in Iran, which is ongoing. We actually don't really know how that will settle. I'll have questions for you about that as well. But I really want to kind of ask what happens next in the whole Middle East and Asia region. There's the stated reasons about why we went to a war with Iran. Trump gave that eight minute video early Saturday morning two weeks ago about all the reasons why we started this. The 47 years of hostility and terrorism, the historical attacks on America, the urgency to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, the need to neutralize the proxy networks. These are all the stated reasons. I want to learn a little bit more about the potential unstated reasons about why Trump decided to attack Iran because I think potentially there is a larger story here. I want to get a sense for how large of a story there is.
One suspect reason that I have is China was buying $30 billion of Iranian oil every year at a severely discounted price, about 15% of all of China's oil purchases. Iran was this captive market to China. Iran is and was beneficial to China. This is one of the reasons why I suspect there might be a larger story here. Is there something to this notion? Is there a larger story about what happens next and what the unstated motivations of the Iranian war is?

**Kamran Bokhari** (2:29)
Great question. So look, I will take our listeners back to the National Security Strategy. It was published on December 5th. I had been talking about and writing about this for at least a year and a half in terms of where the United States is heading in terms of the broader grand strategy, the post World War II system that needs evolution and has been evolving since the fall of the Soviet Union. So if you look at what the US strategy that the Trump White House has rolled out, it's basically retrenchment from the Eastern Hemisphere. In other words, the United States is not going to be doing the heavy lifting for security on the Eurasian landmass. Focus on the Western Hemisphere, which was very clearly stated out in the NSS, and the focus on the Western Pacific with regards to China. And that's natural. The United States is an oceanic power.
It doesn't need to engage in land conflicts and can only afford to do so as is necessary. But what it can't pull out from are the global commons, the oceans. And so I think that that is sort of the objective here. Now, the way to achieve this is to say burden sharing and burden shifting, which is the terminology of the Trump White House. They're saying, we're going to leave in different regions, we're going to shift this burden and share this burden with ally and partner nations. So you have, you know, the European allies, you have allies in Asia, you have allies in the Middle East. But before you can do this, there are loose ends that need to be dealt with. And I'm using loose ends in a very generic sense. We're talking about major conflicts here. The major conflicts are the Ukraine War. The major conflict are the ones in the Middle East. It was Gaza. Gaza was brought to, you know, we have a cessation of hostilities there, and there's a process in play.
And we are also negotiating with China. Notice that in the middle of the Iran War, we now have reports that Secretary Rubio and President Trump are planning to go to China, along with trade officials and the whole delegation. So, let's apply that strategy to the Middle East. In the Middle East, you have four major players. You have Turkey, Israel, Saudi, and Iran. These are the four big players in the region. Israel has been engaged in fighting Iran and its proxies for a very long time. I would say for several decades now. You know, since the end of sort of the Arab-Israeli state-to-state hostility with the Egyptian Peace Treaty in 1978, and then the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Israel has been fighting non-state actors and proxies of Iran. And so, that era is coming to a close. And that began in 2024 in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7th in 2023 And you saw the Israelis weaken the Iranian proxy network and then take the war to Iran itself last June. And this is sort of, you know, part two of it that we're currently, the moment that we're in right now. So what you have is, strategically speaking, Iran was still out there. The two pillars of stability that the United States is leaning on are Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And they need to work with Israel somehow. With Saudi was the Abraham Accords. With it between Israel and Turkey, the president said, look, you know, you need to work things out in terms of Syria and, you know, I can mediate and what not. But then there is the question of where is Iran in all of this? And Iran still has nuclear ambitions. Destroying the facilities was a significant, if you will, gain for the United States. But that doesn't end the nuclear program. That's just like buying time. And so, and then you have the proxies and you have the ballistic missile capability. In other words, the burden sharing, burden shifting architecture that the US is trying to build has a pre-existing threat. So it had to be dealt with. That's how I'm looking at it. And in terms of, because in this region, if you notice the Russians and the Chinese abstained in the resolution in the UNSC. Both Russia and China need to do their own deal with the United States. Russia needs to do it in the context of the Ukraine War because it's under a lot of sanctions. That war is very costly for them. And the Chinese have an economy that's faltering. And they need to have an understanding with the United States and the United States needs to make sure that while being a major, the number two geo economic power in the world, it's not challenging the United States militarily. So the technological advancements that China is making do not translate into future military threats. So I think that those two players, Russia and China, have their own issues to deal with with the United States. So this is why you don't see them playing at all in this conflict with Iran. I mean, none of them came to Iran's aid. So I think that's where we are.