By striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and immediately getting a ceasefire in the Iran-Israel conflict, President Donald Trump was sending a message not just to the mullahs of Iran, but to China and our other potential rivals.
The message Trump sent is this: Believe the president’s red lines. You don’t want to tangle with the United States or our allies. Make a deal, or there will be consequences.
“The operation President Trump planned was bold and it was brilliant, showing the world that American deterrence is back,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Sunday. That’s right.
As conservative commentator Ben Weingarten wrote on X, any assessment of Trump’s strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that doesn’t include its effect on China is “woefully incomplete.”
Trump is reinforcing U.S. deterrence that had been quickly losing ground under the previous administration. Under President Joe Biden, hollering loudly, scaring no one, and blathering pointlessly about “shared democratic values” seemed to be the primary and totally ineffectual modus operandi of the executive branch.
Now, things are different.
A report Thursday in Financial Times noted that Trump’s “dramatic intervention in the Iran-Israel war” is having an impact outside the Middle East and is “forcing rival China to reassess how the U.S. president might wield American military power in the event of a conflict in Asia.”
The Financial Times reported that China must now consider “whether Trump will favor a more isolationist approach of disengagement from regional flashpoints during his second term—or whether he would be likely to intervene militarily if China used force to press its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.”
Even The New York Times acknowledged that Trump’s actions against Iran may make CCP leaders think twice about military action against Taiwan. And they should.
Obviously, a confrontation with China presents a much higher risk for the U.S. than a still nonnuclear Iran. However, as mighty as China may have become, incurring the wrath of an American president willing to occasionally unleash the U.S. military likely poses an even bigger risk to China.
And while there is certainly an argument to be made that America’s continual focus on the Middle East harms the long-term goal of pivoting to Asia (and that using up shallow stockpiles of expensive weaponry will make it harder for the U.S. in a confrontation with China if it comes to that), at the very least Trump’s actions demonstrate that the president is very much willing to use military strength when he thinks he must.
Trump set a very bright, red line for Iran that he has remained consistent about since before he became president. He’s insisted that Iran will not get nuclear weapons under his watch. When Trump returned to the White House the administration put out a memo telegraphing that it intended to put maximum pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
When Trump ascertained that negotiations were going nowhere and that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons was getting close, he struck hard. Then, once the limited goal was accomplished, he quickly negotiated a ceasefire and ended the conflict.
What’s interesting is that many commentators on the Left and Right are so surprised about Trump’s actions. Some have said that Trump’s strike was an example of his “unpredictability.” I don’t think that’s quite true.
Trump was never an “isolationist,” that loaded word often unfairly thrown at skeptics of American interventionism. He isn’t a neoconservative looking to make the world safe for democracy, either. If Trump’s foreign policy can be defined as anything it would be “Jacksonian.” There’s a reason Old Hickory’s portrait has been a fixture in Trump’s Oval Office.
A Jacksonian policy is defined first by restraint. The United States, the thinking goes, is not responsible for maintaining a “liberal democratic order” that was never particularly liberal, democratic, or orderly. Instead, U.S. policy through a Jacksonian lens is tightly constrained by narrow interests, primarily the safety of the American people.
Trump focuses mostly on immediate U.S. concerns such as border enforcement, pushing hostile powers out of the Western Hemisphere, and keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terror-exporting states that have been calling the U.S. the “Great Satan” since 1979.
Trump’s Jacksonian policy is far from pacifist. From time to time, he’s been willing to make a quick, overwhelming strike on a geopolitical foe. He’s also avoided “nation building” projects that have rightly left the American people cynical about U.S. military involvement anywhere in the world.
In a basic sense, Trump upholds the foreign policy represented by the eagle on the seal of the United States. One set of talons holds an olive branch. The other, a quiver of arrows. The eagle faces the olive branch, indicating that we first desire peace with all nations, but we are prepared for war if threatened.
The Trump administration from day one made a blitz to create peace and stability through his unique kind of transactional diplomacy. The president made it clear that he wanted to calm the multiple conflicts that had ramped up during Biden’s term in office.
He helped mediate a growing conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear armed powers that appeared to be on the edge of large-scale war and even successfully applied pressure on Congo and Rwanda to end their long, terrible but often ignored war.
However, just because Trump wants to be a dealmaker and a peacemaker doesn’t mean he’ll refrain from using the military option as his Iran strike indicates. He just won’t use it recklessly. Trump gave Iran time to take a deal from the U.S. When they refused to bite, he backed a strong ally and struck when he thought it was militarily necessary.
This all matters very much in the signals we are sending China.
Trump intends to strategically decouple from a communist powerhouse that’s abused its inclusion in the global trade system to wipe out critical manufacturing in other countries while boosting the strength of the Chinese state.
But Trump doesn’t want to lead the two great powers straight into war. He’s combined a strategic shift on trade with a fair number of concessions to China. That while committing to shoring up deficiencies in shipbuilding and warfighting that may leave the U.S. vulnerable in a future conflict.
Combine that with the strike on Iran and the message should be clear to China and any potential rival about where things stand. It’s better to make a deal with this administration than to refuse one. Let us have peace and commerce, not chaos and war.