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Illustration: Craig Stephens

The

by the United States may be explained by US President Donald Trump’s administration as a retaliation against and deterrence of

Iranian aggression

but, in reality, it may actually be a strategic provocation against China. To understand why this is the case and see how this particular action is merely one piece of a larger puzzle, one must take into account all of America’s foreign policy actions.

Since the end of World War II, US foreign policy has been obsessed with how to maintain the nation’s superpower status. It maintains strong alliances like

Nato

and a military presence in virtually all corners of the planet as part of that strategy.

Over the years, influential policymakers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski have argued that the US must go further to ensure supremacy. For some, this includes designating Iran, Russia and China as enemies because the US doesn’t have total control over these countries, and stirring up Islamic extremism because all three of these countries have large Muslim populations that can be turned into terrorists against their own countries.

By creating Islamic extremism in these territories, the home-grown Muslim terrorists could then battle these foreign governments on behalf of the US, thus reducing the need to sacrifice American soldiers.

As a result, such proxy wars have become a permanent fixture on the world stage. The

invasion of Iraq

, the

civil war

in Syria, the bombing of Libya and many other actions have created extremist groups such as

Islamic State

that are direct threats to Iran, Russia and even China.

A US Marine watches as a statue of Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The US invasion of Iraq set off a series of events that plunged the region into conflict and can be tied to the rise of extremist groups such as Islamic State. Photo: Reuters

In the case of China, Uygur groups from the Muslim minority in China’s northwest, were armed with military weapons by outside forces. Uygur separatists proceeded to terrorise parts of Western China with

bombings

stabbings

and other

violent means

which have been widely reported by Western news agencies such as the BBC.

The Chinese government has responded with an internment camp for

1 million Uygurs

to try to stem the violence and to prevent a civil war like in Syria from breaking out. But such moves have been met predictably with

threats and hostility

from the US, which would much rather see conflict in China.

The US has made it publicly clear that it regards China as a “

strategic competitor

”, which is a polite label for enemy. The US has been actively trying to provoke China into a military confrontation since 2013 under the

Obama administration

by suddenly turning the South China and East China seas into hotspots after decades of peace in the region.

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Since Chinese President Xi Jinping has not taken the bait on that front, the Trump administration has tried to bait China by stirring up more trouble using

Taiwan

North Korea

and Xinjiang. US actions related to

Hong Kong

are consistent with this strategy.

Finally, the

US-China trade deal

notwithstanding, the US has been openly discriminating against Chinese across its economy. From blocking

Chinese investments

in US companies and

restricting

American hi-tech suppliers from doing business with Chinese companies such as Huawei, to accusing Chinese students and

scientists

of being spies, the US has made it no secret that China is its top target.

How does Soleimani fit into this picture? China has been a major importer of

Iranian oil

. China is also part of the

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

, which makes it a close partner of Russia.

Since the US has not had great success in provoking China into a military confrontation in the other theatres, it is very likely that it intends to drag China into a war through another country in the same way that Germany was drawn into World War I after

the assassination

of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

It was no coincidence that Google searches for “Franz Ferdinand” spiked minutes after Soleimani’s assassination, and the vast majority of those searches came from Washington.

This April 4, 2014, photo shows a reproduction of a London newspaper front page from 1914, which writes about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on display at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City in the US. Photo: AP

Naturally, China has been

urging calm

because if Iran escalates things with military retaliation, it could then drag Russia into a conflagration that China would be unable to avoid. China has no interest in being dragged into a war because it knows that when there is chaos and instability in the world, economic growth is the casualty.

China’s economic growth relies on a stable global environment. The US, on the other hand, would prefer chaos in the world because this allows it to remain the sole superpower.

While the US has been openly hostile towards Iran and Russia, China is America’s real prize since neither Iran nor Russia could displace the US as a superpower in the foreseeable future. All the war games in the Pentagon have been against China, not Iran or Russia.

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Without designating China as a “peer competitor”, the US military couldn’t justify its

ever-increasing military budgets

. After all, if China is not a “threat”, the military-industrial complex would be severely downsized.

China is the only country that could soon displace the US as the largest economic power, which often means that political power will follow. Seen from this framework, Trump’s move is a carefully calculated provocation of China, one that brings us closer to breaking the camel’s back.

Ann Lee is an internationally recognised leading authority on China’s economic relations and author of What the US Can Learn from China, and Will China’s Economy Collapse? She is also a former visiting professor at Peking University and an adjunct professor at New York University and Pace University, where she taught macroeconomics and financial derivatives

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Courtesy- South China Morning Post

The real target of the US assassination of Iranian military leader Qassen Soleimani – China

The real target of the US assassination of Iranian military leader Qassen Soleimani – China

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