Fri, Mar 06, 2026 page8

• China’s chance in the Indo-Pacific

  • By Aniello Iannone
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  What is happening between the US, Israel and Iran is not a regional crisis that would burn itself out in the Gulf. It is a reconfiguration that is already reshaping balances far beyond the Middle East, stretching across the Indo-Pacific region and the broader Eurasian space. The most common mistake is to read this war as a localized fracture. What we are actually facing is a shock that redistributes attention, resources and vulnerabilities on a global scale. The killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the joint US-Israeli strikes on Saturday transformed what might have looked like a military escalation into something qualitatively different: a systemic crisis. This is no longer just a war. It is an event that reorganizes.

  The first consequence worth tracking is energy. Asia buys roughly two-thirds of its crude oil from the Gulf, half of China’s imports flow through that region, and for Japan the dependency exceeds 90 percent. A full closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not required to produce real effects. Uncertainty alone is enough. Japan, India, South Korea and Taiwan are already thinking through emergency reserves, alternative routes and substitute suppliers. It is an almost automatic reflex, and it reveals something essential about the nature of this crisis: Its disciplining power comes not only from the damage it inflicts, but from the anxiety it instills. Asian governments and markets are already adapting to a more unstable world, even before the conflict formally widens, and it is precisely in this phase of preventive adaptation that new dependencies solidify and margins of autonomy quietly narrow.

  The second variable is China, and here the reading becomes more layered. Beijing condemned the attack, called for a ceasefire and urged a return to negotiations. China’s position is not normative, but strategic, and it operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Beijing does not want a total war that threatens its energy supply lines or generates uncontrollable instability along its indirect borders, but prolonged US entanglement in the Gulf, consuming resources, diverting attention and wearing down US projection capacity, is not necessarily an unwelcome scenario. A contained, managed escalation that keeps Washington engaged far from the Indo-Pacific region can paradoxically serve Chinese interests better than any diplomatic move. This is not cynicism. It is the cold logic of great-power competition, where advantage is not always gained by acting directly, but often by letting others exhaust themselves.

  There is also an internal dimension that should not be underestimated. Khamenei’s death opens a political transition inside Iran that no one, at this moment, can read with any certainty. Who would take control of the Islamic Republic? And with what orientation and capacity to contain the most radical factions, or, conversely, to open negotiating channels would they have? The answers would directly affect not only the Gulf’s stability, but the entire region’s security architecture, including that of Russia and Turkey, who are watching with growing interest as the balance shifts in their sphere of influence.

  For Taiwan, the picture is deliberately ambiguous. Washington’s use of force can be read as a signal of strategic resolve, an implicit message to Beijing about US willingness to act when its interests are at stake. However, if the conflict drags on, if the US becomes mired in another theater, dispersed across multiple fronts and worn down by an engagement that refuses to close, the message reaching Taipei could be the opposite: a fatigued ally, politically drained, less credible precisely where and when it would matter most. The real stakes are not the strikes themselves. It is what comes after, and for how long.

  For Southeast Asia, the response is one the region knows well: caution, balance and damage containment. ASEAN governments have called for restraint and dialogue, carefully avoiding hard positions. This is neither indifference nor weakness. It is the language of countries that have spent decades inhabiting dependency structures they did not build and cannot easily leave, and that have learned that survival depends on the ability to avoid choosing sides too soon.

  Perhaps the most uncomfortable conclusion is this: Geopolitics does not only redraw borders, it redraws who can afford to be autonomous. Every shock like this one is also a kind of audit, a moment that makes visible how much of the sovereignty countries claim is real, and how much of it is just language.

  Aniello Iannone is a lecturer in Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics at the Department of Political Science and Government at Diponegoro University in Indonesia. His research focuses on ASEAN regionalism, Indonesian politics and the international political economy of Southeast Asia.
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