China-Iran: Is Beijing playing the 'Iran card' against the US?

Iranian president's recent visit to China could be seen as an attempt by the Chinese president to get Washington to tone down its increasingly aggressive posturing towards his country

Competition between the United States and China over global dominance reached a new level during the tenure of President Barack Obama.

Obama launched his Pivot to Asia policy as a way of confronting Chinese initiatives that were seen as leveraging China’s economic power to achieve political gains, regionally and globally.

In Chinese eyes, on the other hand, the US has always been concerned with protecting its own global dominance while doing everything it can to retard or disrupt China’s rise.

Donald Trump, with a sense that America had been weakened by the Covid-19 pandemic adding to his fear of being overtaken by China, raised the pitch of the confrontation up again.

He slammed China as being responsible for the virus and began a trade war in the shape of an escalation of tariffs.

Robert O’Brien, Trump's national security adviser, gave a speech saying that China was seeking to take advantage of the crisis caused by the pandemic “to displace the United States as the leading global power”.

Then, in an aggressive, unprecedented, statement, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, put forward the idea of regime change, saying: "If the free world doesn’t change communist China, [China] will surely change us."

Relations have not softened under President Joe Biden.

His National Security Strategy of October 2022 highlighted China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it. Beijing has ambitions… to become the world’s leading power."

Increased competition

Here is what the US is deeply worried about: China’s rise to become the most powerful economy in the world.

The document reads: “Beijing frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries. It benefits from the openness of the international economy while limiting access to its domestic market, and it seeks to make the world more dependent on the People’s Republic of China while reducing its own dependence on the world.”

Data from the World Bank shows that China’s GDP (based on purchasing power parity, or PPP) was $27.3tn in 2021, compared with $23tn for the US.

The latest world economic outlook growth projections by the IMF for 2024 show US economic growth at one percent compared to China’s at 4.5 percent.