Khamenei Is Dead. Now Look at Beijing.

My cover story in The Spectator on the collapse of Xi's coalition and the summit with Trump

The Spectator gave me the cover this week.

Drawing on my reporting around the world, the piece is about what happens to Chinese president Xi Jinping’s foreign policy when the countries that he wanted to absorb American pressure disappear from his board. Iran’s supreme leader is dead, Russia has bled itself in Ukraine, the proxy network from Lebanon to Gaza has been dismantled. Assad is gone from Syria.

The Chinese Communist Party’s line for years has been that the West is declining. Xi built an entire strategy on this premise. I heard it constantly when I was a journalist in China and I still read it in Party sources today.

But a strategy that depends on Iran, Russia, and a network of proxies absorbing American pressure only works as long as they're still standing.

My article traces the money and the oil—what China has spent in the Middle East versus what it extracted—and argues that the true consequence is about Taiwan. The question is whether the Chinese Communist Party could survive the aftermath of an invasion of the island.

I also make the case that Trump (regardless of whether his decision to strike Iran was the right one) will walk into the March 31 summit in Beijing with a strong hand. How he will play that hand is still up in the air.

Read the full piece at The Spectator.

—Geoff