Iran Crisis Weakens U.S. Leverage Ahead of Trump-Xi Summit

Kurt Campbell’s most immediate warning is that the Iran crisis has become an Indo-Pacific problem. In his account, President Trump is arriving in Beijing for talks with Xi Jinping after a Middle East decision that has consumed attention, pulled military capacity away from Asia, shown Beijing the limits of allied support for Washington on Iran, and given Chinese officials reason to believe the balance of leverage has shifted.

Campbell does not argue that China policy can be insulated from crises elsewhere. He argues the opposite: the linkages are now so deep that a Middle East crisis quickly becomes a test of U.S. power in Asia. Iran matters, he says, in a way Afghanistan and Iraq did not, because of its importance to global energy flows, the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, fuels, fertilizer, and related economic capacities. Trump, in Campbell’s telling, had made a powerful argument about avoiding “political quicksand in the Middle East,” and some of the sharpest critiques of the Iraq War came from Trump rather than Democrats. But Campbell says the current Iran conflict is likely to have “longer and more important implications” than Afghanistan or Iraq.

Elizabeth Economy presses the linkage directly. China, she says, is Iran’s most important patron economically and in security terms, and the Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing makes clear that the Middle East and Indo-Pacific can no longer be separated. Campbell agrees. He says the effects of the Strait of Hormuz closure are visible in the United States through gasoline prices and secondary economic pressures, but that the impact across Asia is far deeper than most Americans understand. In Campbell’s account, some Asian countries are “teetering” because of shortages of fuel, diesel, and jet fuel, and some airlines have “a week or two left of supply.” China is more insulated than other Asian powers, he says, but even Beijing is beginning to feel pressure.

That gives Trump a reason to ask Xi for help ending the conflict, Campbell says. It also gives Xi a reason to ask for something in return. Campbell’s concern is that the price, if any, may involve Taiwan. He repeatedly points to the uncertainty around what has been discussed behind closed doors as the most consequential unknown in the Beijing summit.

The energy shock is only one part of Campbell’s critique. He says U.S. deterrence in the Indo-Pacific has been degraded because the capacity now being used in the Middle East has come substantially from Asia. The United States, he argues, has been engaged in a “patient accumulation of military capabilities” to support deterrence in the Western Pacific: ballistic missile defense for Japan and South Korea, Marine expeditionary capabilities, aircraft carriers on station, fighter aircraft at Kadena, and other forces. In Campbell’s account, much of the additional capacity now being used to “stand watch” and inspect in the Middle East has been drawn from the Indo-Pacific. The result, he says, is that “the quality of our deterrence has definitely been affected in a downward way.”

Economy notes that Admiral Paparo, the head of INDOPACOM, has argued that U.S. deterrent capability has not been affected by Iran. Campbell says a commander has to make that argument. His own assessment rests on what he describes as concrete indicators: the Marine Expeditionary Unit in Japan has vacated, the United States does not really have an aircraft carrier on station, and allies and partners across the region are worried.

Campbell also objects to the way the decision was made. He calls Trump an “improvisational player” and says the president acted “impetuously,” after talking with a few foreign leaders rather than consulting experts inside the U.S. government. He says Beijing understands this. China is hosting Trump, in Campbell’s view, at a moment when the Iran crisis has not resolved quickly, has forced resource shifts, and has made American isolation visible. Campbell says Chinese leaders “appreciate that the correlation of power in many respects has shifted against President Trump.”

Economy is less willing to treat that as the whole picture. She agrees there is no coherent overarching strategy, but argues that the administration remains intensely competitive with China in technology, economics, and national security. Those pressures, in her view, can still produce a better Indo-Pacific policy than Campbell’s darker forecast suggests, even if the policy does not add up to a disciplined grand strategy.

Campbell’s reply is that the search for hidden strategy may itself mislead analysts. He says he warns Asian counterparts not to assume every U.S. move reflects an “overriding strategy or logic.” In the current administration, he sees decisions guided by “personal impetuousness, lack of coordination, long-held biases and beliefs,” and little interest in expert advice. On Iran, he says a senior person told him the key figures on the ground were “Mr. Witkoff” and Jared Kushner. Campbell’s point is not that they lack influence; it is that, in his view, the administration is relying on people not deeply grounded in the regional history and strategic context.

Campbell’s broader claim is that U.S. foreign policy has repeatedly mistaken the Indo-Pacific for a long-term theater and the Middle East for the urgent one. Economy gives the standard reason: the Middle East produces crises of immediacy — Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran — while the Indo-Pacific often looks like the slower strategic play, centered on the rise of China and earlier the rise of Japan. Campbell calls that a misreading. Some of the Indo-Pacific challenges are subtle, including technology competition, but he says they are urgent and require immediate attention.

That view is rooted in Campbell’s sense of how much the U.S. position has changed since his first government service. He began not as an Asia strategist but as a naval officer working around the Joint Chiefs in 1988 and 1989, when Washington was trying to understand whether Mikhail Gorbachev’s changes in the Soviet Union were tactical or real. Campbell says he had been a naval officer, had strong Russian, and was recruited to join the staff of then-chairman William Crowe, the last chairman before the Goldwater-Nichols defense reforms gave the chairman much greater power. He then worked under Colin Powell.

The job was junior. Campbell says that in his “secret life” he was becoming a Harvard professor, but in his Pentagon life he was a lieutenant, “good enough to get a cup of coffee” and make sure doors were opened and closed. But it gave him a close view of leaders he considered unusually effective, including Powell and Rich Armitage, who took an interest in him and supported his career. It also placed him in a moment of extraordinary American confidence. The Cold War was ending, globalization looked open-ended, and there was “optimism and potential as far as the eye could see.”

Economy adds her own point of reference. She had worked at the CIA on Gorbachev from 1985 to 1987 and remembers the same uncertainty: whether the changes were a feint or something real. By the time Campbell was at the Pentagon, she says, there was momentum and an emerging understanding that Gorbachev might be doing something different. Campbell credits Ronald Reagan’s leadership in giving Gorbachev a chance and says Margaret Thatcher deserves more credit for the early diplomacy that led her to tell Reagan this was someone “we can do business with.” He and Economy also connect that early Sovietological training to their later Asia work, including Gorbachev’s 1986 Vladivostok speech about Soviet power in the Pacific and the speculation it generated about whether Moscow was reorienting toward Asia.

Campbell entered East Asia policy almost by accident. After teaching at Harvard, serving as a White House Fellow, working at Treasury for Lloyd Bentsen and Larry Summers, and working with Rahm Emanuel on NAFTA, he was preparing to return to Harvard. Joseph Nye, newly arrived at the Pentagon, asked him to consider becoming deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and the Pacific. Campbell says he had limited Asia experience and was surrounded by specialists — including figures such as Ezra Vogel — who understandably wondered why he had been chosen. But the job became, in his account, “life transforming.”

The office was small — about 20 to 25 people — but had unusual influence. Campbell worked on the U.S.-Japan strategy associated with the Nye Initiative, military-to-military contacts with Vietnam after the absence of relations, North Korea collapse scenarios with South Korea, Indonesia during the fall of Suharto, diplomacy with China, and quiet engagement with Taiwan. He was also involved after the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis, including the decision under Defense Secretary William Perry to send U.S. aircraft carriers to the Western Pacific. Campbell describes Perry as an underrated public servant, careful and gentle in style but tough and purposeful underneath.

That period left Campbell with two impressions that still shape his analysis. He saw the hope of engagement with China in the period leading toward China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. But he also saw distrust built into the military relationship. Even when Washington was trying to build cooperation, he says Chinese interlocutors carried a “deep, abiding, profound suspicion of the United States.” He believed Chinese officials were already “anticipating a different kind of relationship in the future,” while many Americans assumed China remained decades away from challenging U.S. power.

Economy places that moment inside the larger engagement consensus: the expectation that China would join the international system, develop a middle class, and gradually open politically and economically — the modernization-theory logic later captured in Robert Zoellick’s phrase “responsible stakeholder.” Campbell accepts that those ideas were in play, but he says the history was less linear than later accounts suggest. Engagement triggered congressional backlash, including restrictions on military exchanges, information sharing, and space cooperation. George W. Bush entered office, Campbell says, with the idea that China should be treated as a strategic threat. Then September 11 “changed all of that fundamentally,” reorienting U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

For Campbell, that turn left U.S. foreign policy “substantially out of balance,” and in many ways still out of balance. His objection is not that Middle Eastern crises are unimportant. It is that they have repeatedly consumed the assets, senior attention, and political bandwidth needed for what he sees as the decisive theater of the century.

The sharpest disagreement between Economy and Campbell concerns Taiwan. Both see Beijing using political pressure, elite signaling, and the Trump-Xi summit to shape perceptions. They differ on whether the strategy is working and how much danger lies in the current ambiguity.

Economy suggests there may be a paradoxical stabilizing effect from the recent visit to Beijing by the chair of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang. In her view, the visit could give Xi Jinping space to argue that peaceful reunification is on the horizon, reducing the risk that a weakened U.S. deterrent posture tempts Beijing toward immediate action. Campbell reads the same visit differently. He says it is part of a “pincer strategy” designed to erode confidence in Taiwan’s current administration: Beijing welcomes the KMT leader and creates political anxiety, while also trying to cast the Trump-Xi summit as a great-power arrangement above Taiwan’s head.

Campbell is not predicting an imminent invasion. He says the United States tends to overestimate how much China is thinking about near-term military action. The more immediate danger, in his view, is political and psychological. Beijing can use images of cross-strait engagement and U.S.-China great-power management to weaken Taiwanese confidence in the reliability of American backing. Taiwan’s success, he says, rests partly on the assumption of an “ironclad American commitment” that has been bipartisan. He worries that the coming weeks may raise questions about that commitment.

Economy does not dispute that Beijing would like to create that effect. She doubts it has succeeded. She says polling in Taiwan suggests the KMT chairwoman’s Beijing visit was negative for the KMT ahead of elections and that a “vast majority” of Taiwan’s population has no interest in reunification with the mainland. In Economy’s reading, the visit did not accomplish what Beijing wanted inside Taiwan, though it may help Xi maintain a fiction that time is moving in his preferred direction.

On the Trump-Xi summit itself, Economy’s early assessment is “so far so good.” She says Beijing opened with a strong warning that Taiwan is central and that the United States should not act recklessly. The U.S. side, as she describes it, did not acknowledge the warning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after the first day that U.S. policy on Taiwan had not changed. Economy also points to congressional constraints: senior Republicans had signaled before the summit that they did not want a shift in U.S. Taiwan policy. And Taiwan’s legislature, she says, had just passed major arms purchases with support from KMT- and DPP-aligned forces.

Campbell is not reassured. He distinguishes Rubio’s statement from comments by Bessent, whom Campbell describes as the dominant player on China and Indo-Pacific issues in the Trump administration. In Campbell’s account, Bessent indicated that Trump acknowledged or understood some Chinese concerns on Taiwan and would have more to say in the next few days. Campbell reads that as a possible sign of subtle adjustment in U.S. policy.

He also points to what he describes as other warning signs. Campbell says Trump and Xi have discussed issues associated with arms sales to Taiwan. He says that when Xi called Trump to complain about Japan’s position on Taiwan, Trump then called Japan’s leader and warned her, rather than publicly supporting Tokyo’s position. For Campbell, those details matter because they suggest more than ordinary diplomatic ambiguity.

Campbell ties these signals to what he sees as Trump’s broader instinct about spheres of influence: large powers should have more say over their immediate neighborhoods. He says that logic appears in Trump’s thinking about the United States and Latin America, Russia and Ukraine, and possibly China and Taiwan. Economy replies that while Trump may have entered office with such instincts, the administration’s actual Indo-Pacific behavior still shows deep engagement. She cites continued work with partners, new or resumed military-to-military activity, including with Cambodia, and a competitive China policy in technology, economics, and national security that in some respects resembles the Biden administration’s approach.

Campbell pushes back by questioning how much official strategy documents or lower-level activity reveal about presidential intent. When Economy points to the National Security Strategy and continued engagement in the Indo-Pacific, Campbell asks whether Trump read or had anything to do with the strategy. Economy’s answer is essentially institutional: parts of the administration may be running an Asia play that is more disciplined and competitive than the president’s statements suggest. Campbell’s answer is presidential: if the president himself is willing to improvise, bargain, or accept spheres-of-influence logic, the institutional activity Economy describes may not answer the risk Campbell is focused on.

Campbell’s central strategic claim is that U.S. policy toward China cannot be organized around the bilateral relationship alone. He rejects the notion that the most important work is for Washington and Beijing to sit in “stuffed chairs” and manage Asia as two great powers. He does not dismiss diplomacy with China; he says he did a great deal of it and considers it important. But he wanted it placed inside a larger structure of allied and partner engagement.

The origins of that view were practical before they were theoretical. Working on Asia at the Pentagon meant spending much of his time with allies and partners on operational issues: basing, exercises, planning, procurement, force posture, and details as narrow as “what altitude do helicopters fly.” These relationships created habits of cooperation. By contrast, Campbell says that even during periods of closer U.S.-China engagement, Washington and Beijing had almost no habits of cooperation. The relationship remained shadowed by suspicion.

Campbell says a small group of strategists and operators came to believe that U.S. Asia policy needed to be built around allies and partners rather than around a U.S.-China condominium. Rich Armitage, in his account, is often considered one of the fathers of that school. But the group was initially a small minority, and often looked down upon by officials who believed the central task was getting the Washington-Beijing relationship right.

His view is not anti-diplomacy. It is an argument about context and sequencing. Campbell says he tried not to diminish the importance of the U.S.-China relationship, because he did see it as important. His objection was to an approach that treated other Asian countries as secondary. In his view, that misread China’s interests and misunderstood the strategic value of working closely with allies and partners.

Two developments made the allied approach more compelling. The first was China’s military modernization after the Taiwan Strait crisis. Campbell says China launched a massive modernization program that reached heights no one imagined in the early and mid-1990s. The second was Xi Jinping’s rise. Under Xi, Campbell argues, China’s ambitions in technology, its pressure in the South China Sea, and its willingness to press advantages became much more explicit. What had once been partly obscured became visible.

The deeper reason is American capacity. In earlier conflicts — Campbell names the world wars and Vietnam — the United States had the technological and military wherewithal to stand up to any potential challenger. It was “the giant on the sidelines” that could enter the fight. He argues that this is no longer the case. If Washington wants an effective global strategy, it has to work with allies and partners in technology, procurement, planning, and military operations.

That means more than reassurance tours and communiqués. Campbell says a more serious allied strategy would require integration across the practical systems of power: shared technology development, more coordinated procurement, planning that treats allies as participants rather than afterthoughts, operational consultation, and clearer alignment of roles and responsibilities. He says every administration, including the Biden administration in which he served, has fallen short. Even with the closest allies and partners, he still sees paternalism, imbalance, and insufficient consultation. A real coalition, in his view, would require a “sea change” and sustained bipartisan commitment.

His approach to China diplomacy follows from that. Campbell says the best way to have a good relationship with Beijing is to engage from a position of strength. That does not require allies and partners to cut off their own relations with China; he explicitly says they should build ties and engagements with Beijing. But he worries that Trump’s handling of Iran and the broader alienation of partners have weakened Washington before the summit. When the United States made a call for support from allies and partners over Iran and the Persian Gulf, Campbell says the answer was “echoing silence.” China, he argues, noticed.

Economy agrees on the importance of allies and partners, and on the need to repair damaged relationships with European and Asian partners. But she challenges the assumption that U.S. loss automatically becomes Chinese gain. It is one thing, she says, to argue that Washington has lost credibility; it is another to argue that China can effectively capitalize on that loss. She is not convinced Beijing has managed to step into the vacuum created by U.S. retreat from global leadership.

Campbell agrees with that point and extends it. It is not clear, he says, that China wants to fill the vacuum in every area. It is not clear China knows how to do so. And it is difficult for Beijing to appeal to countries with very different political systems. He adds that China is often less patient than its reputation suggests. It oversteps, tries to seize targets of opportunity, and in doing so can catalyze coordination among allies and partners.

This is where Campbell and Economy converge most clearly. U.S. disorder creates openings for Beijing, but China’s own conduct may limit its ability to exploit them. Chinese pressure has often produced the balancing behavior Beijing would prefer to prevent. The question is whether Washington can still organize that balancing effort with enough credibility, humility, and operational seriousness.

Asked what the next administration should do, Campbell resists the idea that the United States can simply “rebuild” the old order. Rebuilding implies going back. He argues that Washington will have to go forward into a different relationship with allies and partners, because the reservoir of trust that supported earlier U.S. leadership will not be quickly restored.

Campbell expects some of the United States’ special leadership roles in international organizations to erode. He expects other countries to take more initiative without coordinating as closely with Washington. He does not treat that as entirely bad; some of it may be healthy. But he argues that allies and partners will be less inclined to give the United States “pride of place” by habit.

He outlines several possible worlds: one organized around spheres of influence, one sliding toward disorder and disunity, and one in which China becomes more dominant. Each carries substantial downsides. In this environment, he says, the countries with disproportionate sway are not only the superpowers but “middle” or “medium” powers. Economy notes that Japan does not like being called a medium power; Campbell adjusts but names Japan, Germany, other European countries, Australia, and Canada as countries that function as global swing states. They can maneuver, form their own connections, and shape outcomes.

Campbell believes most of those countries will eventually decide that some kind of rebuilt relationship with the United States is the best option among bad alternatives. But he says the relationship will be more transactional and less trusting than before. His metaphor is deliberately bleak.

The point is not that alliance is dead. It is that the next phase begins from a lower emotional and political baseline. Campbell says visiting leaders in Washington now spend time before meetings figuring out what “gift” to bring Trump, comparing the dynamic to Pacific Islanders laying fruit before a volcano. Afterward, he says, they privately speak sharply about how they feel about the United States. Under a future administration, he expects them to be less afraid of retaliation and more willing to say those things openly.

That will create a hard paradox for any administration trying to repair alliances. Well-meaning officials will have to sit through “hours, weeks, months, years” of reminders that the United States has been unreliable. Campbell says that will be counterproductive and difficult, but unavoidable. Economy captures the moral contrast bluntly: after the Second World War, the United States was “the good guys”; now, she says, “we’re not sure what we are.”

Campbell still has confidence in the alliance and partnership structures because many of the mechanisms below the political level continue to function. Military-to-military engagement, exercises, operational planning, and institutional relationships persist even when high-level politics is volatile. “The true deep state,” he says, is the mil-to-mil work.

But continuity below the surface is not enough. Campbell says the task of marshaling and building the next alliance framework will be “unbelievably difficult” and unlike anything the United States has seen. He rejects comparisons to the end of the Second World War. The international circumstances, he says, will be more challenging, and the United States will not be operating from the same moral or material position.

Campbell’s answer to the question of future leadership is less about his own return than about training successors. Economy suggests that a future administration will need someone with his experience, relationships, and “deft hand” to build whatever comes next. Campbell answers that the most important work he and Economy have done is to recruit, train, and prepare the next generation of foreign policy and national security professionals.

He frames that partly as a Democratic Party lesson. He says he watched senior figures who were reluctant to yield leadership roles late into successful careers. People have to know when it is time, he argues, and his own priority is to support a new wave. He says he would do everything he can to support an “internationalist president” who can recapture elements of what America has stood for, but he emphasizes identifying, inspiring, and backing the people who will serve next.

That emphasis comes from his own experience. Campbell says there were periods when he felt “very much alone,” even within administrations he served. His views were harder-headed, more skeptical, and more focused on allies and partners than those of colleagues whose priority was to secure a good meeting with Chinese officials. He says he tried to identify younger officials who understood both the challenges and opportunities in Asia and were well versed in the region’s complexity.

He also sees a generational change among Democrats. Many senior foreign policy figures he worked with were shaped by Vietnam, which divided the party and affected Democratic confidence on the use of force. Campbell believes younger Democrats carry fewer of those scars, and he sees that as a source of possibility.

But he warns against a different experience gap. Many officials now moving into Indo-Pacific work were formed professionally by Iraq and Afghanistan. Campbell says they come to Asia because, in the Bonnie and Clyde line, “they rob the bank because that’s where the money is.” He welcomes the added strategic attention, but argues that nothing prepares someone less well for the nuance and subtlety of the Indo-Pacific than 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The practical implication is that the next Asia policy cadre needs habits different from those produced by the post-9/11 wars. It will have to manage alliance networks rather than assume automatic deference, treat economic and technological competition as central rather than adjacent, understand calibrated signaling, and operate in a region where political symbols, military movements, private assurances, procurement choices, and public language all interact. Campbell’s concern is not only that Washington has been distracted from Asia. It is that some of the people now arriving in Asia may have been trained by the wrong strategic experience.