The Trump Administration Can't Acknowledge the Most Significant Achievement of the War in Iran

Getting rid of the Ayatollah and eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities are laudable goals. But perhaps the most significant achievement of the war in Iran isn't about the Middle East at all.

The President and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have repeatedly laid out the goals of Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, annihilate their navy, and ensure that the world’s #1 sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, Iran was building a ballistic missile stockpile as a protective shield around its nuclear program; its purpose was to make it too dangerous for Western opponents like us to take real measures to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon (Rubio has been making this case for 11 years).

Preventing Iran from accomplishing this is a noble goal—as even most Democrats will admit (they just oppose the President achieving this noble goal now, for reasons I have yet to hear articulated). But there’s another major goal that’s already being achieved by the war in Iran: It’s kneecapped China—economically, militarily, and symbolically, reestablishing the United States as the only global superpower.

President Trump and the administration seem reluctant to speak of this second goal, and understandably so; the President has a high-profile meeting with China’s premier Xi Jinping coming up, and rather than brag about all the leverage he’s managed to accrue, the President seems to prefer to just, well, use it.

But make no mistake about it: The President has transformed the globe with his strikes in Iran, and not just in the Middle East. He’s given us a massive leg up over our greatest geopolitical adversary, and he’s done it all while expanding the fortunes of the American people.

US President Donald J. Trump joins Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, at their bilateral meeting Saturday, June 29, 2019, at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, Japan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

For a long time, it was accepted wisdom that the United States was in decline. We were headed into a multi-polar world where America was no longer the reigning superpower. Brazil, Russia, India, and China banded together to form “BRICS” and threatened to start trading energy in a currency other than the dollar, partnering with Iran which was evading American sanctions.

Well, the petrodollar is back, baby! As Axios reported, the dollar has strengthened in value against other currencies since the beginning of the Iran war. That shouldn’t be surprising. Much of the President’s foreign policy is designed not only to make us safer but more prosperous. As Trump put it recently, he’s “cementing America’s status as the number one energy superpower by far anywhere on earth.”

Over the last two months, the President knocked out two global suppliers of sanctioned oil. As others have pointed out, in the Panama Canal and Venezuela, the President protected the Western Hemisphere from economic damage before heading into Iran to take out the most belligerent actor on the planet.

It’s been particularly devastating to China. In recent years, China and Iran, together with Russia, attempted to create the impression of a countervailing force to the West and American power. Yet in less than a week, that alliance has been revealed as worth less than the paper it’s written on. As American and Israeli bombs decimated the Islamic Regime of Iran and their military capabilities, neither China nor Russia have lifted a finger to help. China provided their most advanced Air Defense capabilities to Iran and we destroyed them.

It’s not just the military. Almost all of Iran’s exported oil (and half of Venezuela’s) went to China last year, per Politico. The President’s strike on Iran isolated China from up to 20% of its oil supply at a time when global dominance and energy access are two sides of the same coin.

China is panicking. This week, the CCP told its top refiners they must halt all Diesel and gas exports. China’s oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz, which had been a sanctions-proof corridor until this week. Now, we control the Strait of Hormuz, along with all of the world’s oil chokepoints, and we are providing insurance to oil tankers wishing to pass through.

As Walter Curt put it, cut off from Hormuz, China will be staring down the barrel of empty oil tanks in three months.

On Thursday, the country set its growth target for 2026 at under 5% the first time in more than 30 years. China lent Venezuela $100 billion, which was being paid back in dirt-cheap oil—oil that’s now controlled by the U.S. and available on the free market for anyone to buy at market prices.

China’s Trump-induced energy crunch has effectively neutralized the threat of it taking Taiwan in the near future. As Zineb Riboua explained, “Every barrel China must now renegotiate, reroute, or replace from Iranian sources tightens the logistical margin available for sustained military operations around Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands.”

For the first time in a long while, China has not sent military aircraft to harass Taiwan since February 27—just before the U.S.-Israel strikes began.

Meanwhile, we are producing more energy than ever.

But it goes beyond oil. As Riboua explained, President Trump didn’t just blow up the Ayatollah Khameini and Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile reactors. He blew up China’s entire narrative that the U.S. was on the decline and China set to take its place as the world’s superpower:

In 2021, Xi told senior Party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” that America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of CCP’s dogma of inevitability rested on Iran’s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.

As a result, Xi Jinping is scrambling.

So why aren’t President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shouting this from the rooftops?

Simple: The President could brag about all the leverage over China he’s acquired. Or he can use it. And like the dealmaker he is, that’s the obvious choice.

President Trump would not have gone to war to restore the petrodollar and American dominance. He did it protect future Americans from having to deal with a nuclear-armed state sponsor of terror. But if past presidents took us to war at great cost to the American people, every one of the President’s foreign policy decisions has had a tremendous economic benefit to us. The war in Iran is no exception.