If Washington wants to keep the war on Iran from spiraling into a wider regional crisis, it needs help from what might seem to be an unlikely quarter: Beijing.

China is the only outside power with both the motive and the means to press Tehran toward de-escalation. A prolonged conflict would threaten Chinese energy security, destabilize a region central to its commercial interests, and test Beijing’s claim that it can act as a responsible global power. For all the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, this is one moment when U.S. interests may depend on Chinese cooperation.

If Washington wants to keep the war on Iran from spiraling into a wider regional crisis, it needs help from what might seem to be an unlikely quarter: Beijing.

China is the only outside power with both the motive and the means to press Tehran toward de-escalation. A prolonged conflict would threaten Chinese energy security, destabilize a region central to its commercial interests, and test Beijing’s claim that it can act as a responsible global power. For all the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, this is one moment when U.S. interests may depend on Chinese cooperation.

Energy markets, supply chains, and the stability of the Middle East are all at risk. The danger is not simply a longer war between Israel and Iran. It is a wider conflict that pulls in the United States more deeply, threatens Gulf infrastructure, and disrupts a critical global energy corridor.

An extended war is plausible because the principal belligerents still have reasons to keep fighting. Israel appears to believe that sustained military pressure, especially with continued U.S. backing, can significantly degrade Iran’s military capabilities and perhaps even overthrow the regime. For years, Israeli strategists have argued that enough pressure could expose fractures within Iran’s political system and weaken the Islamic Republic from within.

Iran sees the conflict differently, but it has its own incentives to keep fighting. For Tehran, survival itself would be a kind of victory. If the regime can withstand sustained military pressure, it can claim to have restored deterrence and shown that any attempt to overthrow it will impose serious costs on its adversaries.

Iran has several ways to raise those costs: It is firing missiles and drones at a wide range of countries from Cyprus and Israel in a sweeping arc to Oman. It has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz by firing at ships and scaring off insurers. It has also attacked energy facilities across the Gulf Arab states, which has driven up energy prices. It can escalate further by targeting vital industrial facilities such as desalination and electricity generation plants as well as telecommunication systems, which would paralyze countries in the Gulf.

In other words, both Israel and Iran can still imagine benefits from a prolonged war, as do some domestic U.S. groups, which wish to see the end of the Iranian regime (e.g., elements in the U.S. Iranian diaspora and neoconservatives). That makes the conflict especially dangerous.

Other states do not share that calculus. The Gulf Arab countries have little interest in a long war. Their economic strategies depend on stability, and even a limited conflict threatens tourism, aviation, logistics, real estate, and investor confidence. More serious still is the vulnerability of critical infrastructure. Attacks on oil and gas facilities, export terminals, desalination plants, or electricity systems will impose immediate and severe economic and social costs.

Yet Gulf governments are also reluctant to enter the war directly. Failing to respond to Iranian attacks can make them appear weak. But retaliating militarily risks a wider escalation and invites the politically toxic perception that Arab governments are openly fighting alongside Israel. For Gulf leaders, the priority is not victory through escalation but stability through containment.

The United States has reason to want the same outcome. But Washington’s position is more precarious than it may have anticipated. The Trump administration appears to have entered the conflict without a clear long-term strategy for how it ends and assumed that it would be a speedy operation. It may initially have hoped for something like a low-cost regime weakening strategy of the kind that U.S. officials believe they accomplished with the seizure of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela: remove Iran’s supreme leader, encourage more pragmatic factions within the elite, and redirect Iranian policy without requiring a prolonged U.S. military commitment.

So far, however, there is little sign that such an outcome is close. Iran’s ruling elite appears to be managing succession pressures while preserving internal cohesion. The security apparatus, fresh off the massacre of thousands of protesters in January, remains united. And if Tehran continues to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or expands attacks against Israel and U.S. partners, Washington could find itself pulled further into the conflict even after claiming success.

This is where China can play a central role.

Beijing has historically approached the Middle East less as a military arena than as an economic one. Its most notable diplomatic success in recent years was brokering the Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023. China has no interest in becoming trapped in the region’s wars. But it has every interest in preventing a conflict that could destabilize a major oil-producing region and disrupt maritime trade routes that are vital to the Chinese economy.

That logic helps explain Beijing’s caution. Chinese analysts may disagree among themselves. Some see strategic upside in a United States bogged down in yet another Middle Eastern war. Others have concluded that a post-sanctions Iran could offer expanded commercial opportunities, as happened in Iraq after the United States invaded in 2003. But the more sober view, and likely the one closest to the Chinese leadership, is that prolonged instability or regime collapse in Iran would harm China more than help it.

Iran remains one of China’s few meaningful geopolitical footholds in the Middle East. If the country were to descend into civil war or prolonged disorder, then Beijing would lose influence in a region where it has worked patiently to expand its presence. Chaos in Iran could also radiate outward, aggravating instability in Central Asia and creating knock-on security risks closer to China’s western frontier.

Most important, a wider war would directly threaten China’s energy interests. A substantial share of the oil transported through the Strait of Hormuz goes to Asian markets—above all to China, which imports around 5 million barrels of crude oil per day or one-third of the total that transits through the strait. Any lasting disruption there would hit Beijing quickly and hard. For China, then, de-escalation is not altruism. It is self-interest.

And Beijing has leverage to act on that interest. China is Iran’s largest oil customer and by far Iran’s most important economic partner. In 2025, Iran exported roughly 520 million barrels of crude oil to China, meaning that Beijing purchases about 90 percent of Tehran’s oil exports and accounts for roughly one-third of Iran’s total trade. Few outside powers have comparable influence over Tehran’s economic lifelines. That influence may not be decisive, but it is real.

China has already signaled that it wants to play a diplomatic role. Its foreign minister has spoken with counterparts across the region, and Beijing has sent its Middle East envoy to help calm tensions. At minimum, China can use its economic relationship with Tehran to press against further escalation. It can make clear that threatening energy flows and widening the war would impose costs not only on the United States and its partners but also on one of Iran’s few indispensable economic relationships. So, for example, China can send ships to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz to signal its commitment to maritime security.

None of this means that Beijing will emerge as the Middle East’s new peacemaker. China remains risk averse, and it is unlikely to jeopardize its broader strategic posture by taking dramatic steps. But that caution is precisely what gives it credibility here. Beijing wants the war contained. It has leverage over one of the principal actors. And like many regional players, it does not benefit from continued escalation.

For Washington, the implication is uncomfortable but straightforward. The United States retains unmatched influence over Israel. China has more influence over Iran than almost any other major power. If there is to be a credible diplomatic off-ramp, it may require both countries to use that leverage in parallel.

At a moment when U.S.-China relations are otherwise defined by rivalry, the Middle East may offer a narrow but important area of convergence. For China, helping contain the conflict would protect its core interests while strengthening its claim to responsible global leadership. For the United States, working with Beijing on de-escalation may now be more valuable than scoring another point in great-power competition.

This effort could be coordinated by the Gulf Cooperation Council, a political, economic, and security bloc originally established in part to guard against threats from Iran and whose member states maintain friendly ties with both the United States and China. There is also a precedent in the region for multinational security cooperation: the joint effort by states to combat piracy around the Horn of Africa beginning in 2008.

When U.S. President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing later this month, the agenda should not stop at tariffs and trade. The more urgent question is whether the world’s two largest powers can work together to keep a regional war from becoming a global crisis.