The China Variable
China is the primary beneficiary of a war it didn't start and bears no cost for.
Operation Epic Fury · Brief 006 · Fictional Analytical Scenario
China imports approximately 75% of its oil from the Middle East. A US-dominated Persian Gulf with a compliant post-regime-change Iranian government is a US hand on the economic throat of China’s industrial economy. Keeping Iran viable as an independent state is a Chinese core interest regardless of how Beijing feels about the Islamic Republic.
Beijing is achieving this without visible involvement, without reputational cost and without the exposure that direct support would require. China is continuing to purchase Iranian oil throughout the operation. Tolerating and facilitating shadow fleet and payment infrastructure. Maintaining its UN Security Council blocking position. Deepening Gulf state relationships as US credibility erodes.
China wants the conflict sustained at a level that exhausts the US. China wants it contained at a level that doesn’t destroy the oil supply. China wants Iran to survive as an independent state. China wants none of this attributed to Chinese action. Russia does the visible work. China takes the strategic benefit.
Russia: The Paper Tiger China Is Playing
Russia is not the independent strategic actor its rhetoric implies. Its GDP is smaller than Italy’s. Its military capacity has been substantially degraded in Ukraine. Its protection network has failed serially — Cuba, Venezuela, now Iran — demonstrating that its protection vows are hollow against determined US action.
Russia’s value to China is precisely its limitations. Moscow provides military technology, intelligence sharing and diplomatic cover at Russian reputational cost. China provides the economic lifeline — the oil purchases, the sanctions evasion infrastructure, the trade relationships — that sustains Russian capacity to keep playing the role. It is a division of labour in which China is the senior partner and Russia is the forward instrument.
The Ottoman Empire parallel is instructive. A great power in structural decline, 26 years into the same leadership, operating from a degraded information environment and a template-rigid foreign policy, finding its sphere of influence shrinking faster than its rhetoric acknowledges. Putin is not playing chess. He is running the same playbook in an environment that has changed around him.
India: The Power of Not Choosing
India is simultaneously a Quad member, a buyer of Russian military equipment, an investor in Iranian port infrastructure at Chabahar, and home to a 200 million Muslim population that is a domestic constraint on any explicit anti-Iran posture. India has refused to choose sides and that refusal is not weakness. It is strategic positioning.
India will not choose. That is its power. Every actor — the US, Russia, China, Iran — needs Indian non-alignment more than it needs Indian commitment. That need is leverage, and India is deploying it.
The Nuclear Reframe: It’s Not Russia
The mainstream analysis is focused on Russian nuclear threats. The Russian nuclear threat is substantially empty. Tactical nuclear use by Russia would produce prevailing winds carrying fallout toward Pakistan, India and China — three nuclear powers downwind. Strategic ICBMs mean mutual suicide with no plausible trigger.
The real nuclear risk in the current theatre is Israeli. If Israeli leadership makes a determination that an existential threshold has been crossed — that Iranian nuclear capability is about to become operational and that conventional military options have been exhausted — the Samson Option logic is live.
This is not a remote contingency. It is the nuclear risk that the current analysis is not seriously examining because it is politically difficult to name.
Bottom Line
The most consequential geopolitical shift occurring during Epic Fury is not in the Persian Gulf. It is in the architecture of the post-American international order that China is quietly constructing in the diplomatic vacuum Washington is creating.
The 2023 Saudi-Iran normalisation brokered by China demonstrated Chinese diplomatic competence at the precise moment US regional diplomacy was failing. That template is being extended across the Global South. The US is vacating the multilateral space. China is filling it — not through military force, but through infrastructure commitments, diplomatic engagement and the simple credibility of showing up.
The Russia contradiction this brief identified has now been confirmed: on 13 March 2026 the US temporarily lifted restrictions on Russian oil sales to manage the war’s economic costs. The US is simultaneously bombing Iran and economically sustaining Iran’s principal state backer. Two separate transactional relationships. Nobody connecting them. Brief 006 mapped this architecture before events documented it.
This is a synthesis of Brief 006 of the Operation Epic Fury series.
Read the full brief at substack.joelmorin.com/brief-006.html
The complete series at substack.joelmorin.com