China Experts: U.S. Credibility Falling Post-Iran War
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- World Peace Forum at Tsinghua University convened China's top foreign policy experts in Beijing on July 3-4, 2026, with declining U.S. credibility after the Iran war and rising AI importance identified as the two key trends shaping the immediate future of the global order.
- Yan Xuetong, a Tsinghua University foreign policy scholar, said the Iran war has led more nations to view China as more trustworthy than the United States, with China's strategic credibility rising while America's has declined.
- Yan and other Chinese experts said West Asian states—traditionally U.S. allies—are now questioning American security guarantees on both resolve and capability, citing weakening U.S. ties with partners as evidence of a changing order.
- Wu Xinbo, dean of Fudan University's Institute of International Studies, said the Trump administration's renaming of Indo-Pacific Command back to Pacific Command signals that India's status in U.S. regional strategy has noticeably declined.
- Trump's recent reference to a U.S.-China "G2" during his China visit reinforced Chinese scholars' views of a shift from unipolarity to bipolarity, though it has not officially received Beijing's endorsement.
- Jia Qingguo, a Peking University scholar and CPPCC Standing Committee member, said China wants to preserve older institutions like the UN while shifting emphasis from human rights to sovereignty, framing China as satisfied with the existing international order.
- Yan predicted that within a decade the world will fracture into AI standard-setters, AI innovators, and AI consumer nations—a classification he compared to the World Bank's income tiers—with the U.S. and China as the two key standard-setting players.
Why it matters: The Chinese scholars' assessment frames the post-Iran war period as one of Chinese ascendancy and American decline, reinforcing Beijing's preference for patient multilateral engagement over forceful revisionism. Yan's proposed AI classification scheme, if adopted by other capitals, would shift how nations measure national power beyond GDP and military budgets.
