Washington Times Weekly: China’s pressure campaign meets Trump’s Iran gambit

Video

Saturday, March 14, 2026

I’m George Gerbo and welcome to Washington Times Weekly, where we get a chance to sit down with our reporters and take a look at their coverage of the latest news and events.

Joining me is National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz.

[GERBO] Let’s get started by taking a look at the war in Iran, which is now two weeks in. President Trump has been a little bit vague sometimes, a little bit contradictory with some of his goals and aims with the war. Sometimes he’s pushed for removing, overthrowing the Iranian regime. Other times saying, a little more broadly, he wants Iran no longer to be a threat to both the United States, Israel, and the Middle East at large. As you’ve written recently, that’s a little bit of a departure from his initial campaign for president, when pretty strongly anti-interventionist messaging that we heard from him. And now he’s shifted a little bit on that.

[GERTZ] Yeah, the MAGA base has been very much what I would call neo-isolationist. And the president was recently asked about this — when he was asked if J.D. Vance was less supportive of the Iran action. J.D. Vance, within the administration, I think, represents the neo-isolationist trend among the MAGA faithful. And the president was asked if he wasn’t enthusiastic. And he was very honest in saying, yeah, he was less enthusiastic about going to war with Iran than the president himself. But on the other hand, he’s still supportive of the military action.

The president kind of evolved in this stance. Again, leading up to his election for the second term, he was talking very specifically about ending endless regime change war. Now the MAGA faithful are saying, well, the word “endless” is the caveat for this particular regime change war in Iran. I’m not sure that military action based on air power and strikes against naval forces is actually going to cause a capitulation of the Iranian regime. And at least so far, we haven’t seen that.

[GERBO] One of the related impacts that might go unnoticed — that you’ve written about — is across Asia in China, where disruptions to the transit and export of oil from the Middle East, from Iran, could limit China’s access to energy, potentially harming its economy. China is dependent very heavily on those foreign oil imports. It’s been purchasing Iranian oil, which kind of, at the same time, helps keep Iran afloat as it’s under multiple sanctions from democracies and other countries around the world. And there could almost be a positive net effect for the United States in that part of Asia that maybe diplomats weren’t expecting.

[GERTZ] Yeah, this is a reflection of a major in-depth piece that I wrote for The Washington Times last week, which really drilled down on the topic of what are the impacts of the Iran operation on China. The most immediate one is the fact that China will lose access to lots of cheap oil. Ninety percent of Iran’s oil exports have been going to China at reduced rates, often on fleets of ghost fleet tankers — that is, tankers that are designed to be undetectable from a sanctions perspective.

You combine that with the fact that they’re losing oil from Venezuela, which was a much smaller percentage, somewhere in the range of eight or nine percent of China getting its oil from Venezuela. And I spoke with a number of experts, including a former secretary of state and China experts, who said that the president’s calculation in conducting operations in Iran clearly has a major impact on China’s energy. And the thing you need to understand about energy in China is, China has no domestic sources of oil. It’s heavily dependent — for its economy, which is booming — on these foreign exports. So it’s heavily dependent on these oil exports. And really, the fact that it’s losing access, or could lose access, to the Iranian oil clearly has reverberations in Beijing and the Communist Party leadership compound in Zhongnanhai in Beijing.

Watch the video for the full conversation.