Short read: How China Won the Iran War

A recent survey by Pew Research made headlines for it showed that a significantly larger share of people across the world now have a more favourable opinion of China than the US compared to a similar survey from three years ago. Nobel prize winning American economist, Paul Krugman writes about how America has ended up antagonising the rest of the world so much so quickly.

First, some numbers: In Canada, those favouring US:China flipped from 57:14 in 2023 to 33:44 now (even before last week’s collapse of trade talks), in Spain from 55:28 to 30:54, in Italy from 60:36 to 31:51 and so on. Krugman reproduces the Pew results for a longer list of countries in his Substack post. He begins by showing China’s dominance in global manufacturing preceded the 2023 survey which favoured the US: “China’s role as the workshop of the world inevitably gives it a great deal of geopolitical influence. However, there were a number of factors that, two years ago, arguably still gave an America a power advantage despite China’s economic weight and manufacturing prowess. These factors included:

Yet Trump and his lackeys have quickly squandered all of these advantages.”

To begin with, scientific edge: “Trump officials have orchestrated a series of attacks on scientists and their laboratories, implemented through funding cuts, grant interruptions, and immigration restrictions. Scientists are gravitating to Canada, Europe, and China, and we are rapidly losing the depth of our innovative and essential scientific community.”

And the prolonged nature of the war on Iran questions the military might: “Had U.S. military leaders adapted to the new world — revealed by the war in Ukraine — of cheap, ubiquitous drones? How much damage had the pro-testosterone, anti-intellectual leadership of Pete Hegseth already done? Now we know the answers to these questions, and America’s military reputation has nose-dived…. a December 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, a Chinese supply chain underpins “the architecture of modern drone warfare.”

And the dollar’s reserve currency status has been questioned with central banks across the world swapping their US treasuries for gold and increasing share of trade getting cleared in yuan.

Most importantly, America’s allies: “Trumpian tariff policy, by itself, was an announcement to the world that agreements with the U.S. government are worthless. Add to this the demands that Canada become the 51^st state, that Denmark hand over Greenland, and so on, and America had thoroughly lost the trust of its former friends even before the Iran war.

Then came the war. And in the past five months the U.S. has shown itself both erratic and ineffectual. Trump launched a war that, in addition to creating death and destruction, cut off much of the world’s oil supply without so much as consulting other nations. Once the war began, America proved both incapable of imposing its will on Iran and unable either to open the Strait of Hormuz or to protect regional allies.

So now the world neither trusts nor fears us. The chart at the top of this post, drawn from the Pew survey of global attitudes, shows views of the US and China in multiple countries. Even many of our oldest allies, the nations that helped us win World War II and the Cold War, now have a more favorable opinion of China than they do of us.