To have a feel for how a war is unfolding you need to follow the news hour by hour. I therefore had mixed feelings about leaving London to attend two conferences in China, on foreign policy and the economy. On the one hand, I would have a fascinating chance to see the emerging superpower up close. On the other, I risked losing the thread of the conflict in the Middle East—and at a crucial moment. 

As it happened, our Chinese hosts spoke to me about Iran so often that the war was never far from my thoughts. Our cover leader this week is about what they said.

In America the war’s most bullish supporters hoped that it would cow China, by showing how vulnerable China is to disrupted flows of oil. It would also boost deterrence by contrasting America’s military supremacy with China’s reluctance or inability to save its friends.

That is not how the conflict looks from Beijing, where observers see the war as a grave American error. Indeed, many Chinese experts have dusted off a line attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Chinese experts think the war will accelerate America’s decline. They see American aggression as a validation of President Xi Jinping’s focus on security over economic growth. And they expect peace, when it comes, to create opportunities for China to exploit. Only in the background is there anxiety about the dangers of a disordered world.

And that is where I have the greatest doubts about the vision I heard being set out in Beijing. For all China’s analysis, it has one strategic blind spot. Chinese thinkers are too reluctant to contemplate a scenario in which America acts as a rogue power, ripping up the world order it created. Although China likes to complain about Western values, it has thrived under rules that America has laboured to sustain. 

Faced with technological and political change, America has repeatedly shown a remarkable ability to reinvent itself. By contrast, China is cautious, ageing and hidebound by party ideology. There is a future in which America embraces upheaval and China shuts itself off. That future may yet belong to America.

I will join my colleagues in our London studio to talk about all of this in more detail for this week’s edition of The Insider. You can watch from 6pm London time (1pm in New York) on Thursday.