China, North Korea draw closer amid a weakening US

For Beijing and Pyongyang, the timing offers an opportunity to read the moment, and the reading appears to be that American power, while still formidable, is increasingly stretched, costly to project and politically fragile when applied.

A summit born of convergent interests

The 2026 Iran war was initiated by the United States and Israel on 28 February 2026, in an opening strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggered hundreds of retaliatory missiles and thousands of drones across the Middle East.

President Donald Trump outlined four explicit objectives under the banner “Operation Epic Fury”: preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, destroying missile production sites, degrading proxy networks, and annihilating the Iranian navy – though the ultimate aim appeared to be the systematic degradation of the Iranian government itself.

The outcome, as assessed by Brookings, fell well short of those ambitions.

Trump set out to change the Iranian regime, decimate its nuclear program, degrade its armed forces and demonstrate American power and credibility on the world stage – but made little progress on most of these goals, while instead giving Iran unprecedented control over the Strait of Hormuz, severely undermining US soft power and alliances, and replacing a cautious, elderly supreme leader with a more hardline, vengeful, military-dominated regime.

VIEW ALL

For Beijing and Pyongyang, this is precisely the kind of outcome that validates a longstanding thesis: that overwhelming American military force, when deployed against a determined adversary willing to absorb pain and escalate asymmetrically, produces strategic costs that outweigh tactical gains.

Xi’s decision to make Pyongyang his first stop of 2026 – ahead of any Western capital – can be read as Beijing signalling that it intends to act on this lesson rather than merely observe it.

The ‘Iran Model’ and its appeal to China and North Korea

Several observable elements of the Iran conflict suggest why China and North Korea might draw operational lessons from it. By revealing the United States as an unpredictable, unreliable partner that rejected regional calls to avoid war and thereby inflicted major damage on the Gulf states, the war is expected to push US allies towards greater strategic hedging.

If that dynamic holds for Gulf monarchies that have hosted American bases for decades, Chinese and North Korean strategists may conclude it will hold even more strongly for Indo-Pacific partners whose proximity to a rising China makes the calculus of supporting Washington progressively riskier.

A Georgetown Journal of International Affairs analysis went further, warning explicitly that the structural constraints of the Iran conflict risk transforming the intervention into a strategic overextension for the United States, and recommended that policymakers prioritise diplomacy over prolonged war to avoid exactly this outcome.

When American policymakers themselves are warning of overextension, adversaries positioned to exploit it have every incentive to do so – and the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Korean Peninsula are the most obvious arenas in which pressure could be applied while US attention and resources remain partially absorbed by Middle East reconstruction, Gulf reassurance missions and the political fallout of an inconclusive war. North Korea’s own posture reinforces this reading.

With denuclearisation talks stalled and sanctions enforcement weakened by divisions at the UN Security Council, Pyongyang has continued to demonstrate deterrent capability – including an April 2026 ICBM test demonstrating potential range to reach the US mainland – at precisely the moment Washington’s bandwidth was consumed elsewhere.

Allies watching the Gulf and drawing their own conclusions

For Tokyo and Seoul, the lesson is not that Washington abandoned its allies outright – US allies in the region did stick by the White House through the crisis, and the GCC stood up a joint command centre in Riyadh to coordinate with US forces – but rather that hosting American assets and maintaining the alliance did not spare these countries from becoming primary targets and absorbing the resulting costs in casualties, infrastructure damage and economic disruption.

Japan and South Korea, both of which host substantial US military infrastructure and both of which sit far closer to a potential China–Taiwan or Korea–DPRK flashpoint than the Gulf states sit to Iran, may reasonably ask what a comparable scenario would look like in north-east Asia – and whether the costs of proximity to American power projection now outweigh the deterrent benefits as cleanly as they once seemed to.

Cold shower for Taiwan

If Taipei needed a reminder of how quickly assurances can collide with reality, the Iran war provided one. For years, the debate around Taiwan’s defence has centred on a binary question: would the United States come if China moved? The Iran war reframes that question in a way Taiwanese planners can’t easily dismiss – not whether Washington would show up, but what showing up would actually look like, and whether it would be enough.

None of this means Taiwan is abandoned, or that a cross-strait scenario would unfold the way Iran did. The geography, the stakes, the domestic political consensus around Taiwan in Washington, and China’s own risk calculus are all different – in some ways more favourable to deterrence, in others less.

But the Iran war has done something that years of think tank reports could not: it gave Taipei a live, recent example of what happens when a US-led military campaign doesn’t go according to plan, and what that does to the credibility of the power backing it.

For an island whose entire defence posture rests on the assumption that American power can be relied upon at the moment of maximum danger, that’s a genuinely cold shower – and one that’s likely to accelerate Taiwan’s own efforts at asymmetric defence, civil resilience, and diversifying its security relationships, regardless of what Washington says next.

More than an anniversary

The Xi–Kim summit, viewed against this backdrop, represents more than ceremonial diplomacy marking a treaty anniversary. It reflects a calculated bet – shared, to varying degrees, by Beijing and Pyongyang – that the post-Iran-war environment offers a genuine opening: an America whose stated objectives went largely unmet, whose Gulf partners absorbed serious damage despite the alliance relationship, and whose attention and resources remain partially committed to a volatile Middle East.

Whether this assessment proves accurate will shape the choices both governments make in the Indo-Pacific over the coming year – and will be watched nowhere more closely than in Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei.

Alan Callow is a graduate of Western Mindanao State University in the Philippines and is a freelance journalist with experience in writing about the Asia-Pacific region.