But all the intelligence suggests that, even with an extended military campaign, the US cannot force one of its suggested aims: regime change in Iran. The Washington Post cited a classified report suggesting as much and I am hearing exactly the same thing from governments across Europe.

A long war would be disastrous for the global economy, with oil prices jumping to well over $100 a barrel, followed by higher inflation, higher interest rates and lower growth. Some European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and now the UK, are already suffering low gas storage volumes. A short war would be just as bad: Trump loses his nerve, abandons the operation and leaves the antagonism in the Middle East to escalate. Even in this scenario it is far from clear that the flows of oil and gas would return to normal quickly.

The high oil price has already led the US to drop its oil sanctions against Russia. That would be headline news most days, but not today. Vladimir Putin has resumed oil deliveries to India, but this time not at a discount, but a premium. The Russians are back in business. Putin threatened last week that he is considering cutting all the remaining supplies to Europe. So a week into the US war against Iran and we are already looking at very different endgame scenarios for the Ukraine war. Wasn’t Russia supposed to go bankrupt?

Meanwhile, the West’s scenarios get progressively worse; the battlefield question has become an industrial one.

The West is currently facing a supply-chain crisis for military procurement. Even the world’s most powerful army cannot assume victory if the war lasts more than a few weeks. It may simply run out of key materiel. And the US is already running into bottlenecks. Contrary to Trump’s recent claims that the US has “a virtually unlimited supply” of munitions, Foreign Policy magazine reports that the war is already burning through the US/Israeli arsenal at such an alarming rate that the retaliatory destruction caused by Iran could take years to fix — and only then if the defense-critical minerals can be sourced. Tracing the military supply chains all the way back to their original sources, the journalists discovered that it is all but impossible to “instantly reverse decades of consolidated construction lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity”.

The decline set in decades ago. Back at the turn of this millennium, outsourcing was the cool thing to do, especially in the US. The service economy was the future then. And during this golden age of globalization, all the metal bashers wandered off to China, leaving the economies of the West to focus on higher value-added services such as finance. Coming from Germany, a country with a strong industrial tradition, I noted a good deal of contempt for industry among the elites of London or New York. I have argued myself that Germany overspecialized in some of the old-tech industries, such as cars. But getting rid of base industrial services, such as steel and chemical plants, is not smart for purely strategic reasons.

Metals, minerals and chemicals sit at the top of every supply chain, and most have to be extracted. These raw materials are then processed to produce those essential base materials like steel, aluminum, or magnets. The material goes through a number of further processing stages and if the final product is complex, like a military radar, or even a car, there will be many additional nodes in your supply chains. Small wonder the German car industry regularly breaks into sweat whenever China restricts the supply of any single piece of equipment — such as an essential mid-range semiconductor. Without it, their engines are useless.

But the specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals — it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled: there is a lot of know-how in producing rare earth magnets from neodymium. And we are currently paying a heavy price for a service industry fetish. I blame the macroeconomists. There are no supply chains in standard macroeconomic models. The stuff just arrived at our door. These models worked in the fair-weather environment of a globalized, multilateral trading system, but not in our world today.

Were the Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz alive today, he would be taking an interest in supply chains. Back when he was in action, the key powers had plenty of blacksmiths and sweatshops to produce weapons, cannons and ammunition. Their bottleneck was money and soldiers. But he did understand that strategy was dependent on the “hard math of supply”. Today, you cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains.

And if Putin and Xi Jinping understand one thing, it is industrial supply chains. Putin wrote his thesis on Russia’s mineral resources with a call for them to be nationalized. Western commentators obsessed over whether he plagiarized the thesis. But a far more important question is why he chose that particular sector as a theme to hone his plagiarizing skills, rather than finance.

Xi formed his economic views as a young man when he observed the decline of the Soviet Union, a country known for its smokestack industries. Xi became a champion of modern industry. He disproved the lazy thesis that governments can’t pick industrial winners. China is doing this all the time. The difference is that they are picking industries, not companies. They picked rare earths, magnets, car batteries, electric cars, solar panels, robotics, among others.

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Can any of us name any western leader with an interest in mining? Or a knowledge of downstream industrial processes? That’s for people in anoraks, isn’t it? Trump was a developer of prime property before he entered politics. Emmanuel Macron was an investment banker. Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz were lawyers. Meanwhile, successive governments in America have chosen to transform industrial heartlands into a rust belt which has ultimately constrained its military-strategic options. It can choose to become protectionist, as it has done under Trump. Or it can pursue regime change in distant lands as it did under George W. Bush. But it cannot pursue both at the same time.

Imagine, then, the nightmare scenario for the West: the simultaneous invasion by China of Taiwan, by Russia of the Baltic Republics, and by North Korea of South Korea. I don’t think this is particularly likely because each has its own tactical and strategic timelines. For as long as Russia fights in Ukraine, it is not in a position to fight another land war.

But the West would not even be prepared for one of them. If China were to go for Taiwan now, the US might try to stop it — especially if China were to restrict supplies of semiconductors. But it is far from clear that Trump would be ready for a long fight with another nuclear superpower. If you are running out of missiles after a week of fighting against Iran, then how could you possibly take on another enemy?

I have to admit that I found Trump’s pacifism during the election campaign one of his more appealing characteristics. He appeared to have broken with the failed policies of some of his predecessors. The US war record is dismal. The country hasn’t had a successful conflict since Korea. They totally messed up the Middle East. I don’t want to speculate what, or who, got him into this one — he certainly doesn’t seem to know. But it will become the defining moment of his entire presidency.

Perhaps some of these scenarios can be mitigated. Certainly, the oil price could come down, as shipping in the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal. But what I cannot see is a scenario that brings peace and stability to the Middle East and which preserves economic stability in the rest of the world at the same time.

I can, however, see a scenario that delivers neither.

Today, however, they have far more in common. China is now the major trading partner of most South American states, which marks a substantial change from the 20th century when the US dominated bilateral trade with the region. Brazil sold 110 million tons of soy beans to China in 2025, while Chinese firms are building a new metro line in the Chilean capital Santiago, and in 2024 opened a brand new port near Lima. Overall, South American-Chinese trade in 2024 topped half a trillion dollars.

In the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s rendition, many have been asking whether the incident marks a major blow for China’s prospects in South America. One of Beijing’s representatives was in talks with Maduro mere hours before Delta Force came calling. Beijing won’t be thrilled about Maduro’s loss, but his presence probably isn’t critical to its influence in the region. American oil companies are proving skeptical about investing in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure, but China has readily made much longer-term investments there and in other South American countries. Beijing has long believed that in the 21st century, real power lies in tech infrastructure — and it shows.

Under Maduro, Venezuela committed on a grand scale to Chinese Huawei systems to run 5G. Huawei and other Chinese players have also moved into cloud computing in recent years, and have penetrated much of South America. It is not yet clear whether America’s new arrangements with Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, will change all this. There are alternative 5G providers in operation in Venezuela, but it will be hard — and costly — to remove Chinese infrastructure that has already been installed.

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That infrastructure includes energy as well as communications. South America has shifted decisively toward renewables: over 60% of its electricity generation is from renewables (including hydropower), and more than 90% of the region’s solar and wind equipment is from Chinese producers. Meanwhile, Chinese EVs have more than a quarter of the market in Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay, and their presence is growing fast in the continent’s other markets.

Will the Trump administration demand that South America abandon its current dependence on Chinese infrastructure, electric vehicles and green energy? And if so, will the US help pay for an alternative in a region where consumers want cheap, efficient products here and now? American taxpayers might not be delighted to hear that Venezuelan oil revenues, if they ever arrive, are spent on subsidizing cloud computing in Caracas or Buenos Aires.

If the Americans allow China to remain the region’s infrastructure giant, then many in Beijing will be fine with the loss of Maduro. In the long term, tech dominance assures China leverage in Venezuela regardless of who sits in the presidential palace. If arresting a head of state is America’s way of showing its dominance in a key region, then influencing everything from business to energy infrastructure might be Beijing’s way of doing the same thing. China has multiple opportunities to adapt and find new opportunities in a region where it’s indisputably a major economic player.

Meanwhile, Trump’s success in decapitating the Venezuelan leadership has revived his enthusiasm for talking about taking Greenland. In an interview with the New York Times, he suggested that Russia and China might take over Greenland if America didn’t get there first. Yet this implies that China’s Arctic plans are further advanced than is really the case.

In 2018, China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — the word “near” is carrying a lot of weight in that formulation. China’s interest in the far north is rooted in a historical sense, developed over the past century, that the country is surrounded by enemies and that an alliance of adversaries might cut off important sea routes to China by blocking the Strait of Malacca. It’s hard to imagine that many powers would actually seek to provoke China, now a military superpower, in that way. But Beijing has long sought alternative ways to supply itself if one key route is cut off. The warming waters of the Arctic provide one possible pathway. China has invested in new icebreaker ships and has sought increased status in the Arctic Council, the international body where issues relating to the region are discussed.

This is still a policy for the 2030s and beyond, but the thinking started years ago. In 2018, China introduced the term “Polar Silk Road”, describing its interest in sea routes from northern Chinese ports across the Arctic waters to the Atlantic and beyond, though the phrase hasn’t caught on in quite the same way as its more famous Belt and Road Initiative. A few prescient Western researchers have been tracking China’s increased interest in the Arctic, and Greenland in particular, for some years now, including Eyck Freymann, who co-wrote, with Calvin Heng, an important paper for the Belfer Center of the Harvard Kennedy School on the Arctic intentions of Asian powers. As they point out, the Arctic is one of the areas where greater cooperation between Russia and China, which is certainly real in a broad sense, is still fragile. Other analysts point out that Russia has a very strong sense of the Arctic as part of its own identity. A greater Chinese presence there would cause significant anguish among the Russian nationalists who both inspire and goad Putin online.

The aspiration to expand beyond China’s traditional Asian position is influenced in part by three Western figures who have been prominent in its thinking on geopolitics over the past few decades: Mahan, Mackinder and Monroe. Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most prominent naval theorists of the 19th century, argued that control of the oceans through a powerful navy was central to dominance in the global economy; Sir Halford Mackinder maintained that control of the “World Island” of Eurasia was central to any power’s search for global dominance. US president James Monroe’s doctrine of hemispheric dominance has come into prominence this month because of its recasting as the “Donroe Doctrine”, but Chinese thinkers have been debating an “Asian Monroe Doctrine” since at least the Thirties, when Japan’s empire sought to dominate the continent.

China has little obvious interest in classic territorial dominance over Greenland, though mineral rights are another matter. But a new approach to global politics, one that enables Beijing to push its case around disputed islands and maritime routes in Asia, will be of great interest. It has had longstanding disputes with other maritime powers over islands in the East and South China Seas: Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. In the longer term, the precedents set by the Donroe Doctrine might yet lead online Chinese nationalists, many of whom love a bilingual pun, to start agitating for dominance in the South China Xi.

Not so with many other targets. Sir Ken McCallum warned in 2023 that as many as 20,000 Britons have been approached on LinkedIn by profiles linked to Chinese state actors. The phenomenon hit the news last month when MI5 issued a formal parliamentary alert about two individuals accused of using LinkedIn to approach people in the parliamentary ecosystem on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).

The genius is in the banality of it all. The choreography of modern recruitment is designed to look normal: a polished message, a flattering invitation to write a short “policy” paper, an honorarium, a paid trip, a promise of future “opportunities”. These approaches are not crude entrapments, but the hooks for what become long-term grooming campaigns that escalate slowly and exploit everyday vulnerabilities. It’s a low-cost, high-impact option for Beijing’s operatives. LinkedIn does the reconnaissance. Tens of thousands of invitations can be sent. And a single lead can justify hundreds of dead ends.

On its own, a single approach may not pose much of a risk to national security. At scale, the threat is very real. This work is a part of a broader effort to shape UK institutions to be less resistant to the aims of the Communist Party, and to help Beijing assert its dominance by all and any means necessary, lawful or illicit.

And, yes, people fall for it. The CIA famously groups espionage motives under the acronym MICE: money, ideology, coercion, ego. It remains unerringly accurate, especially the ego factor. Flattery, exclusive invitations and the promise of being “the expert” are consistently reported as powerful accelerants. The MSS’s recruiters cultivate status and belonging. It works especially well with mid-career specialists who feel overlooked by their institutions. Of course, these motives rarely appear in isolation. The MSS’s success lies in shaping multiple pressures over time, turning a benign connection into routine cooperation. Even journalists have been shown to be susceptible.

But the threat ranges far beyond LinkedIn. Let’s widen the lens a little. The MSS is not just a spy agency in the narrow sense, but a key instrument in upholding the unchallengeable authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is itself foundational to the “new China”. The old China, by contrast, is the China of the “century of humiliation” which, in both Nationalist and Communist folklore, was bullied and suppressed by Japan and by European powers including Britain. The Party is the means of liberation — the architects of a People’s Republic that will achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, and restore China to its natural position at the center of the world order. This presupposes, of course, the end of what the CCP sees as a Western-imposed order. Any criticism, anywhere in the world, which challenges the legitimacy of the Party is therefore a threat to national security and to China’s destiny that must be managed, if not eliminated. To that end, the MSS is among the Party’s chief tools.

But the MSS is only one part of China’s intelligence apparatus. You may remember the Prince Andrew “spy” scandal, where the courts refused a visa to Chinese national Yang Tenbo on national security grounds. Yang had grown close to some of Prince Andrew’s charitable efforts, and dozens of photos of him looking chummy with the former prince surfaced. Those following closely may also remember that Xuelin Bates (neé Black), now married to a Tory peer, was found to have set up “talent acquisition centers” for Beijing. The FBI says that China’s talent schemes “incentivize members to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals”. Both Yang and (now) Lady Bates were accused of being affiliated with the “United Front”, a loose and sprawling association of organisations and individuals using their positions to soften opposition to the CCP.

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Successive leaders have termed the United Front an “important magic weapon” to “defeat the enemy, govern, and rejuvenate the country”, and Xi currently sees it as a key component of advancing the Party policy. The United Front mobilizes non-Party forces, such as overseas Chinese, intellectuals, religious groups, minorities, businesspeople, to align them with CCP goals, strengthening national unity, broadening the Party’s social and influence base.

Its methods are almost impossible to detect, and rarely illegal: coded threats to dissidents; services offered to overseas Chinese which enable the party to exact control at a distance; preferential business offers with invisible strings attached; infiltration of institutions across the UK economy and civic institutions; calling in favors earned over long periods of careful grooming. This list barely scratches the surface. It’s not a homogeneous body. Jelly is more easily nailed to a wall than is the amorphous blob of the United Front, and that’s by design, of course.

The MSS and United Front projects are distinct, but two branches of the same tree. They can and do interact and reinforce one another as part of China’s broader strategy for political influence and security. Together, they form complementary pillars of the Party’s mechanism to maintain internal cohesion, project influence abroad, and secure its long-term political dominance.

Not only that, as Alex Joske’s painstaking research has pointed out, they are the apparatus at the center of a deliberate strategy to blur influence and intelligence collection, showing how united front networks of diaspora groups, academic ties, and business associations provide institutional cover and plausible deniability, enabling the co-option of civic and academic structures into state purposes. The line between “normal” outreach and state targeting is intentionally fuzzy.

Those downplaying the risk often argue: “It’s normal for nations to spy on each other”. Or: “We are just as bad”. But they spectacularly miss the point, revealing shocking ignorance of the scale and intent of China’s intelligence operations in the process.

For context, both organizations have gargantuan budgets. In the financial year 2022-23, we spent £3.6 billion on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 combined. While there are no reliable figures for the MSS cashflow (predictably), one publication put the figure at $20 billion. Turning to the United Front, the Jamestown Foundation found in 2020 that the spending on institutions core to the United Front well exceeded that of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ entire budget, with nearly $600 million set aside for offices designed to influence foreigners and overseas Chinese communities alone. These are regarded by analysts as “floor” figures — highly conservative, with the likely spending much higher.

In sum: China has the means, manpower, and intent to reshape our way of life. The UK neither has the desire nor ability to do this. In the Chinese model, human intelligence, technical collection, and influence operations fused into a single national effort. It’s a behemoth.

Now, China would not put it in such stark terms, but the logic is plain enough. Their mandate is to protect the unchallengeable authority of the CCP and its aims. This requires and demands narrative control abroad. This, in turn, necessitates the adaptation of life in the UK to the extent that it poses any risk to CCP authority and its stated aims. That means that our values and freedoms, and our open, pluralistic society and institutions, are under threat.

So there’s a whistle-stop tour on what we are dealing with: an adversary with an intelligence apparatus that is “almost certainly the largest in the world,” composed of “hundreds of thousands” of officers and paired with a highly capable cyber-espionage arm. Don’t take my word for it. These are quotes from Parliament’s most senior committee.

Where does all of this leave the UK? My assessment would be that we are fighting a house fire with a syringe filled with lighter fluid. The syringe being the resources available to contain the threat, and the lighter fluid being the UK government’s seemingly irrepressible desire to make things worse.

Consider the National Security Act. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat designed a scheme to help police and intelligence deal with the problem of Chinese interference, called the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). The idea was that certain countries would be put in the “Enhanced Tier” and be subject to more stringent registration requirements. Then, the theory goes, those working on behalf of the CCP who fail to register properly would have committed an offense, and the police would have legislation to charge them (not currently the case). The scheme was launched this year, with Iran and Russia placed in the top tier. No prizes for guessing who’s still not in it: the country it was actually built for: China.

This isn’t a party-political point. The last government’s approach to China could be charitably characterized as schizophrenic, with different departments pursuing mutually contradictory approaches. We’ve had an intelligence community screaming from the rooftops about the threat, while ministers made concessions to Beijing in order to pave the way for begging bowl trips to China and Hong Kong.

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Indeed, across both Conservative and Labour administrations we have only ever seen movement in the direction of China realism when the backbenches have demanded it. Even then, it’s been tough going, with heavy campaigning to extract the smallest concessions. Huawei, Hikvision, the Genocide Amendment campaign. Every time it has been a slog, which became harder when latent divisions among China hawk MPs were worsened by someone who would be later accused of Chinese espionage.

I write as a long-standing member of the Conservative Party who had to spend the past five years criticizing the government’s obstinate unwillingness to address the problem. It is a dereliction of duty to leave the defense of the realm against our more acute security threat to a merry band of backbench MPs and activists. At the very least, it cannot be described as a meaningful China “policy”. More “path of least resistance” capitulation, whether to the backbenches or to Beijing.

That said, it is also true that the UK has begun adjusting its legal architecture, even if in a piecemeal way. I’ve mentioned that the National Security Act 2023 introduced offenses criminalizing the obtaining or disclosure of trade secrets for a foreign power and other espionage-related acts, addressing a prosecutorial gap that previously made economic espionage difficult to pursue. But legislation is only one pillar: MI5’s warnings, parliamentary briefings to MPs and peers, and the creation of protective institution signal that there is some desire for the state to shift from ad-hoc alerts to system-wide resilience.

Yet we remain miles away. According to MI5, one of the most targeted aspects of the UK economy is business, yet I am not aware of a single MI5 alert having been issued to the business community. We should not be surprised, therefore, when City of London institutions pop up to lobby the government in favor of, say, keeping China out of the top tier of FIRS.

Our response must be precise, grounded in clarity, not ignorance or xenophobia. Britain’s strength is in our openness: universities, collaborative research and cross-border professional networks are national assets. Overreach risks pushing communities away from cooperation and falsely equating ethnicity with threat. The landmark Intelligence and Security Committee report on China explicitly cautions against conflating the Chinese state’s activities with people of Chinese heritage. Effective policy therefore balances targeted intelligence and security measures with safeguards for civil liberties and community cohesion.

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But there can be no meaningful response which fails to recognize the strength of the adversary, or to signal willingness to address it. The power of China’s interference apparatus lies in its cinematic scale; the genius lies in the subtlety of its tools, and the danger lies in its intent. That subtlety is what makes the operation both potent and hard to see. We should be alert and robust in our countermeasures, honest about the scale and sophistication of the challenge, and disciplined.

The lines between sunlight and shadow, and between Party and people, have been blurred by design. Recognizing that fact is the prerequisite to defending an open society against a whole-of-state adversary that prefers the appearance of normality to the drama of the cloak-and-dagger.

But, right now, we are barely on the playing field, invincibly ignorant for fear of diplomatic detriment. We lack the China expertise and political courage to face reality. This is clearly unsustainable. We are already feeling the pain of naivety. Just recall the British Steel fiasco, bought by Chinese company Jingye and mismanaged so drastically that nationalization was the only option. As so often, the short-term allure of Chinese investment made us forget the risk, anyway costing us more in the long-run. And yet the Treasury remains convinced that a country which targets the majority of its foreign direct investment towards UK critical infrastructure, and with which the UK has a gaping trading deficit, is somehow going to help save our economy.

Just as the obstinacy of the Westminster bubble over migration policy led to the splintering of the political spectrum and yielding of the microphone to the political fringe, so refusal to address the intensifying threat from China will strengthen the CCP’s narratives, and hobble the UK. If we don’t get this right, it will be British-Chinese people who will pay the price as the UK lurches for a nationalist answer to the Beijing question.

The UK should exchange its lighter fluid-filled syringe for the biggest hosepipe we can find. Our security services are superb, but until we kill the governmental culture of anticipatory obedience, and stop denying the police and intelligence services the tools they need to address the problem, we will not succeed in constraining China’s interference behemoth. This really is urgent. Our universities and private sector have already been compromised, and  civic institutions, including even Parliament, are now also being targeted. Act now, or future generations will inherit a different Britain.