The war between the United States and Iran has etched five fronts into the international order. On each of them, Washington and Beijing stand on opposite sides. It is China, not Iran — the country actually at war — that faces the United States.
The first is the geopolitical front. The battlefield is Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, yet the front itself has split into two theaters: the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. The Middle East is a bloody front where shells are actually flying. The Asia-Pacific, by contrast, is a potential front that foreshadows a future war. Even in the midst of the war with Iran, the strategic gaze of the United States has shifted to the Asia-Pacific, where China is rising.
The second is the geoeconomic front. The Iran war has once again carved the value of the Strait of Hormuz into global consciousness. More than 20% of the world's crude oil supply passes through the strait. China accounts for the largest share of that flow, at roughly 37%. That is why there is force to the argument that views U.S. intervention in Iran through the lens of an "oil geopolitics" linking China and Iran. Beyond crude, the strait also carries a significant share of raw materials and export goods. The Iran war has handed South Korea, and the world, the enormous task of diversifying supply chains.
Next comes the front of technological supremacy. In the wars in Ukraine and Iran, drones have emerged as a game changer reshaping modern warfare. Artificial intelligence assets, including Anthropic's Claude, also played a decisive role in the U.S. airstrikes on Iran. That means a nation's defense capability is inseparable from its technological competitiveness. These three fronts are matters of hard power; the remaining two concern soft power.
The fourth is the front of democracy and human rights. Anti-government pro-democracy protests that spread across Iran in January pushed the country's theocratic system to the brink of collapse. They were mass popular protests that went beyond the level of the human rights demonstrations touched off in 2022 by the suspicious death of a woman arrested on suspicion of not wearing a hijab. Yet the U.S. attack on Iran ended up cutting off the buds of the democracy movement inside the country. In the face of U.S. intervention, even forces that had resisted the theocracy rallied back together out of patriotism. It is a paradox that the hollow war rationale invoked by U.S. President Donald Trump in the name of democracy and human rights has instead thrown a new front into relief.
The last front is the global diplomatic one, formed between the "one-top" governance the United States advocates and the multipolar international order set against it. As the U.S.-led security and defense order in the Middle East was shaken by the Iran war, countries in the region have begun building new multilateral security cooperation arrangements. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have signed a joint defense pact under which an attack on one is treated as a threat to each of them, calling for a response. The outcomes of the war between the United States and Iran are the ebbing of Pax Americana, the isolation of the United States and Israel, survival strategies of every-nation-for-itself that go beyond the existing religious solidarity among Arab states and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) framework, and strategic autonomy for the European Union and middle powers.
The five new fronts Trump has created will come into sharper outline the longer the Iran war drags on. The problem is that as tensions on these fronts mount, the bilateral contest between the United States and China grows more sharply defined. Chinese President Xi Jinping met Russian President Vladimir Putin again at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, three months after their last encounter, and called for "multipolarity" — but the edge in that voice was aimed at the United States.
In an era when the U.S.-led international order is being shaken, countries are shedding old habits and searching for new paths. For South Korea, that is no easy task. North Korea is advancing its nuclear arsenal by the day. Solidarity among North Korea, China and Russia is tightening, while the United States raises the strategic flexibility of U.S. Forces Korea and the possibility of a change in their role.
Amid the fog over the Korean Peninsula, standing at the center of five fronts tightly entangled with China, a geographically close neighbor, a hasty strategic choice could produce irreversible and tragic consequences. That is why debate over diplomatic answers — strengthening the South Korea-U.S. alliance, bandwagoning with China, going it alone — runs so thick. A "standing on two legs" approach that pursues both the alliance with the United States and a strategic cooperative partnership with China may draw attention, but given the deep gulf between Washington and Beijing, its limits are clear. Also worth examining is a strategy that treats the alliance as a bicycle running on two sturdy wheels, South Korea and the United States, while using solidarity with middle powers and ties with China as separate training wheels. As the future of the Korean Peninsula sinks into a fog that shifts by the moment, a strategy buried in old inertia can only lose its way.
