Washington and Beijing had barely finished their carefully staged diplomatic embrace when the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned an Iran procurement network that included actors operating in .
Just a week or so after U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House, the administration was again using American financial power against China-linked entities over Iran. The episode shows a deeper tension: Trump’s two central foreign policy projects, confronting China and forcing Iran toward a settlement, increasingly pull against each other.
That tension is giving Beijing leverage that tariffs and export controls have struggled to create. China does not need to defeat American pressure. It only needs to remain indispensable to the economic and diplomatic problems Washington is trying to solve, many of which were created by the current administration.
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