I'm definitely not saying that's the only factor, but I think it's naive to assume it isn't at all a factor.
That said, if were going down the rabbit hole of saying that the Chinese labs are now part of a larger geo political strategy by the Chinese government, then I think Taiwan is part of the equation. If the frontier models require the best chips and those are mainly coming out of Taiwan then it's hard to imagine a world where the US allows China to make a move on Taiwan without a fight. If frontier level models can be run on chips being made elsewhere, then Taiwan becomes less important geopolitically. I don't think we'll ever get to a world where the US is just like, "Fine China. You do what you want.", but China has to assume that there will be a lot less resistance from the US is Taiwan isn't such a key component in the AI race.
In the same way that the US going to war with an important Chinese oil supplier: 85% of Iranian oil going to China and comprising ~14% of China's oil imports.
There's always geopolitical reason behind the reason.
Even if the current President was known for his strategic global thinking and ability to keep quiet about the “real goals,” other explanations seem more likely.
Anybody who's ever looked at a map can see that Iran surrounds a strategic chokepoint for the world's most important natural resource.
It is almost like there is a book called AI Superpowers from 2018 that Kai-Fu Lee tells you exactly how all this is going to go.
Why would I read a book though when I can just repeat the nonsense from my social media feed?
It is hurting China. Their economy has slowed to a crawl as a result of stalled oil and has delayed any real gains they had by at least a couple of years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/business/china-economy-gd...
Do you think Trump makes all of these decisions? Like all presidents, he has many advisors around him.
China’s factory outputs are in fact increasing. So is their export. You wouldn’t see this if they are energy constrained. China’s problems are weak consumption and deflation. It started way before this year and has very little to do with Iran.
For example, part of the dynamic was, according to the NYT (though they may have been fed bad intel), that Ahmadinejad was apparently working with Mossad and could've been a partner for a new leadership team in Iran. Who saw that coming?
It also brings to mind Kennedy. He campaigned hard on, in part, the "missile gap" with the USSR. Gets into office, gets read into the real intel, realizes the "missile gap" was essentially a MIC psyop of strategic 'leaks' to the media and that the US was in fact far ahead of the USSR in strategic arms. Kennedy was furious -- but due to it all being classified, could say nothing in public. But it did start a pattern of mistrust that lasted his presidency between him and the MIC. That all didn't come to light later.
Later, like the Ukraine/Starlink thing. The media jumped all over Elon for allegedly holding back Ukraine and shutting off their terminals close to the front lines. More recently it turns out that was the US government, they were afraid Ukraines rapid progress might tempt Russia to deploy tactical nukes. Elon was innocent.
Theres layers upon layers of things we don't see and won't know for decades after the fact. And as Hillary showed with her email server, digital records are more ephemeral these days, so there will be a lot of things we simply never know.
Ironically, part of the story behind the email server was that State Dept IT was so bad that provisioning a new email server was a months-long request.
So naturally, shadow IT became prevalent.