The Iran war is placing a new strain on America’s ability to deter China in the Indo-Pacific, as the conflict draws military assets, munitions, and attention away from the region.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump deployed the USS Abraham Lincoln and its usual cadre of smaller ships to the Middle East. However, recent reports regarding the living conditions aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and the deteriorating mental state of some of its crew prompted the president to relieve the Lincoln with the USS George Washington and its associated strike group.
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The Washington won’t arrive for several weeks, and because both carriers are typically based in the Pacific, their Middle East deployments could have consequences that outlast the Iran war itself.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior director Mark Montgomery told the Washington Examiner that the Lincoln will require maintenance after its extended deployment, as will the Washington following its Middle East mobilization. The result, Montgomery estimated, could leave the U.S. military down two carrier groups for “more than 18 months” in the Indo-Pacific.
“There is a risk as it sends a weak deterrence message to China and does not assure America’s allies and partners in the Pacific,” he explained, noting that the U.S. military can maintain its commitment to Iran “for another 12 months.”
“There will be a significant readiness bill to pay in 2-3 years, resulting in extremely low deployment and readiness rates,” Montgomery added. “Again, this is a problem for deterring China or assuring allies and partners.”
Guy Snodgrass, a former aide to ex-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, similarly warned that the carrier deployment could signal broader U.S. military shortfalls to adversaries. Snodgrass, who was based on the Washington while deployed to Japan, specifically noted the carrier group’s role as a deterrent to Chinese, North Korean, and Russian threats to the region.
He argued that those nations would view moving the carrier to the Middle East, coupled with depleted American munitions stockpiles, “as one more signal that there’s a shortfall.”
Beyond the immediate strain on military assets, Snodgrass said America’s inability to rapidly end the war with Iran could undermine adversaries’ perceptions of the U.S. military.
“America may not be the 10-foot-tall giant that other nations have assumed us to be, and it’s a similar dynamic we saw play out with Russia against Ukraine. Everyone thought Russia was going to roll right over Ukraine, and they didn’t,” he explained. “That’s the danger of what’s happened now with this decision with the Iran war.”
Others argue the carrier deployments themselves are less consequential, even as the Iran war exposes broader vulnerabilities China could exploit.
Lyle Goldstein, the director of Defense Priorities’s Asia Program and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, said the Iran conflict doesn’t substantively alter the Indo-Pacific calculus, given how outgunned the United States already was in the theater.
He told the Washington Examiner that some war gamers “have long believed that the carrier is really not of much concern to China,” as “China has for decades worked on how to destroy it.” Goldstein cited a 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies war game that showed two U.S. carrier groups being destroyed within the first 10 days of a potential hot war with China.
Furthermore, he claimed that the U.S. Navy, even before the start of the Iran war, simply did not have the firepower to sink a Chinese fleet totaling between 5,000 and 10,000 ships that experts see Beijing mobilizing in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.
Still, Goldstein raised concerns that the Iran war is “revealing” to China an American pattern of “poor decision-making, poor planning, vulnerability of bases, and an overall lack of munitions,” on top of “a lot of angst in the American body politic.”
“In other words, we are divided, and they know it. And so, I am worried that this poses an ever-increasing temptation,” he said. “It’s not a new issue, but the huge amount of intelligence assets that have been put at Ukraine for five years and now also at Iran — those are people, those are intelligence analysts that are staring all day at patches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East who are not staring at the Chinese coast. So, if I were a Chinese planner, it’s been a good five years. And I am concerned that there are probably hawks in Beijing who are saying now is the time.”
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The White House rejected the notion that the Iran war was undermining U.S. military readiness in the Indo-Pacific.
“The United States military maintains the force posture necessary to achieve any desired objective set by the Commander-in-Chief. As Operation Epic Fury demonstrated, America’s military might is stronger than it’s ever been,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
