Is China helping Iran by not intervening?

I keep seeing scores of people on Twitter saying that unless China intervenes in the Middle-East, it will somehow be their end. Like this guy 👇

Or this guy 👇

Meanwhile, fascinatingly, here’s what Oriana Skylar Mastro, who used to be the Pentagon's top strategic planner on China and is now a professor at Stanford, has to say about it 👇. She is widely recognized as having been one of the best strategists in the Pentagon and won multiple awards recognizing her as such.

In a nutshell, she says that the U.S. would love nothing more than to “drag” China into conflicts like that with Iran - and she herself has “often tried to articulate recommendations” to trap China in that way - but China never takes the bait, which in her view shows that they're “very strategically disciplined”.

It also reflects the fact that China, unlike the U.S. obviously, “do not believe in foreign military intervention as a tool of power”: they believe in “using political and economic tools."

She asks rhetorically: “the war in Afghanistan cost the equivalent of 10 Belt and Road initiatives. So which one is more impactful on the world?”

She is adamant that the U.S.'s renewed involvement in the Middle East is an unequivocal mistake. As she explains, not only it will prevent once more the mythical “pivot to Asia,” which is obviously in itself in China's interests, but it will only further deplete U.S. resources without much to show for it in the end.

Effectively, according to her, China gets exactly what they want: the U.S. repeatedly getting baited and exhausting itself into costly military interventions with little strategic rationale. As she puts it: “that's how great powers decline.” In fact, it's exactly the type of strategic overextension that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So, who’s right? The Twitter crowd or Pentagon Oriana?