Cuba is having its worst energy crisis in decades. Hospitals are rationing surgeries. Families are cooking over wood fires because the power is gone for hours at a time. In March the island ran through three nationwide blackouts in a single month. Its great-power patron, the People’s Republic of China, answered the emergency with rice.

This month Washington signed a deal meant to end the war with Iran, and the foreign-policy class reached for a familiar verdict: China is the real winner. It is the verdict they reach for every time. It is wrong every time. China talks. America acts. Beijing’s problem is not a subtle long game but a plain inability to influence anything, including the partners it calls allies and the strait it depends on most.

In Havana, China sent rice

The United States put Cuba in the dark on purpose, and it worked. After American forces captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in January, the Venezuelan oil that kept Cuba’s power plants running stopped coming. Mexico and the other suppliers backed off once Washington threatened tariffs, and the United States began turning back tankers bound for the island.

China stepped in as the patron of last resort. In January, Xi Jinping approved eighty million dollars in aid and a donation of sixty thousand tons of rice. Beijing is also building solar farms across the island. Chinese panel exports to Cuba jumped from three million dollars in 2023 to a hundred and seventeen million in 2025, and the two governments agreed to open ninety-two solar parks by 2028.

Rice and sunshine do not run a power grid. Oil runs it, and oil is the one thing China is not sending. Solar produces nothing after dark, when Cuban demand peaks, and the grid behind it is too broken to store much of what the panels make in daylight. Cubans know the difference. The blackouts are worse than they were a year ago, and most ordinary people have felt no benefit at all. A Cuban news outlet put it plainly: China’s support “once again amounts to donations of rice and rhetorical statements.”

I wrote in May that neither Russia nor China can supply Cuba. Two months later, the proof is a dark island and a warehouse of rice.

In the Gulf, China sent words, and it had the most to lose

China’s failure in Cuba is embarrassing. Its failure in the Persian Gulf is staggering, because no country on earth had more riding on the outcome.

More of the oil crossing the Strait of Hormuz is bound for China than for any other nation, by a wide margin. Close to half of China’s own crude comes through that one waterway. China is the biggest customer for Iran’s oil and calls Tehran a “comprehensive strategic partner.” When Iran went to war and the strait turned into a shooting gallery, the country with the most to lose and the loudest claim of sway over Tehran had every reason to act.

It made phone calls. By its own account, Beijing floated “four propositions” and ran up more than thirty phone calls and meetings. When the deal was announced, it welcomed the result in a statement. Asked directly whether China would mediate the next round of talks, its spokesman could not say yes. Iran’s own parliament speaker pressed for China to become a true partner “in every sense.” Beijing answered with the usual language about a strategic partnership and nothing behind it.

The country that actually stopped the war was Pakistan. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his army chief ran the shuttle diplomacy, and President Trump credited them by name when he announced the ceasefire. The United States supplied the leverage and Pakistan carried the messages. China sent propositions.

Whether the deal holds or the bombing resumes is an open question. I argued on Friday that the agreement looks more like a pause than a peace. Either way, China will not be the one to decide it.

Three clients, three statements

Beijing ran the same play in Venezuela, and it ended the same way. When American forces seized Maduro in January, China condemned the “blatant use of force” and demanded his release. That was the whole response. China is the largest buyer of Venezuela’s oil and had every reason to keep its man in power, and it answered his capture with a press release.

China answered all three the same way. A client president was carried off to an American courtroom, and Beijing sent a statement. A client island went dark, and Beijing sent rice. A client went to war over China’s own oil lifeline, and Beijing sent phone calls. Every time, the help was a strongly worded paragraph with nothing behind it.

They are calling that a win. It is incapacity.

The experts have decided China came out ahead anyway. The Atlantic Council’s Melanie Hart wrote that China “may turn out to be a bigger beneficiary than either Iran or the United States,” and that it “did not spend billions or draw down its own military reserves to achieve it.” She means it as praise. It reads as a confession. China spent nothing because China did nothing. Its boldest move during the crisis was to buy less oil and wait. Gaining from an outcome you had no hand in shaping is not power.

The forecast is days old and already failing. Cuba is still dark. Iran got its phone calls. The prediction of Chinese ascendance is the same one the same outlets sold through 2024, and they were wrong then too.

China could not have done much more if it tried. It can host a signing ceremony between two countries that already want to talk, as it did for Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023, but it cannot end a war. It has no way to ship and protect fuel to Cuba; its navy operates from only two overseas bases and cannot sustain force anywhere near the Western Hemisphere. A country that cannot win the wars its own clients start is not a rival superpower but a creditor with opinions.

Russia is no better. Moscow pocketed higher oil prices while the strait was closed and lost the windfall the moment the shooting stopped. The two of them are clients of disorder, not the architects of a new order.

China Is a Paper Tiger

China has spent a decade selling the developing world a single promise: stand with Beijing, and Beijing will stand between you and Washington. The year 2026 called the bluff. When the United States reached into China’s own hemisphere and pulled out Venezuela’s president, Beijing answered with a condemnation. When the strait that feeds China’s economy turned into a war zone, the self-described strategic partner of Iran could not move Tehran an inch, and settled for quietly buying less crude. A rising power changes facts on the ground. China changes the wording of a press release.

Every time China sits still, the analysts call it strategy. No five-dimensional chess hides behind a rice donation. A power that cannot fuel its friends or fight for them has not chosen patience; it has run out of options. Beijing keeps telling the world the century belongs to it, and 2026 keeps answering back. What kind of powerful ally is China? The paper kind.