Dumping the treasury bonds
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Dumping the treasury bonds is the second Chinese economic lever John Kiriakou named in his February 2026 assessment of what an American attack on Iran would cost, alongside the rare earth calculation.

The holding

"You made a second point that I think bears repeating," Kiriakou told his interviewer. "The Chinese are, depending on what numbers you're looking at, the second or third largest holder of long term government treasury bonds."

The lever

The mechanism requires no restriction, licence or announcement, only a sale. "If the Chinese really want to put the pain to us, they can just dump those bonds and our entire economy would crash."

The question attached

Kiriakou used the two levers together as a cost estimate rather than a prediction, and turned them into a question about the war itself: "So, you know, is it really worth it? Do we really want to do this? Besides the fact that you're probably not going to get your Nobel Peace Prize for waging a war of choice."

He accepted the framing that these are costs to America and not to Benjamin Netanyahu, who "doesn't care if he throws America under the bus" so long as Israel gets chaos in the Middle East, adding only the observation that saying so publicly gets a person called an anti-Semite, as had happened to him weeks earlier. "The word is lost all meaning now."

See also

- The rare earth calculation
- The anti-semite smear
- Nobel Peace Prize
