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A Russia--Iran--China axis means that all of Central & Northern Asia is outside US influence as an unbroken landmass. The stan countries are irrelevant and Pakistan is a Chinese vassal state.
It's fortunate that China is so dependent on sea based trade, because it is thoroughly flanked by US allies in the sea. Effective land based trade needs to be established between Iran, Russia & China. If that's achieved, then between those 3 and indebted B&R nations, China should be able to get dedollarification started quite soon.
Been there, won that.
More seriously, I don’t know that China’s development really hinges on Russia. It’s going to follow the Belt and Road plans one way or another. It has energy, and it has manpower. If they want to get off the dollar, they’ll do it whether or not they have Russian debts.
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You speak this as if it's a bad thing for the Americans, rather than a plus. Central & Northern Asia is just about the least threatening center of gravity for any anti-US coalition, all the more so if you helpfully exclude India from in.
'Effective' land-based trade is not the same as 'cost-efficient', and that's always going to come back to the cost of water-based transport vis-a-vis everything else. If China wants to invest huge sums of money on infrastructure to carrying material from the coasts of China up and over and through the hindu kush, they should actively be encouraged to do so. A land-based trade route is a far less economically efficient, and thus slower growth and less throughput, than a sea-based economy.
Dedeollerification doesn't exactly hinge on having land-based trade either. That's a misconception of why the Dollar is useful in trading between states, and why the Chinese yuan isn't a much-sought reserve currency.
The land based trade that China is interested in (Gwadar fantasies aside) is alternative routes for importing fossil fuels and natural resources via its northern and northwestern borders. Decidedly worse economically than sea-based trade, that's still far more practical than the Hindu Kush route. And in a Taiwan contingency, the costs don't matter too much: it's already decided to nuke its economy. It's more than willing to take on otherwise uneconomic projects if those can secure resources from a Russian vassal state to help wage its war, and that's entirely rational (taking the rationality of a Taiwan invasion as given).
Its goal isn't to create some permanent Eurasian land-based trading bloc but to provide energy security in the case of war. Post-conflict, it would return to sea-based trade, with the hope/expectation that it would be able to dictate the terms of what sea-based trade in the western Pacific looks like.
China has to be pretty happy about what the war is doing to Russia. Before, there was some chance (admittedly less than likely) that Russia could be drawn into some kind of sanctions regime. But now it's certain where Russia's chips will land, because it really won't have a choice.
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