290km? That mostly covers the Strait of Hormuz where no US ships was going there in the first place. This feels more like an Israeli disinformation campaign designed to pressure Trump to stop delaying the war with Iran immediately. Combined with the supposed Russian missile deal article from an couple days ago.
290KM is only to satisfy MTCR. China was never a signatory so doesn’t need to comply in any case, it just does so to keep its arms sales as uncontroversial as possible. But with US and allies openly violating MTCR with weapons sales and transfers to Ukraine, I think the likelihood of China actually limiting any missiles it sells to Iran to such ranges is as likely as America not attacking Iran.
The very most China will do to limit the missiles is probably sell Iran with missiles that can do 290km out of the box that had some solid fuel segments removed, plus some ‘spare’ fuel segments and a print out telling Iranians to never ever insert those spare fuel blocks into the spaces shown on the printout and to never ever tick the box in the missile fire control software called ‘remove range limiter’.
Frankly, the USN will literally have to be even more stupid than the Indians to believe the 290km advertised missile range as the Indians were in believing in the PL15’s advertised range.
The main thing giving me doubt about this story is the timing. It will take far longer to get the missiles delivered and Iranians combat ready to use them than it would probably take for America to start attacking. But then I guess AShMs is probably the weapon that will take the least amount of time to get basic combat proficiency on. Especially if you already have experience using other AShMs as there will be a lot of commonality in general operating principles.