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Foreign. Welcome to a special quick episode of Ask Aviv. Anything about the war? It is Monday, March 2, as we record the eve of the holiday of Purim. We ourselves, our family has been hunkering down in the bomb shelter dozens of times already as missile sirens wail, we've heard the booms in the sky as they are intercepted over the air over Jerusalem, or probably some of them as far as Jordanian airspace. And they're such loud explosions that we hear them many kilometers away. Some Israelis have died. So it's been a trying time. The kids are out of school, everything is shut down. And nevertheless, we wanted to get out to you this explanation. There's so much intense debate about this war in Europe, this conversation about international law and the destabilizing of the global oil markets in China. This is the number one topic of discussion in many places in Russia, in Brazil, in Canada, all across the world. And what's happening now in the United States is that this has been taken up as a great cause that is basically the schism in the conservative movement right now. Is Trump fighting a war, dragging America into a war in the Middle east for regime change for Israel? Obviously the anti Israel forces and progressives and Democrats generally are much, much more skeptical, as is natural for people skeptical of a war fought by a president on the other side of the aisle. But also a lot of anti Israel stuff comes into it. And so there's so much debate. And I think that that debate hides a lot of confusion. We talk about it a lot and we understand it very little, I want to lay out what I think is being missed by the debate by all these many different discourses all over the world, whether it's Europe or the United States or the Latin America or the Middle east. In fact, because I don't think this is a well understood war. And I think that if you don't understand the fundamental thing that I'm going to try and convince you of, you won't understand the future. You won't be able to predict what's going to happen. You won't know whether America has resilience and stick to itiveness in this confrontation or whether Iran does. What do the Iranians think they're doing? Bombing a Saudi oil refinery? How does that end well for them? What does Trump think he's doing? He gave a speech in Riyadh in which he said nation building wars end up demolishing nations, not building them. What the heck does he think he's doing once we figure out what he thinks he's doing? We can then judge is this good or bad or sensible or foolish or evil or whatever, whatever. We want to judge it. But first, that first step of what is actually happening, I think hasn't been done. So let's do it here. Before we get into it, I want to tell you this episode is sponsored by Greg Manson and dedicated to the IDF soldiers who have fallen since October 7th and also dedicated to the roughly 380 Canadian servicemen who died on June 6th, 1944 at Juno beach during D Day. We, the living owe deep gratitude to those willing to sacrifice to preserve Western values. Thank you so very much, Greg for that dedication. Thank you to those soldiers, our soldiers, Canada's soldiers in that moment of truth. And thank you. I just want to add from me, US soldiers. Not many, but everyone is a world have died in this war. I don't think this is a war to defend Israel and I'm going to prove that to you. It's just not a reasonable argument. But it does defend Israel and we owe them a debt that is not repayable. And I want to say that as well as we go into it, I also want to thank everyone who is listening and to invite you all to join our Patreon. It's how we keep the lights on. The questions asked by our Patreon members guide the topics we choose to talk about. You also get to be part of our monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. It's at www.patreon.com askhlavivanything. The link is also in the show notes. Friends, the basic story is that there are two chessboards, not two dimensional and three dimensional, not clever and shallow. The difference is scale. There's a regional chessboard in which Israel plays, Iran plays, Saudi plays, you know, the uae, Qatar, and then there's a global chessboard. It's a whole nother level and that's a chessboard in which the US Plays, China plays and then some secondary characters like Russia or the EU on its best days, Israel is operating on the smaller chessboard. America is operating on the larger chessboard. The Iran strikes overlap, but they overlap in two completely different wars, completely different confrontations. Iran matters to both, but in very different ways. And that's the bottom line. If you understand this war as America riding shotgun on an Israeli war, you will misunderstand what it is America is targeting when America is going to stop, why President Trump is willing to sacrifice so much politically domest internationally how it's connected to Venezuela, what is Trump's next move? You will not Predict any of that. If the only framing you have is that Bibi convinced him to get into the war. This is an American war for American interests. And in fact, I would like to argue both the timing, which was set more by the CIA than by the Israelis, and the fundamental strategy tells us it is not an Israeli war. Israel is just taking advantage of a very beneficial moment and a very beneficial American interest that happens to open a window for what Israel wants to achieve in this region. Israel is extremely useful to the US in this, in this war the US wanted and Israel's taking advantage of this moment to serve its own existential, overwhelming interest. But everything is happening tangential, marginal, on the sidelines of a great American war. China was investing in turning Iran into a state that could disrupt American military activities at a strategic scale. That's the bottom line. That's what you need to understand. It's recent, it's enormous, and it pushed Iran, it dragged Iran, by the way, willingly. It thought of a great alliance with China as a strategic depth, but it ended up bringing Iran into the much larger, much more dangerous for Iran US China standoff, which is the foundational American national security question and problem. Iran was explicitly becoming a Chinese forward base, a second front in any future confrontation between America and China. And I want to get into how. There are media reports that tell us that Iran was finalizing a major deal for Chinese supersonic anti ship missiles that would replace the missiles, the anti ship missiles and some other assets that Iran lost back in the June 2025 war with Israel. These are supersonic anti ship cruise missiles that have a range of about 200 miles and they can go faster than Mach 3. And they're specifically designed by China to evade the kinds of shipborne defenses. The Aegis system that America's US carrier strike groups, including the Abraham Lincoln off the coast of Iran some hundreds of kilometers off the coast, but nevertheless, that is at Iran now actually possess. Iran was going to pay for these systems through very discounted oil shipments. China today is Iran's lifeline. 90% of Iran's crude exports go to China. We talked about this in the episode with Melissa Chen. We talked about this in the past several times. 90% of Iran's crude exports go to China and they're these special Chinese teapot distilleries that evade U.S. sanctions to allow it to take in that Chinese crude. China is desperately dependent on oil imports and on securing its oil imports because it can't possibly produce enough energy domestically to meet its needs. And so its status as a Strategic power. Its ability to become a dominant global hegemon, which is its goal over the next 30 years, depends on energy independence and diversifying its energy imports. And Iran is a big part of that strategy. It's somewhere between 10 to 15% of its imports of energy. And Iran uses that to pay for weapons systems that the Chinese are specifically gearing to be the kinds of weapons systems that can, for example, prevent the United States from passing through the Straits of Hormuz and also causing a massive disruption to the oil supply, to the global oil supply to the United States. In the case of a future US China confrontation. The deal was reported on February 24 as near completion and it would have significantly expanded Iran's strike capabilities and threat to U.S. forces. Since January, China has been shifting more and more toward non kinetic kinds of military support to prevent infrastructure sabotage for Iran. To protect Iran, that includes a cyber shield replacing Western software in Iranian government and military systems with closed Chinese systems. To reduce the success rate of Mossad and CIA cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear and command and control infrastructure. China basically has implemented a strategy in which Chinese closed systems that China, by the way can track are implemented. Iran has replaced its use of GPS with China's Beidou system. Naval exercises. China uses joint drills with Russia and Iran in the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to signal political alignment, but not just to signal political alignment, to also become very familiar with the area, to increase its ability to cooperate closely in real time in military terms with the Iranian and Russian navies. And the last such exercise was in February, was last month. It also tries to stamp Iranian military forces in the region in the Gulf, Iranian bases with a Chinese stamp. If there's a Chinese footprint on the ground, it's a much more complicated thing for America to then attack all of these different signals trying to deter US military action with naval exercises with the Chinese navy and the Russian navy. All of this stuff is an attempt to say Iran is now plugged into a much larger strategic infrastructure. It's specifically about challenging the US and challenging the ability of the US to secure the global oil supply. And here's the thing. Iran doing everything it can to embed itself in China's cyber infrastructure. Naval infrastructure in China's strategic architecture was the cause of this war, was the dumbest folly, the most foolish decision Iran ever made, this regime ever made. Iran is utterly dependent on China. Iran sees China as its only remaining life support system for the Chinese. Iranian oil is part of the diversification which is a strategic interest. It's absolutely critical for China. It's not small, it's significant. But for Iran, China is the only lifeline left. It's the lender of last resort. It gives it money. It buys 90% of the oil that Iran manages to sell. 90%. Iran's economy has one customer. Oil revenues themselves are about 25% of Iran's GDP, mostly controlled, by the way, by the Revolutionary guard corps. And 33% of the oil revenue in the current fiscal year was allocated directly to the military. In other words, China finances the Iranian military. Without China purchasing that oil, the regime faces immediate internal collapse because it simply can't pay its security forces or subsidize basic goods. What does that mean? Iran is desperate. Iran needs China, depends on China. And so Iran will do China's bidding in any confrontation with the US and that also is one of the reasons that you can't look at Iran. If you're an American defense planner and say, oh, I can compromise, I can negotiate. I can pull them out of China's orbit, that option doesn't exist. That option doesn't exist because Iran is just simply too dependent on China. China is using Iran in this way, as I said, to create a second base, a second front to confront the Americans in that potential future conflict and confrontation. But also China really needs that, that oil. And I want to explain this. Iranian oil is about 13 to 15% of China's seaborne imports, something like 1 1.2 million barrels a day. And it's used a lot of those cheap imports to build a strategic reserve of well over a billion barrels that give China the ability, if it is sealed off from being able to import oil, which is very easy for the American Navy to do in a future confrontation. It gives China the ability to actually hold out for maybe 100 days before it starts running out of oil. And so for China, this connection to Iran, this outside of American oversight, outside of the American ability to disrupt oil imports that it's used to build out fairly cheaply because the Iranians have no other buyers. So they sell for very cheap. This oil to build out this massive reserve hasn't been a small benefit. It's been a significant and serious benefit. But it's not hard for the US to force China to choose between Iran and, for example, the US domestic consumer market. Since early this year, with the US threatened a 25% tariff for countries trading with Iran, Chinese refiners have started dumping Iranian oil. Importing less Iranian oil, they're now shifting to Russian oil to fill that gap. One of the reasons they're doing that is that China doesn't want to lose access to the American markets and have that huge tariff slapped on it. China is one of the biggest producers of natural gas and oil in the world, fourth and fifth largest, respectively. But its economy is so big that it still has nothing near self sufficiency in fossil fuels. China produces more oil than either Iraq or the Emirates, but it also consumes 15 million barrels a day. That vulnerability means that it actually depends on this diversification to some significant extent. When you add up the Iranian oil, the Russian oil, the Venezuelan oil, up until Maduro's removal sanctioned oil, it was one fifth of China's total imports. Without it, China is in a much worse situation. And if you can enforce those sanctions on China and you hit it economically in the US markets. China and America are confrontational foes on the global stage, but they are also deeply dependent on each other in terms of their actual economies. So a lot of it is about how you create weaknesses to the other side without losing the massive benefit you yourself are dependent on on the other side. Well, sanctioned energy supplies is a big part of the leverage America could potentially have to weaken China in any confrontation. And that's what we saw in Venezuela and that's what we're seeing in Iran. China's imports through the Straits of Malacca is part of this story. Most of the energy imported to China has to travel through the Straits of malacca. It's this 500 mile stretch of water between the Malay Peninsula in Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra at its narrowest point near Singapore. It's like two miles wide. And about 60% of global maritime trade passes through the Malacca Straits. And most of China's energy from the Middle east and Africa goes through that. Hu Jintao called it the malacca dilemma in 2003. It's a major pillar of Chinese naval policy, Chinese foreign policy right up to this day, where you've seen the beginning of the building out of bases outside of China. The very first base China ever built outside of Chinese soil was in Djibouti. And they're trying to create multiple naval bases throughout the Indian Ocean specifically to protect the Malacca base. They're also trying to build out capabilities on land to transport, using oil pipelines and trucks and things like that with Russia and also with Iran. So that's China's great strategic energy problem, which Iran is part of. The solution to Iran is therefore a direct threat to American forces securing the oil supply in the Gulf in a future confrontation, taking in hypersonic Chinese missiles Specifically meant to target American ships. Iran is part of the lifting of the massive American leverage over China in a future confrontation in terms of energy supplies. And Iran is a testing ground for all of China's cyber defense, AI surveillance tools. All of the stuff that Iran has built out using Chinese controlled digital technologies, that is helping it tamp down on protests, that is helping it oppress its own people. But that for China is also this really important testing ground by a very loyal and dependent ally doing that work for the Chinese government. So the bottom line here is that China sees Iran as a very low cost way to keep the US military bogged down in the Middle east or significant parts of it, preventing Washington from pivoting to the Pacific in a real way by turning Iran into a serious threat to the oil supply. And so by selling Iran the radars, anti stealth radars and supersonic missiles, it turns any US pivot out of the Middle east to becoming something risky and expensive. If America wants to pivot to China, it needs the Iranian regime, that Chinese forward base removed from the scene. That's what we're seeing in this war. Iran is a more significant Chinese forward base, more significant second front than any actual Chinese base in the Indian Ocean. Iran is also part of the front lines of the new Silk Road of the Belt and Road Initiative. Iran connects China to Turkey over land for land based transport, whether through trucks or rail, and eventually to Europe. It's the southern corridor, so called to the Silk Road, not the one that goes through Central Asia. China has a 25 year agreement which includes the development of the port of Josky just outside the Persian Gulf. It's a future naval foothold for China that isn't inside the Straits of Hormuz. And then finally there's Russia, Russia as another anchor, another piece of that larger anti American alliance. The Russia Iran alliance has been important, very important for Russia. Something like 57,000 Iranian Shahed drones have slammed into Ukrainian cities since February 2022. Russia has become dependent on Iranian missiles on Iranian drones as one of the major arms suppliers for that war. In July, a month after the war, Russia sent an S400 air defense system to Iran, a massive upgrade from the S300 systems that failed Iran during that war for what it called testing under operational conditions. In other words, to be used, to be used in wartime. America's strikes on Iran now included the F22s, which are capable of clearing the path electronically against all those Russian systems. That confrontation, that Russian American technological confrontation was not for the Americans a sideshow. It was fundamental. It was about showing, demonstrating, also learning from the American side, that the Americans can neutralize that particular threat. There are reports, especially by Ukrainian analysts who are some of the best analysts of Russia working nowadays online, who are talking about how the Russians turned off transponders and radars of their various sites and facilities in Syria during this very war in the last three days so that they don't accidentally trigger an Israeli strike. So they don't accidentally trigger an American strike. One of the fascinating things to watch has been the extent to which Russia has refused despite a kind of defense agreement it has with Iran, despite a relationship in which it depends on Iranian weapons in Ukraine, despite sending Iran various systems, Russia has refused to ever come to Iran's aid whenever it has confronted Israel, either in Syria, when Israel struck Iranian assets in Syria over the last two years, or in Iran itself. And that's really fascinating. When the chips were down, Russia, the third party in this trilateral alliance of Russia, China and Iran, completely sat it out. Leaked documents reported by the Financial Times in February last month revealed that there had been a secret arms deal signed in Moscow in December 2025 which included Russia's Vrba air defense missiles. It's one of Russia's best, most modern systems and it's effective against cruise missiles and against low flying drones. What does that mean? It's effective against American strikes. China has supplied or is supplying, is going to supply. Iran maybe has already a little bit with systems that can penetrate American defenses because they're hypersonic, while Russia has been supplying Iran and is beginning to ship and was beginning to ship and supply Iran with defensive measures against American missile strikes. This is an alliance whose sole purpose is to be able to challenge America militarily and bog America down, hold America down in the Persian Gulf in a future confrontation. That's why also in January of last year, Vladimir Putin and the Iranian president possess Kiyan signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty. It's a defense accord. It's a defense treaty. The Iranians built out this alliance with China, this dependence on China that also means they're useful to China and built out this defense relationship with Russia that's very useful to Russia and Ukraine. But Iran always thought that it would receive from China and Russia the strategic depth, the backing, the defense levers of influence and power over Israel's great backer, America. That was a complete misunderstanding of what was happening. By doing all of that, both with Russia and with China, Iran placed itself on the larger chessboard America could ignore. Iran didn't care that much. About Iran was willing to sometimes help Israel a bit, sell Israel hardware certainly, but not more than that. It was an Israeli problem and American conservatives and the American left were not going to go to war for Israel. And then Iran embedded itself in the grand strategic geostrategic architecture whose sole purpose is containing America. And then it became a problem for America itself. Incidentally, it's worth saying one of the reasons that neither China nor Russia will actually help Iran right now go to war with Iran, do much for Iran, is Iran's weakness. The very fact that it is so weak, the very fact that this regime has revealed itself to be so incompetent, so penetrated by CIA and Mossad operations and operatives, makes it not a useful ally. It limits the relationship to something much less than an alliance. It's become basically a kind of best practices club for regimes that are under siege in various ways and want to survive. That's basically what the strategic alliance of Iran, China and Russia really is. And that means that both Russia and China are fair weather friends. They will never intervene to save Iranian assets, not in Syria, not in the region, not in Iran itself. And, and Beijing also has come to understand that Russia won't fight powerful enemies for an ally for Iran and the whole world. The entire Belt and Road initiative, the entire BRICS alliance, every piece and part of the Chinese attempt to build an anti American world order or a non aligned world order. All of that is also now noticing that China won't come to Iran's defense. These are powerful boons to American strategy already. America has already won something really important just by demonstrating the uselessness of an alliance with Russia and China. China is looking to become the next global hegemon to challenge the US to bring down the American led order. The US is hard at work disrupting that alliance structure, forcing the Chinese back into their own frontiers. This is a vast, sophisticated, multi front effort. Every Trump action on the world stage leads in that direction. The Iran war does too. And if you try to understand it in any other way, nothing makes sense. And if you understand that, everything immediately clicks into place. For example, what is the US actually targeted in Iran? Trump said the US will annihilate the Iranian naval forces capable of carrying those Chinese missiles and disrupting American forces in the Straits of Hormuz. He explicitly used the word annihilate the Iranian navy to prevent him from closing the Straits of Hormuz. That's China's primary goal, primary strategic asset in Iran. And what the US has targeted is exactly the assets that make Iran a Useful partner in that sense. In the first 24 hours, according to Centcom, it confirmed strikes on Iranian vessels, on Iranian submarines, anti ship missile positions all along the southern coast. That's explicitly said by the Americans that they've targeted that major strikes in Bandar Abbas where the IRGC Navy is headquartered and the port of Jask, which we just discussed as a port where the Chinese have high hopes for developing great things. That's also outside the Persian Gulf. So it's a, it's a critical focal point for China. As we mentioned, maritime traffic through the Straits of Hormuz are stopped as of today. Day three of the war insurance coverage for the tankers has been withdrawn. Some vessels have actually been attacked. But the Americans have used the opportunity to massively degrade everything, including military communications infrastructure in the region that Iran could possibly have used. And America is doing its best to attack the nuclear sprint capabilities, the nuclear umbrella that Iran was building, which would have protected, not in America's view, Iran's ability to strike in the region, but China's ability to Iran's ability to protect everything that Iran can do for China in the region. The Americans are targeting naval capabilities, the Americans are targeting coastal defense capabilities. That's not about Israel, that's about China. U.S. planners recognize that in any war with China over Taiwan, for example, Iran would be a second front. Its proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah, they're built to close the Bab El Mandab Straits, the Straits of Hormuz, the eastern Mediterranean, to spike oil prices, to divert carrier groups away from the Pacific. That is what they're built for. It's important to America that Iran be seen to be on its own, that China be shown to be an unreliable partner and that these specific advantages to China in that war, a war in which America has the ability to close the Malacca Straits, a war in which America has the ability to target China's energy arter, that Iran doesn't have the ability to be that disrupting factor in return as part of the Chinese alliance. That's the story. That's what this war is about. That's one of the reasons why America has not just targeted existing missiles, but American airstrikes have targeted the missile industry from the ground up. The totality of the missile industry. It doesn't want China to be able over the next couple of years to rebuild the capability to build out those missiles. Massive explosions have been reported in the missile factories and Isfahan in Tabriz. These are hubs of ballistic missile production and drone assembly. By destroying those factories. The US Is ensuring that Iran can't serve as that arsenal. Not for Russia's war in Ukraine, not for China's regional proxies, and not for China's own strategies. Trump announced the operation by saying the United States would annihilate Iran's navy, destroy their missiles, raise their missile industry to the ground. Folks, this has all been said out loud. The only piece that hasn't been said out loud, because you don't unnecessarily trigger a Chinese response, is that all of these are the pieces of Iran that serve the Chinese grand strategy to contain, push back, and ultimately replace America as a global hegemon. Friends, America is taking advantage of Israel's willingness to take the Iranian regime off the regional chessboard once and for all of Israel's needs in the much smaller regional landscape. It isn't doing this for Israel. It has found an advantageous moment. Having a competent and capable local ally who's willing to absorb damage, capable of dealing massive damage, willing to fight for as long as you will fight, that's a hell of an operational advantage. It's a window for America to knock Iran off of a much, much larger chessboard. And America is taking that window when America faces China. If America has to face China, if it comes to kinetic war, imagine that Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines take the brunt of the attacking and the brunt of the blowback from China, allowing America much more strategic freedom and much lower cost for America fighting a war that is in America's primary interest. That's how Israel is behaving as part of this American war. America isn't riding shotgun on an Israeli operation. It's the opposite. Israel, with great gratitude and happiness. But Israel itself is riding shotgun on an American one. It's about regime change, and this is worth saying and finishing with, but it's not about nation building. It's not about democracy spreading. That's important. It's about regime change, but with zero idealism. This is Donald Trump. This isn't George W. Bush. And the reason it's about regime change isn't because Trump plans a great democracy in Iran. It's because this regime is foundationally anti American. American as much as it's possible to be anti. Americanism isn't a policy of the Iranian regime. It's the basic regime truth. It is the ideology that established the regime. Rukhollah Khomeini, the founder of this regime, the first supreme Leader, frames the United States as the Great Satan, a metaphysical evil, not just a political one. That has to be resisted for the Islamic Republic to remain legitimate. What the Islamic Republic is, is the anti American force in the world ordained by God to bring down the great arrogant powers of the world and that leadership that has just been killed in Iran. Enmity against the U.S. including Khamenei, is a matter of principle. Khomeini coined the term Great Satan just after the 1979 revolution. It's specifically depicting America as the Quranic description of what Satan is. And he argues that the US gathers all the devils around itself to tempt and corrupt nations. And also Khamenei. For the last 35 years, the dictator of Iran has argued that Iran has to be purged of its toxic westernization. That every U.S. influence in Iran is a venomous dagger trying to rob it of its Islamic identity. America is the heart of globalization, which is a kind of spiritual slavery. Endless enmity. That's the term Khamenei has always used to describe a permanent civilization. A war against America. Okay, this isn't about sanctions. This isn't about strategy. America has inherent malice for Islam and for the kind of revolution that the Shia are pushing. That is the argument of Khamenei. He famously said that even if the nuclear issue were resolved, the US would find another excuse to use sanctions because its goal is the annihilation of the Islamic system. Battle and jihad, Khamenei said, are endless because evil in its front continue to exist. This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressor's front with America at the head of it. Khamenei May 25, 2014 there's no compromise over the long term between this regime's ideology and America's existence, America's interests. It doesn't kid around when it says America is the Great Satan. And it's not about things America did wrong in 1954 against an Iranian leader. It is foundational to their understanding of cosmic spiritual justice. Iran will only ever be a spoiler for America in the Middle east at the heart of the global oil supply and with China and with a rising challenge of China investing in Iran's ability to do just that. China trusts Iran to never turn those abilities on China. To never compromise and become a friend, ally or even just trading partner that doesn't hate America. It knows Iran will always be anti American religiously. Iran was foolish by its own hand. It made itself a threat not to Israel, but to America. An anti war president elected partly on the wave of frustration with the the unbelievably costly and often failed interventions of the past administrations is now willing to fight this war because it is now America's war. America still believes in war, but only in war that helps America directly, specifically. And Iran, thinking it was building itself this great strategic depth, linked its fate to China and made itself, for the very first time, a threat to America. It's not about Israel because it's now about China. All Bibi had to do was lay this out. I don't know this for a fact, but I can imagine it easily in meetings with Trump. I imagine the case that Bibi was making was being greeted by the entirety of America's generals and defense planners and China specialists nodding along. Not the Middle east, folks. It's not about Israel. They don't care about the Middle east for itself. And, folks, this war is working. Iran itself has responded in ways that show it's working. It's hit 10 regional countries, activated Hezbollah, explicitly threatened to seal off all oil shipping through the Straits of Hormuz and attacked Saudi oil refineries. Or, in other words, the Iranians know this is it. They know Trump is committed to this. They know this is grand strategy. They know they've triggered the great and powerful America to believe. They've led it to believe that this is a threat to America, not to some ally. And so this could be the fall. And if they don't set everything on fire on their way down, then if they survive this, they will never again be able to threaten with doing so. The only way to survive this is to make sure that the whole region goes whimpering to the Americans, screaming to the Americans not to ever threaten the ayatollahs in this way ever again. They have already struck oil refineries. They will strike more. But this is also how incompetent Iran has become, how little its ideology equips it to deal seriously, not just with its domestic situation, with its domestic economy, which it has broken and shattered, but with its strategic situation on the world stage. By firing at all these Middle Eastern countries, Iran is demonstrating to the Americans, to the Americans, just how dangerous it can be if it's left standing behind American lines, so to speak, on that much larger chessboard on the confrontation with China. By making good on the threat against Saudi, against the Emirates, even dragging neutral Oman and actively anti Israel, Qatar and poor Lebanon into the fight, it massively incentivizes all of them to urge the Americans to finish the job. Because when are they going to get this chance ever again? Everybody now wants to live in a world in which this regime no longer casts its long shadow. So now the US has moved from deterring China to dissecting China's alliance structure. Venezuela, Iran. Don't be the Cuban leader. Trust me on this. Iran is to America, in other words, what Hezbollah is to Israel. The first severed limb on the path to the direct confrontation with their main foe. By removing the leadership and the naval industrial tools that made Iran a strategic asset to China, Washington is closing the Iran chapter of that larger confrontation. America isn't fighting Israel's war. Israel is just one of the many local beneficiaries of a completely American war. And I, for one, am on America's side of that war. Thank you for listening.