Big D (49:17)
Zanette Raboa. The title of her sub stack is called the Iran Question is all about China. Why Operation Epic Fury is the opening act of the Indo Pacific century. She makes the best case that I've seen or heard about what's maybe the 4D 5 because everybody loves to cling to the 4D chessboard that we always are told somebody's playing and why none of us are ever. You can't just be normal because it's never just common sense normalty, it's always some. But in this case I think she probably gets to the point and she says Iran is most often discussed as a non proliferation problem, a sponsor of terrorism, things like that. Regional sports. Each of these framings captures a real problem, but none capture what matters most, which is the nuclear file stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, the question of Gulf security architecture. These only acquire their full meaning when read against the backdrop of the Chinese grand strategy. Beijing has spent years and billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. Everything that follows in the Middle east flows from this fact, which is why Operation Epic Fury is the first American military campaign that threatens to sever that asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China's regional architecture. And I've seen other people make this case over the weekend. Mark Dubowitz talks about it a lot, but she has the best article and the best making of the case for how important this is at this moment and strategically. Why the White House and the Trump administration specifically obviously are possibly undertaking this at this moment. Yes, there is all the common known stuff about the reign of terror and wishing death to America, death to Israel, trying to kill Trump, all of that. But there is a much bigger thing at play here and she says the urgency has never been greater. Think about the 12 Day War. Just back last year, the United States got involved with three direct strikes. The Islamic Republic's deterrent methodology, cultivated over four decades, collapsed within a fortnight. And then you saw the largest protest since 1979 erupt in all 31 provinces, fueled by economic freefall in a population that no longer believed in the regime's strength. Of course, the government responded with massacring 30, 40, maybe 50,000 of their own people, prompting the designation from the European Union as the IRGC is a terrorist organization. And she says at that moment, when you think about Iran, they were probably at their weakest moment ever at that point. And this is the question a lot of us have asked, well, if that operation was so successful, how did we get here year? Well, she says China was moving quickly to put it all back together. This week it was reported that Iran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese made supersonic anti ship cruise missiles, weapons capable of threatening American carriers now massing in the Persian Gulf. Earlier, Chinese suppliers shipped over a thousand tons of sodium perchlorate, a key missile propellant ingredient, to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that they had just spent 12 days destroying. Understanding why Beijing would do this and what it means for the US requires looking beyond Iran and towards the border contest in which Iran plays a role. And so then she gets into obviously energy. China buying about 90% of Iran's crude exports at a steep discount for their energy. And how they, the shipments travel by ghost tankers. They re, they disguise their disguise, these tankers, as if they're Malaysian or Indian or Indonesian crude oil to circumvent American sanctions. So she goes through the whole case of how energy is a big part of it obviously for Beijing getting cheap oil, how when Khomeini and Xi Jinping met in 2016, he praised this 25 year strategic partnership and how much they relied on China and China was relying on them almost as a forward base is basically the case she makes here. And then she gets into the digital part, Huawei zte. They've built significant portions of Iran's telecommunications infrastructure. They've dealt with a lot of the, basically modeling it after the great firewall of China built with Chinese technical assistance, all what we saw during the blackout in January, a lot of the same tools that China uses, facial recognition AI, things like that, to be able to turn off the Internet and make sure that the message couldn't get out. And then obviously she goes into the logistics of where they're located. The Red Sea. The value to China extending beyond energy and technology into the domain of proxy warfare there, considering the Red Sea and the shipping and the fuel costs. And again, basically, China trying to set this up in the end for an eventual move on Taiwan and how crucial it was going to be for Iran and their position and the oil and the energy and the partnership, and basically building, then building them into some strategic alliance, a forward base, if you will, for eventually a move on Taiwan, which in her mind is. All of this was set up for that.
