Episode 94: America's war, not Israel's

Hi, everybody.

Welcome to a special, quick episode of Ask Will Be Anything about the war.

It is Monday, March 2nd, 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

where probably some of them as far as the Jordanian airspace and there's 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 that 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 and 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 the 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, and 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 as it's good or bad or sensible

or foolish or evil or 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 O 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 soldiers in that moment of truth.

And thank you.

I just want to add from me, U.S. 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.

That's how we keep the lights on.

The questions asked by our Patreon members guide the topics we just 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 slash aschaviv.

Anything, 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 into 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 domestically, internationally, how it's connected

to Venezuela, what is Trump's next move, you will not predict any of that.

What the only framing you have is that BB 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 U.S. in this, in this war the U.S. 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 wanted, 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, U.S.-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 ship-borne defenses, the Egypt system, that America's U.S.-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 weapon systems that the Chinese are specifically gearing to

be the kinds of weapon systems that can, for example, prevent the United States from

passing through the streets 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 U.S.-China

confrontation.

The deal was reported on February 24 as near completion, and it would have significantly

expanded around strike capabilities and threat to U.S. forces.

This 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.

And Iran's nuclear and command and control infrastructure, China basically is implemented

as 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 Beidu system, naval exercises.

China uses joint drills with Russia and Iran in the streets 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, and 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 to 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 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 a hundred days before it

starts running out of oil.

And so for China, this connection to Iran, this outside of American, you know, 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 significant and serious benefit.

But it's not hard for the U.S. to force China to choose between Iran and, for example,

the U.S. domestic consumer market.

Since early this year with the U.S. 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, a fourth and fifth

largest respectively.

But its economy is so big that it still has nothing near self-sufficiency and 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 isn't a much worse situation.

If you can enforce those sanctions on China and you hit it economically in the U.S. 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 and 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.

A huge Intel 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 threat, direct threat to American forces securing the oil supply

and the Gulf in a future confrontation, taking in, you know, 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 bog 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, overland 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 to Central

Asia.

China has a 25-year agreement, which includes the development of the port of Jask, just

outside the Persian Gulf.

It's a future naval foothold for China that isn't inside the straits of Harmoos.

And then finally, there's Russia.

Russia has 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 and Iranian drones as one of the major

armed suppliers for that war.

In July, a month after the war, Russia sent an S-400 air defense system to Iran, a massive

upgrade from the S-300 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 F-22s, 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 side show.

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 at 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,

in Israel's 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 and

China in Iran, completely sat it out.

League 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

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 to the Persian Gulf in a future confrontation.

That's why also in January of last year, Vladimir Putin and the Iranian president, Pazish

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 chess board.

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 too 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 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.

It's already, America has already won something really important just by demonstrating the

uselessness of an alliance with Russia and China.

He's looking to become the next global hegemon to challenge the US to bring down the American

let 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 streets of Hormuz.

He explicitly used the word annihilate the Iranian navy to prevent him from closing

the streets of Hormuz.

China's primary goal, primary strategic asset in Iran.

And what the US is targeted is exactly the assets that make Iran a useful partner in

that sense.

In the first 24 hours, according to SENTCOM, 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 in 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 critical focal point for China, as we mentioned.

Maritime traffic through the streets 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.

It's proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah.

They're built to close the bubble-manned upstates, 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 Malakas Straits, a war in which America has the

ability to target China's energy arteries, 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

air strikes 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 into breeze.

These are hubs of ballistic missile production and drone assembly by destroying those factories,

the U.S. 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 pushback and ultimately replace America as a global hegemon.

Friends America is taking advantage of Israel's willingness to take the Iranian regime of

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 the 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.

Israel is taking 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 raising 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 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.

Bukhala Khomeini, the defounder of this regime, the first great 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, or damed 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

Khomeini is a matter of principle.

Khomeini coined the term great Satan, just after the 1979 revolution.

It's specifically depicting America as the coronic description of what Satan is, and he

argues that the U.S. gathers all the devils around itself to tempt and corrupt nations.

And also, Khomeini, 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 Khomeini has always used to describe a permanent civilization, a war against

America.

Okay, this isn't about sanctions, this isn't about strategy.

Khomeini has inherent malice for Islam and for the kind of revolution that the Shia

are pushing.

That is the argument of Khomeini.

He famously said that even if the nuclear issue were resolved, the U.S. would find another

excuse to use sanctions because its goal is the annihilation of the Islamic system.

Battle and jihad, Khomeini said, are endless because evil in its front continue to exist.

This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors' front with America

at the head of it.

Khomeini, 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 Seed and it's not about things

America did wrong in 1954 against a 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 a 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 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 Chisbalat 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 autolas in this way ever

again.

They have already struck oil refineries.

They will strike more.

But this is also how incompetent Iran has become.

That little it's 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 U.S. has moved from deterring China to dissecting China's alliance structure.

In Israel, Iran, don't be the Cuban leader, trust me on this.

Iran is to America, in other words, with his relies 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.