No. of Recommendations: 12
China is not better off. Much worse. Think they’re charging the same prices for their weapons sales?Why wouldn't they be? Venezuela didn't happen because of issues with Chinese equipment - their air defense systems were almost entirely
Russian provided. They also failed in large part due to both lack of maintenance and
not being activated. Because they were almost entirely Russian systems, and Russia has stopped supplying parts and technicians, almost none of the systems were properly maintained, and few of the Venezuelans were properly trained in their use. Plus many of the systems were
still in storage, which makes them hard to be effective:
https://medium.com/the-geopolitics-report/how-did-...https://archive.ph/KtTtWAs for Iran, there's no evidence yet that there was any failure on the part of whatever systems were provided by China. Even if Iran
had purchased some Chinese air defense systems (and that itself is disputed), there's no way
any such system would have been able to handle the massive amount of assets that were sent in for the attack. And right now, there's no indication that the systems didn't function properly.
But most importantly -
it doesn't matter if China is making a skosh less money on their weapons sales. Seriously? You're looking at China
possibly having to offer a discount on weapons prices? Total global international arms sales is about a $120 billion market, of which China has about 6% - or about $7 billion. In gross sales. So if they had to take a haircut on arms prices, it would be barely a billion dollars - if that. Chump change, before you even compare it to the tens of billions of dollars of material that
we're running through to prosecute the war.
Even if that happened, that would be a tiny economic pinprick compared to the massive advantages they're getting from the overall war. They're going to get to displace Moscow as Iran's main patron, lock in even
more dependency from one of their largest oil suppliers, get the benefit of Iran no longer causing problems for their other (larger) oil supplier in the region,
and get to see the U.S. use up tens of billions of dollars of American military assets (including the most critical anti-projectile defense systems that will take years to replenish)
for nothing of value.
https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/...
