No. of Recommendations: 13
In other words: This is all about China.
Indeed it is.
Indeed is not. None of those arguments are correct.
Yes, China owns Iran. And if anything we were doing were actually going to change that, then perhaps you could argue that this is about China.
But it's not. China will continue to own Iran, because we're not changing any of the conditions that lead China to own Iran. In fact, we're exacerbating them.
The article is simply incorrect in attributing China's influence in the other oil producing states as being a reaction to Iranian proxies. It's not due to that. It's due to the fact that in the last decade and a half, China has become their biggest customer. They've basically replaced the U.S. as the biggest buyer of global oil. It's not even close. China imports about 11 million bpd, and about half of it comes from the Gulf states.
This is the most ridiculous argument in the article:
All of which brings us to the central problem. President Trump didn’t launch Operation Epic Fury only to punish Khamenei for his massacres. Trump launched it because every year Washington spends focusing on managing Tehran is another year Beijing gets to build control in the Pacific. The orientation of the Middle East will determine whether the U.S. can prevail in the defining confrontation of this century: a Chinese move against Taiwan.
...because nothing we're doing is going to change the degree to which we have to manage Tehran. We're not changing the regime. We're not reducing their hostility to the West, or their control over some 90+ million people and a huge chunk of the world's oil, or their long-term threat profile to the region. We're not going to be in a position to declare "Mission Accomplished" and never have to pay attention to the Middle East again.
Remove the Islamic Republic from the equation, and China loses its pawns for a Taiwan contingency. Leave it in place, and the Middle East remains what Beijing designed it to be: a second front that Washington can never afford to leave and can never afford to stay in. Trump’s strikes are the first move by an American president who appears to understand that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran.
Utterly false. We're not removing the Islamic Republic - it's going to remain. China isn't losing a pawn - they're going to have just as much, if not more, influence and control in Teheran. The Middle East wasn't designed by Beijing, which has only recently (last decade or two) started to get involve in the region - it was designed by the USSR, who used existing Arab hatred of Britain and France to align the Arab states against the west in the 1950's as one of the proxy theaters in the Cold War. Beijing wants the Middle East to be a stable and secure source of oil and an economic engine for them to exploit and dominate.
Trump's strikes are a foolhardy move by an American president who, if he actually thought that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran, would be completely and utterly wrong in that thought.
