Globalities

The US-Israel war on Iran: Takeaway #2, the China-Iran angle

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories China, Iran, Israel

Very few people in the ‘West’ have yet paid much attention to the very significant contribution that China has made, behind the scenes, to strengthening Iran’s resilience as well as its defensive and offensive military capabilities.

Several Western reporters have written (e.g., Reuters here) about China’s heavy degree of reliance on oil imports from Iran, and many of them have noted that this has made China very vulnerable to any closure of the Straits of Hormuz that could have been sparked by a continuation of the US-Israel war on Iran. But very few Western commentators have taken note of the fact that on May 24, a lengthy freight train carrying electronics and other goods arrived in Tehran, having inaugurated the first ever direct rail link between China and Iran.

Establishing this direct rail link is not the only way in which China has been bolstering Iran’s resilience and capabilities. Of probably even greater importance has been the ability Chinese tech has given many core parts of Iran’s governance and military command systems to free themselves from reliance on the kinds of Western tech that have left users often fatally vulnerable to US-Israeli hacking. As the well-placed Chinese tech expert William Huo noted earlier today, “Iran’s drones… fly coordinated, autonomous, and lethal. That’s Chinese targeting AI and optical systems… Iranian missiles run on Chinese chips, Chinese servos, Chinese nav units.”

He noted that in return, “China gets a combat-proven proxy and real-time telemetry from a U.S.-backed target. If Iron Dome can’t keep up, what happens in Taiwan? What happens to Aegis? To Japan’s missile net? Everyone watching saw the same thing… “

Small surprise, therefore, that earlier today, per Al-Monitor, “China hosted defence ministers from Iran and Russia for a meeting in its eastern seaside city of Qingdao…”

Huo and others have noted that much of the terminal guidance that made Iran’s most advanced missiles, and some of its drones, so effective in reaching precise targets inside Israel, was provided by systems using China’s Beidou navigation system (intriguingly often shortened to ‘BDS’.) Unlike systems reliant on the Western GPS system, BeiDou is not vulnerable to US/Israeli hacking or spoofing.

Evidently, some leading people in Iran’s security sector were still, as of June 13, using Western-based communications systems like WhatsApp or Telegram. Earlier this week, a Washington Post reporter was passed, by “an Israeli individual who obtained the material” an audio recording of a threat that an Israeli security-services operative had delivered over the phone to a “senior Iranian official” warning that he and his wife and family would be murdered unless he either fled Iran or made and sent back to them within 12 hours a video in which he dissociated himself from the Iranian government.

Almost certainly, going forward, all senior Iranian officials will be restricted to using non-Western means of communication.

China’s ability to have started building valuable, concrete operational relations with many parts of the Iranian military should come as little surprise. Back in March 2023, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stunned the whole of the Western world when he succeeded in brokering a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran that changed the geopolitics of the Gulf region and West Asia very substantially.

Prior to that reconciliation, it was an unquestioned assumption of most Western policymakers that the wealthy (and Sunni Muslim) rulers of the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Gulf more or less shared their desire to see the demise of the (Shi-ite-dominated) Islamic Republic of Iran. During the whole of the current US-Israeli attack against Iran, however, the Arab Gulf rulers of the GCC have largely stood aside from joining the anti-Tehran battles, though Qatar and many of the others do still host significant US military bases. At the June 22 meeting that the UN Security Council convened urgently to discuss the US-Israel-Iran crisis, the ambassador of Kuwait put his name on the speaker’s list and in the name of all members of GCC he decried the Israeli and US attacks on Iran and called urgently for a ceasefire.

On recent developments in China’s policies toward Palestine and West Asia more generally, here are two other intriguing sources:

  1. This piece by Zhang Sheng in Mondoweiss in March. (This tracks how, despite the PRC government’s fairly close economic ties with Israel some years ago, it has more recently distanced itself from it.
  2. English translations of the speech the Chinese rep at the UN made at the June 22 session, and comments by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spox, also on June 22. Interestingly, the Ministry spox noted that Chinese bodies had worked to evacuate 3,125 Chinese nations from Iran during the war, while “China’s Embassy in Israel helped and organized the evacuation of over 500 Chinese nationals from Israel to safety, and helped some nationals from the UK, India and Poland safely evacuate.” So that is ratio of about 6 to 1.

The US-Israel war on Iran: Takeaway #1, the stalemate

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories Iran, Israel, U.S. military

London-based security analyst Mark Sleboda gave one good initial summary of the takeaways from this war, as summarized here by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama.

I agree with most of Mark’s points, especially his bottom-line conclusion that the biggest loser was “the NPT and international law.” We’ll come back to that, later.

Here are just some quick clarifications on Mark’s point that the US and Israel came to realize that a war of attrition “was going to go badly for Israel”:

  1. People who consume mainly western corporate media need to understand that they have NOT gotten anything like the full picture of the damage that Iran’s strikes have caused to Israel’s society and economy. All foreign media reporting from Israel is subject to very strict military censorship, as I know from experience. None of the journos for Western corporate media who report from Israel tells their viewers/readers that. Shame on them!
  2. In a small slip, the Israeli Tax Authority recently released (but then speedily deleted) some docs reporting that as of yesterday they had already received 32,975 claims for damages to buildings. The Twitter account of MENA Unleashed reproduced some parts of this Israeli Tax Authority report. You can read their whole analysis of this and other damage data from Israel here.
  3. The Electronic Intifada’s indispensable Jon Elmer also presented a great assessment on June 20 of how the war was going for Israel, by then. You can see his 31-minute here, or read a transcript here. (The still photo above is from his report.)

Mark Sleboda wrote that the Iranian government had agreed to Trump’s ceasefire proposal “because they too have been badly shaken through Israeli covert warfare and their own air defense all but collapsed.” The first part of that assessment is almost certainly true, given that on the first day (Friday the 13th) of Israel’s massive initial assault, Israeli covert ops succeeded in killing more than a dozen key, top IRGC leaders and commanders, and top nuclear scientists.

However, after many decades of facing different types of attack from Washington, Israel, and their allies, the Iranians have become very accustomed to building redundancy and resilience into their command and control networks. And within just a few hours of Israel’s atrocious and quite illegal sneak attack, Iranian units were able to send 100 missiles against Israel on that first day, and then to maintain the capability to shoot missiles and drones against Israel until the very day of the ceasefire, June 24.

The image here, taken from the Haaretz website, lists just the 532 ballistic missiles that Iran sent against Israel during the war, not those low-level drones that also got through. It indicates that 31 of the missiles managed to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and generously US-funded) interceptor system.

Toward the end of Jon Elmer’s June 20 report, he gave some intriguing figures on just how expensive Israel’s anti-ballistic and anti-drone interceptors are, compared with the often minimal cost of the incoming Iranian weapons. (As with Yemen’s Ansarallah, as he noted.) There have also been several reports that Israelis were just plain running out of interceptors for their high-level Arrow system.

Mark Sleboda was right to say that Iran’s air-defense system had “all but collapsed” as of June 13– when, on the first day of Israel’s attack one of its main target sets was precisely the Iranian air-defense radars and associated systems. And that left many, many parts of Iran woefully unprotected against Israel’s many waves of bomber aircraft, which received considerable, active help from the USAF along the way in the spheres of both intel coordination and in-air refueling as the Israeli planes streaked across the skies of Syria, Iraq, and possibly also Jordan, with huge amounts of help from US Centcom.

Source, IISS via Jon Elmer. Click to enlarge

However, Iran is a very large country and it’s nearly 1,800 km away from Israel. So though Israel has a very large, very capable (and did I mention US-funded and US-supported?) Air Force, it was still, after eleven days, quite incapable of breaking the Iranian military in any meaningful way. And meantime, though the USAF and the IAF were able to act with a high degree of safety for themselves inside that air-bridge from Israel to Iran, the Iranian military/IRGC was able to get to Israel using two different layers of the atmosphere: both by shooting their large and capable missiles very much higher than the USAF-IAF air bridge and by send their Shahed drones very much lower, as Jon Elmer very helpfully explained.

So after eleven days it was a mutually hurting stalemate. But there have been several indications that Israel’s society and economy were much closer to collapse than Iran’s. (Hence, Trump’s rush to the ceasefire.)

[More takeaways to come!]

Netanyahu’s big roll of the dice in Iran

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories Iran, Israel, U.S. policy

In the early hours of June 13, the Israeli Air Force, reportedly aided by special forces/spy units pre-deployed into Iran, launched a barrage of massive strikes against Iranian air-defenses, nuclear facilities, command-and-control nodes, and individual targeted Iranians, military and non-military. Iranian government negotiators were planning to meet in Muscat, Oman, just two days later, in the next phase of the talks that U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had maintained for the previous two months. (Israel’s attack reportedly killed some of the Iranian specialists who were planning to attend those Muscat talks.)

The Israeli attack almost certainly took the Iranians by surprise. Israel killed many senior military leaders, especially in the elite Iranian revolutionary Guard Corps. But within just a few hours, Iran’s command system proved capable of responding in kind; and since June 13, every night has seen an exchange of deadly missiles between the two countries. Israel has delivered much of its ordnance against Iran from air-force planes flying right over Iran, or close to its Western border in the skies of Iraq and Syria protected by U.S. surveillance (and potential interception) capabilities, while Iran has delivered its missiles, including some hypersonic missiles, from its own home turf.

The Israelis claim they have destroyed many significant Iranian military and nuclear-research facilities. Their attacks– along with calls from Pres. Trump for the “evacuation” of the whole of Tehran–have caused deep disruptions in the lives of millions of Iranians.

The human casualties of this war have been very much higher in Iran than in Israel–though not on a per-capita basis. In Israel, families who have never previously experienced “incoming” attacks that caused more than minor damage have now been seeing the much larger level of damage inflicted by those Iranian missiles that manage to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and partly U.S.-supplied) anti-missile shields.

The two sides have seemingly become locked into a deadly war of attrition with no clear end– or even a plausible diplomatic off-ramp– in sight. (There have meantime been some reports that Israel’s stock of “Arrow” anti-ballistic missiles has been depleting at a rate that can’t be sustained for very much longer.)

Within this picture of a possibly lengthy, slugging-it-out war of attrition, there are a number of possible wild cards:

Continue reading “Netanyahu’s big roll of the dice in Iran”

The West’s domination of the Rest needs to end. (Part 1.)

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories China, Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Global governance, Uncategorized

In Gaza today, we see Israel’s cruel, violent, and always ‘West’-backed military working overtime to snuff out the existence of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, two areas that have always formed a key part of Palestinian national territory. This phenomenon is not new in the lengthy record of the actions that heavily armed, West-European-origined settler cohorts have taken against the Indigenous people of lands far from the shores of Western Europe. Indeed, it replays with disturbing accuracy the actions that violent Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch, and French adventurers took over the past 500 years against Indigenes in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australasia.

But today, everyone worldwide can see this latest massacre of the Indigenes taking place in all-color video, in near-real time.

That vast, non-‘Western’ majority of humankind whose ancestors were the survivors of earlier White-Western settler rampages well understands what is going on, and stands aghast at the continuing, barbaric cruelty of the Israeli government and military– and also at the active complicity of the U.S. and many/most other Western governments. (Many citizens of those complicit Western countries are also aghast at the massacre in Gaza, though a disturbing proportion of them– of us– have been cowed, silenced, and blackmailed by the endless repetition of old tropes about the need for Westerners and others always to “support Israel.”)

It is ways past time for all of this– above all, the massacres themselves, but also the complicity and the silence– to end.

I have been actively calling, since early November 2023, for the United States to step aside from the lockhold it has exercised since 1990 (or earlier) on all dimensions of Arab-Israeli “peace-making.” By wielding this lockhold, successive U.S. presidents have not just allowed but also actively supported Israel’s continued suppression of Palestinian rights, its force-backed takings of Palestinian and Syrian territory, and its repeated wars against neighbors.

At the end of that earlier essay I noted that in 1956, an earlier U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower, had intervened against the British, French, and Israeli governments to force them to reverse the large-scale land-grab they had just undertaken against Egypt. And Eisenhower achieved that laudable goal not through military action (though he had earlier been been a forceful and effective military commander.) Rather, he did it by using only economic pressure, flexing just a small portion of the dominance the United States enjoyed in the world economy back then, to bring those three aggressive rogue states to heel. (Tragically, their Tripartite Aggression of 1956 had harmed not only numerous Egyptian military and civilian installations but also the always vulnerable, overwhelmingly civilian population of Gaza, who also stood in Israel’s way…)

In my essay I noted that just a few days later, in mid-November 2023, the leaders of the United States and China would be meeting in San Francisco. And I asked whether that meeting might see some efforts to restore oversight over Arab-Israeli peacemaking to the United Nations, where it rightfully belongs, and to end the (sharply pro-Israel) U.S. oversight of that diplomacy.

That did not happen then, and it hasn’t happened since– despite so many of us having continued to call, with increasing urgency, for the world powers to decisively END the political protection and the active support that Washington and its minions have given to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Like the vast majority of other governments around the world, the People’s Republic of China has been strongly critical of that genocide since the beginning, as it had been of Israel’s many other violations of international law against Palestinians and others, for many decades prior. But Beijing has still taken zero visible or effective action, of the kind that Eisenhower took back in 1956, to rein in the US-Israeli assault on Gaza and push Israel back to its recognized international border.

In March, researcher Zhang Shen published this excellent analytical essay about China’s policy on Palestinian, in Mondoweiss. In it he wrote,

The seemingly promising bilateral [trade-focused] relationship between China and Israel from 2015 to 2020, once created some voices, both within Chinese and Israeli society, calling for a deeper strategic cooperation between the two states. Yet, what happened on 7 October 2023, and in particular the Israel bombardment of Gaza that followed, irreversibly destroyed the possibility of business as usual. 

Right after 7 October, the Israeli government demanded China condemn Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and to list Hamas as a terrorist organization, but unsurprisingly, China refused this demand. The Chinese government does not accept the Western-Israeli narrative that portrays 7 October as the start of history. Instead, China sees it as one of the many tragedies of the prolonged “Arab-Israeli conflict” inherited from British colonial rule. The PRC, as a regime that emerged out of Mao’s strategy of “people’s war,” guerrilla warfare, and anti-colonial armed struggle, remains inherently sympathetic toward other guerrilla forces of the Global South.

But still, until now, the PRC government has taken no concrete steps to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza or to challenge the “ironclad” protection and support that Washington has given to the génocidaires.

I guess there are a number of possible explanations. Maybe the CCP’s leaders do not care enough about what’s happening to Palestinians in Gaza to try to take action? Or– and this I find more likely– maybe they care very deeply but are still for a number of reasons wary of confronting Washington over an issue that, as they must understand, the powers-that-be in Washington have long judged to be of central importance to them.

Whether, when, and how, we might see some change in these judgments in Beijing (or, more accurately, in the well-guarded Zhongnanhai enclave where CCP leaders hold their most important conclaves) is what I’ll be exploring in the remaining portions of this series.

This is a matter of impact far beyond the misery-soaked ruins of Gaza. That tiny enclave is now the epicenter of the “last gasp” of the White/Western supremacist worldview that has dominated world affairs for the past four-plus centuries. What happens there matters to all of humanity.

China displays its chops in tech, mil-tech, manufacturing– and even political philosophy…

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories China, Global economy, Shipping news, U.S.-China relations

On April 2, Pres. Trump launched a super-harsh economic “war” against China, slapping on the country a harsh initial round of his tariffs that by April 9, after two rounds of reciprocal raises, had reached the level of 145%. By April 11, China’s reciprocals had reached 125%, and Beijing also announced a ban on exports of a broad range of rare-earth minerals and their derivatives.

Trump said throughout that he was waiting for China– and all the other countries on which, with extreme folly, he had also slapped tariffs of a range of harshness– to call him and start negotiating. Pres. Xi didn’t call. Trump blinked first and early, saying Oops he wanted to exempt computers and iPhones. But he also announced punishing new fees on all China-linked vessels to use U.S. ports.

Pres. Xi still hasn’t called, while there are several signs that Trump is increasingly eager to pick up the phone himself and start offering non-trivial concessions.

The two countries are thus far in an economic-warfare standoff that, as many participants in the IMF/World Bank’s Spring Meetings this week have warned, threatens to plunge the U.S. economy and a large chunk of the rest of the world economy into a deep recession.

I thought it would be a good time to take a deep dive into what China’s manufacturing and international-trading capabilities (and vulnerabilities) actually are…

But the journey I took in order to explore those topics took me to some extremely intriguing areas I had not expected when I first set out…

Continue reading “China displays its chops in tech, mil-tech, manufacturing– and even political philosophy…”

For the commanders of Western hegemony, cruelty is a vital tool

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories China, Global governance, Indian Ocean, Israel, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy

The painting above is of Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque

For Pres. Trump, cruelty is a vital tool as he bulldozes through all constitutional requirements to undertake (and publicize) exemplary deportations of undocumented immigrants and of any legally documented visitors like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil whom he arbitrarily chooses to punish.

For Israel’s PM Netanyahu and his ministers, cruelty is similarly a vital tool as they deploy waves of bombers and incendiary drones against two million Palestinians huddling under tarps on Gaza’s trash-piled shores while totally blocking the entry into Gaza of all the basic necessities of life.

Indian Ocean trading routes before da Gama. Click on image to enlarge.

It’s worth noting that cruelty has been a vital, and deliberately deployed, tool for the architects and commanders of “White” empires ever since the 15th century CE. In 1415, Portuguese navigators started carving their way down the coast of West Africa to establish heavily fortified “trading” (plunder) posts in their quest for gold. Those navigators were also intent on finding a sea-route to the richest trading zone they’d ever heard of, the one that traversed the Indian Ocean and wove the riches of East Africa, India, and distant Cathay (China) into the most advanced manufacturing and consumption area then known to humankind…

Continue reading “For the commanders of Western hegemony, cruelty is a vital tool”

Speech policing, LSE style

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories Discourse suppression, Gaza, Israel, United Kingdom

The above photo shows, l. to r., Dr. Michael Mason, Dr. Catherine Charrett, me, and Dr. Jeroen Gunning just before our LSE event March 10

In mid-March, I visited the U.K. for the London Book Fair and decided to add a few days to my visit to catch up with colleagues, friends, and family there. On learning of my visit, my esteemed colleague Dr. Jeroen Gunning of Kings College London and the London School of Economics suggested he could invite me to an event at LSE where we could present and discuss the book that we– along with others– had worked together on, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters.

I eagerly accepted his invitation. LSE’s Middle East Center agreed to host the event on March 10, and billed it as a “book launch” for our book. Palestinian scholar Mouin Rabbani, who had also contributed to the book, agreed to take part remotely from his home in Canada and University of Westminster scholar Dr. Catherine Charrett agreed to serve as our discussant. We were set to go, and on February 24 LSE/MEC opened public registration for the event.

All hell broke loose. Local pro-Israeli organizations and even the Board of Deputies of British Jews, mounted a strong protest and called on the LSE leadership to cancel it. LSE stuck to its (figurative) guns, and did so even after, on March 7 or 8, Israel’s ambassador took the The Daily Telegraph to call openly for the event to be canceled.

It is to the credit of the LSE leadership that they refused to bow to that grossly unwarranted external pressure. But the form and content of the speech policing they imposed on me and my fellow presenters as their condition for continuing to host the event was truly Orwellian. Here’s my recollection of how it went.

Continue reading “Speech policing, LSE style”

Musk’s digital coup in Washington: Effects and prospects

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories U.S. policy, U.S. politics

(Above: A scene from the post-Inauguration lunch in the U.S. Capitol. See Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Justice Bret Kavanaugh, Apple’s Tim Cook, and others…)

The digital coup that Elon Musk launched to capture the U.S. government started on January 20 (though it had been prepared for many weeks before then.) On January 20, shortly after Pres. Trump took the oath of office and briefly dropped by a lunch at which tech billionaires mingled closely with Supreme Court justices and senior legislators, he signed an Executive Order that stated,

This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.

We could think of this as “Communiqué Number 1” of the Musk-Trump coup that we’ve seen playing out ever since.

On January 20, Musk and his digi-goons were ready. By the next day, civil servants arriving in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building found the door to the space there that had long housed the White House’s Office of Digital Services (ODS) sported a note describing it as now housing “DOGE.” DOGE, the non-governmental body that Musk had been running for some time out of the DC office of his Boring company, had already burrowed itself deep into the core of the U.S. federal apparatus.

Continue reading “Musk’s digital coup in Washington: Effects and prospects”

Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and AIPAC

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories Israel, U.S. politics

The death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter feels like the end of an era– and all the more so, since it will be followed very speedily by the launch of the Trump/Musk presidency.

There has been much discussion about the echoes between Carter’s failure to win re-election after his first term back in 1980 and the crash-and-burn that doomed Pres. Joe Biden’s more recent, far too-long-pursued attempt to win re-election. The reasons for the two failures were very different. Age, which was the major factor (of many) for Biden certainly wasn’t a factor for Carter. The explanations most U.S. commentators have given for Carter’s resounding failure back in the elections of November 1980 have nearly all centered on his failure to resolve the lengthy and very debilitating crisis over Iranian students’ holding of U.S. hostages and the (linked) issue of the massive disruptions that the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran inflicted on the U.S. economy.

But by contrast, very little attention has been paid to the significant effect that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s decision to run against Carter in the Democratic primary much earlier in 1980 had in weakening Carter’s ability to organize a successful re-election campaign. And crucially, the role that dedicated pro-Israel organizing played in encouraging Kennedy to mount that primary challenge to Carter.

Tom Dine

Back in 2009, I secured and was able to report on a short series of interviews with the Kennedy staff member who had been the linchpin of that pro-Israel organizing effort. That was Tom Dine, a man who in 1979 joined Kennedy’s staff in the senate after some years working for the Senate Budget Committee and as a defense-affairs staffer for Sen. Edmund Muskie. “With Ted Kennedy, I was ostensibly doing defense policy, but really I was orchestrating his Jewish-vote efforts,” he told me during those interviews.

Continue reading “Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and AIPAC”

Setbacks for the Axis of Resistance and for progress to a multi-polar world

Author Helena CobbanPosted on Categories BRICS, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above photo is from a meeting Pres. Putin had with PM Netanyahu in 2018, when they fine-tuned some arrangements for coordination (“deconfliction”) in Syria

On December 13, I made a first stab at analyzing some of the regional and global repercussions of the recent rapid disintegration of the Asad government in Syria– and indeed, also, of the Syrian state’s entire defensive capability, which Israel bombed to smithereens in the days (and hours) right after the collapse of Pres. Asad’s government on December 8.

Over the past week I have learned more, and I hope come to understand more, about the decision-making in Moscow that was a vital factor in Asad’s collapse– and also, about the possible effects of this collapse on the regional dynamics within West Asia, and on the worldwide balance of power in an era of rapid geopolitical change. In this essay I will sketch out some of my current thinking/understanding on these matters so crucial to the fate of humankind.

Continue reading “Setbacks for the Axis of Resistance and for progress to a multi-polar world”