Iran – Globalities

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

Helena CobbanJune 26, 2025June 27, 2025China, 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:

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.
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

Helena CobbanJune 26, 2025June 26, 2025Iran, 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”:

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!
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.
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

Helena CobbanJune 21, 2025June 21, 2025Iran, 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:

Syria’s collapse and the global balance

Helena CobbanDecember 13, 2024December 13, 2024Global balance, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above image shows some of the Syrian navy vessels destroyed by Israel this week.

Over the past 17 days, the system of (Baath Party + military) governance that the Asad family had maintained over Syria for 53 years underwent a catastrophic and complete collapse. This collapse had been many years in the making; and now, it has numerous implications for the regional balance in West Asia– not least for the serious blow it has delivered to “Axis of resistance”, the previously hardy alliance of regional forces working together to resist the cruel, expansionist assaults of the Israeli military. Asadist Syria had not been an active participant in those efforts, but it provided a key land bridge for interactions between the resistance forces in Iran/Iraq and those in Lebanon.

The severing of this land bridge will have significant, though almost certainly not fatal, effects on the capabilities of Hizbullah and its resistance allies in Lebanon. (We discussed some of these effects in the discussion I was part of in the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday.)

A potentially much more serious effect on the anti-Israeli resistance may well turn out to be the re-emergence throughout West Asia of the same kind of harshly anti-Shi-ite sectarianism that has been publicly displayed by leaders (and rank-and-filers) of the victorious, al-Qaeda-style Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement that rode into glory in Damascus on Sunday and Monday. (We discussed that, too, in the livestream. An imperfectly edited version of the transcript of our convo can be downloaded here.)

But even far beyond West Asia, the collapse of Asadist Syria, and indeed of the Syrian state itself in any recognizable form, and the manner in which that collapse transpired, will have stark– and as of now, only dimly predictable– repercussions on a global balance that has anyway been in an increasing degree of flux over recent years.

Israel’s path to defeat: The implications

Helena CobbanJune 21, 2024June 23, 2024Gaza, Global balance, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians, West Asia6 Comments

The image above is a still from footage a Hizbullah drone recently shot of a key Israeli naval base in Haifa

Today, nearly nine months into Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the evidence is mounting that the country’s political-military leadership is on a path to serious defeat not only in Gaza but also more broadly in its decades-long contest against West Asia’s Iran-led “Axis of Resistance.” This fact is only just starting to receive some glimmers of recognition in the corporate media in the West. (Interestingly, one of the few to give it any public acknowledgment at all has been lifelong Zionist apologist Tom Friedman, who did so in some key portions of this June 18 column. Most of the other Zionist apologists who are deeply embedded in the US elite are still publicly spinning fairy tales of “an imminent defeat for Hamas.”)

The defeat towards which the Israeli leadership is currently hurtling is, as I noted, not only in Gaza, where numerous, apparently well-coordinated, cells of armed resisters have been making smart use of the rubble to which the Israeli military has reduced most of the Strip’s buildings, as well as their own tunnels, to launch well-prepared and often lethal attacks on Israel’s tanks, APCs, and snipers across the length and breadth of the Strip… and where Israel’s grotesquely genocidal attacks and other policies have notably failed to turn the population against Hamas. (Find more on the evidence for that key political fact, below.) But this defeat looms also in the ever-tense, but until now somewhat controlled, confrontation Israeli forces have been engaged in in the North, against Hizbullah fighters who are considerably more lethally armed than the Hamas fighters of Gaza and who have continued to upgrade their capabilities almost continuously in the 18 years since they last inflicted a decisive defeat on Israel’s military, in summer 2006.

Western corporate media huff on about Syria’s survival, reintegration

Helena CobbanMay 22, 2023May 23, 2023China, Global balance, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria

The Western corporate media that for 12 years have cheerled the brutal regime-change project in Syria are still sore about the fact that the project failed and that the other Arab states have agreed to reinstate Syria into the Arab League. So in what they’ve been publishing about Syria in recent days—whether “news” or “opinion”—they still clearly embody the deeply one-sided way they have been “covering” Syria for many years now.

(Other voices can be found—if you know where to look. I’ll come to one of them a little lower down here.)

The story in today’s WaPo that purported to tell us how “Syrians” feel about Pres. Bashar al-Asad’s participation in last Friday’s Arab League summit was a classic. “Syrians”, the headline tells us magisterially, “feel anger, hurt as Assad is welcomed back to Arab League.” But no attempt was made by the two reporters bylined there to, um, actually go to Syria and ask that majority of Syrians who live in areas under the government’s control. Instead, they are writing with no dateline, that is, presumably working the phones and the WhatsApp lines from Washington, to the three named sources whom they quote. One of those sources is described as currently located in Qatar, one in Germany, the other, not located.

The reporters make a couple of references to them as “Syrian activists“, a deliberately vague descriptor that is usually understood to mean “Syrian pro-regime-change activists”… But then they also, several times, build on those quotes to conclude that “Syrians” (meaning, presumably, all Syrians) feel that same way.

That is exactly how, through lazy writing based on a barrow-load of wishful thinking, pro-war propaganda gets ever more deeply embedded into the minds of readers. It really makes you wonder. If all “Syrians” feel exactly that same way, how on earth did the Syrian government manage to survive the 12-year-long regime-change campaign?

Jake Sullivan’s team quietly sticks it to Israel, over Iran

Helena CobbanMay 15, 2023May 16, 2023China, Global balance, Iran, Israel, Persian Gulf, U.S. policy

David Ignatius, long the national-security journo with the closest access to Democratic decision-makers, wrote in an intriguing column in today’s WaPo that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s recent meeting in Vienna with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi, “Sullivan praised Wang’s mediation of the bitter rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran… welcoming China’s effort to de-escalate conflict in the region.”

This is a real turnaround. It deals a strong serious blow to all the anti-Iran hawks in Israel and Washington who have tried to keep Saudi Arabia and the UAE firmly in the anti-Iran camp, and have downplayed the significance of the region-transforming rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia that Wang unveiled in Beijing back in March.

Ignatius diplomatically buried this significant news item down the near the bottom of today’s column. The column also offered many other tidbits indicating that the Biden administration is now finally recognizing the folly, at a time of intense confrontation with Russia, of trying also to maintain or ramp up an intense confrontation with China.

David Ignatius’s wildly misleading take on West Asia diplomacy

Helena CobbanApril 19, 2023April 19, 2023China, Iran, Sanctions, Syria, U.S. policy, West Asia, Yemen

The map above, showing UAE military bases in and around Yemen, is from The Cradle, an excellent news source on West Asian diplomacy.

I have long had a lot of respect for the work of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, whom I first came across, briefly, when we both working as journos in Beirut in the early 1980s and whom at a personal level I like. His work is generally pretty smart and well-informed. And though he has long been eager to be close to the centers of power, especially at the highest echelons of the U.S. military and intel agencies, many of the opinion pieces he has written over the years that explicitly or implicitly conveyed the views of those officials did two helpful things: (1) They provided an informative view into the thinking of those officials. (2) They put the snippets of info he provided about those officials’ views into a generally smart and sometimes slightly critical context. (Though never quite critical enough for him to lose his access?)

Today, he had a piece in the WaPo that had neither of those qualities and that instead just seemed to be full of hyper-defensive and deeply misleading analytical blather. Lest anyone be tempted to think he is still a smart analyst and thinker, I thought I should comment on some of what he wrote, point-by-point.

I’ll comment, you decide, folks!

Global Shifts Update, April 14

Helena CobbanApril 14, 2023April 15, 2023China, Europe, Global balance, Iran, Persian Gulf, Syria, Ukraine crisis, West Asia2 Comments

Globalities is currently releasing its new content in audio format. What follows is the text of the podcast episode I released April 14. Seen above: Brazil’s Pres. Lula Da Silva and China’s Pres. Xi Jinping, in Beijing yesterday. ~HC

Today is April 14, 2023. In today’s episode I’m going to, first of all, present a quick review of some of the key developments this past week has seen in international affairs and what some of them might mean. Then, I’m going to reflect a little on the longer-term historical significance of the seemingly rapid shifts we are currently seeing in the global balance…

But first: My survey of the major developments this balance has seen over the past week, and what they might mean more immediately:

Fallout from Macron’s recent visit to Beijing

The China-Iran-Saudi handshake seen around the world

Helena CobbanMarch 11, 2023March 11, 2023China, Global governance, Iran, Persian Gulf, U.S. policy, Ukraine crisis2 Comments

This truly was “the handshake seen around the world.” Yesterday, China’s top negotiator, Wang Yi, concluded the diplomacy he and his colleagues have pursued for some months now by bringing together top negotiators from Saudi Arabia and Iran (Musaad bin Mohammed Al-Aiban and Ali Shamkhani) to conclude an agreement under which their two countries would resume their long-torn diplomatic relations within two months and start cooperation on a number of other matters.

Top officials from the United States, which has long seen itself as the overseer of all diplomatic matters in the strategically sensitive Persian Gulf and which has been maintaining tight sanctions on Iran for many years now, seemed to be taken by surprise. (One news report had a seemingly befuddled Pres. Joe Biden, on being asked about this diplomatic breakthrough, responding with boilerplate that didn’t even mention the three countries involved, but only “Israel and the Arab neighbours.”)

Here are my first quick takeaways from this news: