האם התמיכה של המשטר הסיני באיראן תמנע את קריסת המשטר בטהרן? | פרשנות של הקולונל בדימוס בצבא ארה"ב, ג'ון מילס

Israel's surprise military campaign against Iran has reshaped the political map of the Middle East in less than a week. The operation, codenamed Rising Lion, rapidly expanded from an initial airstrike on June 13th to a full-blown operation to destroy Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs within a matter of days. Joining us now to discuss is retired U.S. Army Colonel John Mills. He's a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. Given the targeted Israeli strikes into Iran, many say Israel's end goal is regime change. Now this comes as President Trump is still keeping the door open for a deal with the current Iranian regime leader. How do you see this playing out? Can the Ayatollah stay in power? Well, we'll see. It was Prime Minister Netanyahu on Friday who called on the people to rise up. There's also been other reports of civilian uprisings. This is the fog of war. We don't know exactly what's going on. The Israelis have clearly established dominance, but at the same time, China is their main supporter. There's a very large Chinese footprint of advisors inside of Iran. They get scant attention. I'm really surprised how little attention this gets. They are many orders of magnitude larger in number than the American presence at the height of the Shah in 1976 to 1979. But I think that's a large part of what's keeping Iran in the game. China doesn't care how many Iranians are killed or the losses in Iran. They just don't want their partner to fall and collapse. Now, on that China angle, the Wall Street Journal reported this month that China has been supplying Iran with thousands of tons of ballistic missile components. What is China's stake in this conflict? Well, Iran is their major proxy. We now have an international constellation that's on the China side of the showdown to take down the American-led system. This is the no limits agreement that has grown since fall of 2021 that was announced between Russia and China. And so you have Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, but you also have to include, we also have to include South Africa and Pakistan. And so that is the constellation of the major players that are on the China side of the ledger in the worldwide showdown. There is a world on fire in progress. I would assert we essentially are already in World War III. So it just remains to be seen. I don't think China wants Iran to fall. That would be a huge loss because Iran's job is to essentially carry out the mayhem in the Middle East theater of operations in the world on fire. They don't want them to collapse. So they have, again, a very large footprint gets under reported for what's going on inside of Iran by China.