קולונל בדימוס בצבא ארה"ב: "המשטר הסיני יכול לחיות ללא הנפט של ונצואלה, אבל האיראנים מספקים נתח עצום מאספקת האנרגיה של סין..."

Joining us now to discuss the impact of the Venezuelan operation on the Chinese Communist Party's strategy is Chris Chappell, host of China Uncensored, a popular channel on YouTube, and we have Grant Newsham, retired U.S. Marine Colonel, former U.S. diplomat, and senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. First of all, thank you both for joining us. Chris, I'll start with you, and before we talk about Venezuela, I just want to address the mass protests in Iran, marking the biggest challenge to the Iranian regime in years. What are the main connections, I want to ask you, between the Iranian regime and the Chinese regime? Well, I think the Chinese Communist Party, being a brutal authoritarian dictatorship, is very concerned any time it sees another authoritarian regime struggling or verging on collapse. But it goes beyond that. China's used Iran as a regional proxy to destabilize and occupy the U.S. attention for years. And, you know, China, if it wants to take Taiwan, needs to secure energy assets, and Iran, particularly sanctioned Iranian oil, was a very affordable option for the Chinese Communist Party, and that might disappear very soon. Okay, so Colonel Newsham, can I go to you now? How would it impact China if, let's say, the Iranian regime falls, and what is the likelihood of that? Well, the Chinese would lose a lot of oil. I think they can live without Venezuelan oil, but the Iranians provide a huge chunk of China's energy supplies. What would happen if the regime fell in Iran is, as Chris said, China would lose that proxy that they've had in the Middle East that they've used very effectively. But also, it gives the Chinese huge political influence in the region also. But what really scares the Chinese here would be if you had two dictatorships that China has implicitly been guaranteeing their survival, simply go under in a matter of days, and that would scare the daylights out of them. And the Communist Party, the top dogs, they are very frightened of this, to see what happens in Iran, Venezuela, and to think that, well, maybe the Chinese people themselves would get some ideas from this, see that they don't have to live under a dictatorship. So they're looking at this, and this has really got them worried. Venezuela was scary enough, but Iran is even more so. This is a big deal. The likelihood of the Iranian regime going under, it's hard to say. These windows open, and they don't stay open all that long. It's a very repressive regime. It's willing to shoot a lot of people. It already has. It's willing to shoot more. And I'm not sure that mass protests are going to do the job. The people who want freedom may need some more support than that. Okay, so Colonel, I want to ask you a question about Venezuela. To what extent does removing access to Venezuelan oil impact China? It's not a huge thing, because they only provide about 4% of Chinese oil or so, and they can probably find that somewhere else. But they were using Venezuela as a platform as part of their effort to create something called a petroyuan, or petro RMB, to replace or be an alternative to the US dollar, which is the one big thing that causes them trouble, is their reliance on US dollars and having to get it. So in terms of pure energy, it's not a huge thing. But in terms of the political, psychological effect of really your lapdog, your guy in Latin America, simply being removed by the Americans, and the Chinese hardware, the Russian hardware, couldn't protect him. Your proxies, the Cubans, who had a few hundred people protecting this guy, couldn't protect it. That's an embarrassment for the Chinese. And the Chinese public notices this as well. And they think, well, the Americans are pretty good. They're not so sure the People's Liberation Army is. So there's a lot of problems that come out of Venezuela for the Chinese communists. The oil itself is probably not the main one, however.