The obvious signs are that the Iran war is part of a larger competition with Russia and China
Critics who call Operation Epic Fury foolish or a distraction are missing the point: Iran is just one front in an ongoing, evolving rivalry between Russia and China.
It extends to other sectors as well, although President Donald Trump has closed Venezuela and it seems that Cuba is headed in the same direction.
But Tehran is closely tied to Moscow and Beijing, exchanging arms, technological know-how and intelligence.
Even now, Russia is providing Iran with high-quality intelligence to guide missiles at US missions, experts conclude: Such accuracy is beyond the limited capabilities of the Islamic Republics’ few military-grade satellites.
Cooperation goes both ways: Tehran has been sending Shahed drones to Moscow to attack Ukraine for four years now; it even built a factory in Russia to produce thousands of these cheap, deadly drones.
To monitor how well the drones worked, Iranian observers then worked to improve the technology, which may have helped the attack that killed six Americans.
But we have allies, too: The US military is now using Ukraine’s vast experience in defeating Iranian-made drones – tracking, jamming and shooting them down.
Indeed, President Volodymyr Zelensky made Ukrainian experts available to help the US intercept Iranian drones before they penetrate traditional defenses in the Middle East.
China, meanwhile, has supplied Iran with weapons and air defense systems – with plans to develop the latter blocked by the start of Epic Fury.
That need was revealed by the complete failure of those plans in Venezuela, as the US forces had no problem escaping them as they removed Nicolás Maduro – whose security was provided by Cuba, another one how the alliance worked.
China has also become a voracious buyer of Venezuelan and Iranian oil (and Russian power, too), happily avoiding international sanctions on these criminal regimes: Losing those supplies is a major strategy to back off Beijing, which must fear a US embargo in the event of a war.
Meanwhile, Iran’s diplomats are also working for their allies: Syria’s former Assad regime has provided Russia with a military base in the Mediterranean, while the Houthis allow Chinese and Russian ships to sail freely as they target other commercial vessels in the Red Sea.
In fact, the Houthis again get referral information from the alliance.
Xi Jinping has been supporting Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from the start, providing supplies and dual-use technology (and fighters from its North Korean proxy), while Moscow has provided Beijing with key technology to build next-generation ballistic-missile submarines.
For years, Western countries have been hiding their heads in the sand as this black alliance cooperates to convey the goals of all members; pulling back on any part of it – like the ongoing campaign to remove the “ghost ships” of oil tankers under sanctions – disrupts the whole thing.
So Operation Epic Fury helps Ukraine fight against Russia and disrupts China’s plans to seize Taiwan.
Naysayers on the left and right have variously called helping Ukraine a distraction from confronting the Chinese threat, insisting that Israel’s expansion is a distraction from calculating Moscow or Beijing and now suggesting that this latest campaign somehow undermines those other arguments: They are wrong on every count.
It’s so obvious, you have to ask yourself which critics are naive, and which are biased.
