Off Topic Politics Thread
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I have no idea - but then I'm not Trump and therefore probably sane.
Without a tangible ground force all he can do is destroy infrastructure, military assets and people from the air / sea - neither of which helps the situation other than creating chaos.
Without a tangible ground force all he can do is destroy infrastructure, military assets and people from the air / sea - neither of which helps the situation other than creating chaos.
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Oh the irony.
It's a Trump "Thatcher/Belgrano" moment. On the question of legality, as far as I know, none of the combatants have actually made a declaration of war, so how can any of it be legal? However under 21st Century "rules" any ship flying an Iranian flag is now a legitimate target for any of the Nations that have been attacked. As far as Britain Rules the Waves is concerned, I have been doing a bit of research and as far as I can tell, we have 6 Type 45 Destroyers only 3 are active, Dragon will make it four. We have 11 Type 23 Frigates and only 4 seem to be active. Plus the 2 Carriers and a number of Auxiliary vessels. Both Assault ships are laid up. Not much of a force available. Victims of Peace. Even HMS Victory isn't seaworthy.The US have torpedoed and sunk an Iranian Destroyer .
They’re not fing about are they
HMS Belfast and HMS Cavalier could be commandeered!
I do get this is a sarcastic reply to a post you don't agree with and that's fine by me, sarcasm serves a purpose. You probably weren't looking for a reply but I will answer because there is a distinct difference between the dodgy Iranian regime and other dodgy regimes.
If any other regime had continued their nuclear programme while stating their intention was to obliterate Israel, had for years showered Israel with missiles, had sponsored Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis to carry out terrorist acts on Israel and helped devise an inhuman atrocity on Israel, I would suggest that Israel might have a good reason to attack that dodgy regime.
A long read but quite an interesting one I think.
Geoffrey Cain
Spectator
The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East. Russia waged war on Ukraine with Chinese materiel support, a gamble that was supposed to cement a powerful anti-western axis but has instead bled Moscow into dependence on Beijing. Regional proxies from Lebanon to Gaza added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China. The Chinese Communist party (CCP) propped up Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, too, as it funnelled narcotics and other ills into America. That network has now suffered damage so severe that no trade deal – no matter how many soybeans China agrees to buy from the US, or how many Boeing jets it orders – can disguise the devastation. And at the end of this month, Xi must sit across from Donald Trump, the man who greenlit the strike on the Ayatollah in Tehran and the seizure of Maduro in Caracas.
Trump flies to Beijing on 31 March for three days of talks. It will be the first visit by an American president since 2017. The summit was designed to extend the one-year trade truce both sides struck last October, with its lower tariffs, soybean purchases and standoff over rare earths and chip exports. Both sides had been preparing for weeks. Then Khamenei was killed and everything else became secondary. China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil on Earth. It imports more than 70 per cent of the crude it burns, and Iran has been one of its cheapest suppliers. Khamenei’s death throws the terms of that arrangement into doubt and the US is now threatening tariffs on any country that trades with Tehran. Beijing has yet to find a coherent response.
I spent the better part of the past decade watching this network take shape, reporting from North Korea, Xinjiang, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine as the architecture grew. I walked the streets of Kashgar documenting a surveillance state being built in real time, and sat with Uighur exiles in Istanbul who told me what it was like to live inside it. Xi built a coalition, loose and transactional and deniable, that would give China strategic depth if it ever needed to withstand serious American pressure. The line I heard constantly when I was in China, and still read in CCP sources today, is that the West is declining. Xi built his foreign policy on that premise. By most visible metrics, he was succeeding. Trade between China and Russia hit a record $245 billion in 2024, and Beijing was flooding Moscow with the microelectronics and drone components that kept Russia’s war machine running. Beijing overtook the combined West as the largest trading partner of the Gulf oil states, long an American sphere of influence. Every-where Xi looked, the system was transforming in his favour. But even as the trade figures climbed, the foundations beneath them were giving way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago has now cost it more than a million military casualties by most credible estimates – losses on a scale unseen in European warfare since the second world war. Moscow has gone from a partner capable of projecting power to a dependant surviving on Chinese goodwill. Iran’s regional proxies were wiped out, with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh killed in response to the horrors of 7 October. Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled. And now Khamenei, the linchpin of Tehran’s revolutionary state, is dead. None of these figures was a Chinese asset in any direct sense. Each, however, was useful to Beijing, a piece on the board that kept the West distracted and off balance. One by one, they were being eliminated.
Start with the money, which reveals how little Beijing actually paid for the influence it is now losing. China’s 25-year partnership with Tehran, signed with fanfare in 2021, promised $400 billion in investment. Almost none of the money arrived, because it didn’t need to. What China took from Iran was oil. An average of nearly 1.4 million barrels a day in 2024 and 2025, according to tanker-tracking data from the commodities firm Kpler, often bought at $8 to $10 per barrel below market price, through a shadow fleet operating outside western sanctions. Now Xi faces a problem he cannot talk his way out of. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called the killing a ‘grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security’. But the Gulf states are watching what Beijing does, not what it says. And so far Beijing has offered Tehran no materiel support, no weapons, nothing that would cost China anything. Beijing’s own spending reveals which side it has chosen. Last year, Iran received almost no investment from Belt and Road, Beijing’s flagship programme for building infrastructure and buying influence abroad. Saudi Arabia received nearly $20 billion in contracts. Xi cannot say so out loud but the money has moved to Riyadh, and Tehran gets little of it. The optimistic read is that Beijing is simply upgrading, swapping Iran for richer partners in the Gulf. There is something to this. China’s deepening relationships with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the broader Gulf are real and accelerating. What Xi has lost is harder to replace than a trading partner. Iran kept Washington tied down in the Middle East, unable to focus on China. That was extraordinarily useful, and it cost Beijing almost nothing. Which brings us back to the room in Beijing where Xi and Trump will sit across from each other.
The conventional wisdom is that Trump arrives weakened. The Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs on 20 February, ruling that the President does not have the power to impose them. Chinese goods still face steep duties under other trade laws, but Trump’s ability to raise them at will is gone. That take misses what the Iran strike has done to the room. Trump walks into Beijing as the president who signed off on the killing of the supreme leader of one of China’s most important partners. Whatever leverage he lost at the Supreme Court, he recovered over the Iran strike. His threat of 25 per cent tariffs on any country doing business with Iran puts Beijing’s oil imports squarely in the crosshairs. He walks into the summit with the stronger hand – and Xi knows it. As Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, which tracks Beijing’s military footprint across the Middle East and Africa, told me, Xi will try to ‘convey an image of a strong China, but their grand strategy is not functioning as they wish it to be’. Xi arrives boxed in on every front. He cannot defend Iran without alienating the Gulf states. He cannot abandon Iran without appearing weak to the remaining members of the coalition he spent a decade assembling. He needs a trade deal to stabilise China’s economy, which is slowing far faster than Beijing admits. Official figures claim 5 per cent growth, but Rhodium Group, a widely cited independent research firm, puts the real number at closer to 2.5 to 3 per cent. He needs Trump in a generous mood.
The deepest damage, though, is something Xi cannot afford to acknowledge: what losing Iran means for Taiwan. Most analysts think about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in military terms. Can Beijing’s forces actually land there and take the island? But invading Taiwan would also trigger western sanctions far worse than any-thing imposed on Russia. And after what happened to Khamenei, Beijing knows that escalation does not end with sanctions. To survive all that, China needs countries willing to sell it oil off the books, help it move money past western banks and provide political cover. Iran and Russia were supposed to be those countries. China could still invade Taiwan, but not with any confidence that the CCP would survive the consequences. Some will argue that makes Xi more dangerous, that a leader who sees his options shrinking might act before they disappear. But everything he is doing points the other way. He is shoring up his economy, not preparing for war. The summit will be conducted in the language of trade. Iran will hang over every session, but don’t expect that in the communiqué. Every government from Tokyo to Riyadh will read the subtext. Xi will sit across from Trump and speak the language of a strong and ascendant China. The image is no longer the reality.
Geoffrey Cain
Spectator
The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East. Russia waged war on Ukraine with Chinese materiel support, a gamble that was supposed to cement a powerful anti-western axis but has instead bled Moscow into dependence on Beijing. Regional proxies from Lebanon to Gaza added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China. The Chinese Communist party (CCP) propped up Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, too, as it funnelled narcotics and other ills into America. That network has now suffered damage so severe that no trade deal – no matter how many soybeans China agrees to buy from the US, or how many Boeing jets it orders – can disguise the devastation. And at the end of this month, Xi must sit across from Donald Trump, the man who greenlit the strike on the Ayatollah in Tehran and the seizure of Maduro in Caracas.
Trump flies to Beijing on 31 March for three days of talks. It will be the first visit by an American president since 2017. The summit was designed to extend the one-year trade truce both sides struck last October, with its lower tariffs, soybean purchases and standoff over rare earths and chip exports. Both sides had been preparing for weeks. Then Khamenei was killed and everything else became secondary. China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil on Earth. It imports more than 70 per cent of the crude it burns, and Iran has been one of its cheapest suppliers. Khamenei’s death throws the terms of that arrangement into doubt and the US is now threatening tariffs on any country that trades with Tehran. Beijing has yet to find a coherent response.
I spent the better part of the past decade watching this network take shape, reporting from North Korea, Xinjiang, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine as the architecture grew. I walked the streets of Kashgar documenting a surveillance state being built in real time, and sat with Uighur exiles in Istanbul who told me what it was like to live inside it. Xi built a coalition, loose and transactional and deniable, that would give China strategic depth if it ever needed to withstand serious American pressure. The line I heard constantly when I was in China, and still read in CCP sources today, is that the West is declining. Xi built his foreign policy on that premise. By most visible metrics, he was succeeding. Trade between China and Russia hit a record $245 billion in 2024, and Beijing was flooding Moscow with the microelectronics and drone components that kept Russia’s war machine running. Beijing overtook the combined West as the largest trading partner of the Gulf oil states, long an American sphere of influence. Every-where Xi looked, the system was transforming in his favour. But even as the trade figures climbed, the foundations beneath them were giving way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago has now cost it more than a million military casualties by most credible estimates – losses on a scale unseen in European warfare since the second world war. Moscow has gone from a partner capable of projecting power to a dependant surviving on Chinese goodwill. Iran’s regional proxies were wiped out, with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh killed in response to the horrors of 7 October. Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled. And now Khamenei, the linchpin of Tehran’s revolutionary state, is dead. None of these figures was a Chinese asset in any direct sense. Each, however, was useful to Beijing, a piece on the board that kept the West distracted and off balance. One by one, they were being eliminated.
Start with the money, which reveals how little Beijing actually paid for the influence it is now losing. China’s 25-year partnership with Tehran, signed with fanfare in 2021, promised $400 billion in investment. Almost none of the money arrived, because it didn’t need to. What China took from Iran was oil. An average of nearly 1.4 million barrels a day in 2024 and 2025, according to tanker-tracking data from the commodities firm Kpler, often bought at $8 to $10 per barrel below market price, through a shadow fleet operating outside western sanctions. Now Xi faces a problem he cannot talk his way out of. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called the killing a ‘grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security’. But the Gulf states are watching what Beijing does, not what it says. And so far Beijing has offered Tehran no materiel support, no weapons, nothing that would cost China anything. Beijing’s own spending reveals which side it has chosen. Last year, Iran received almost no investment from Belt and Road, Beijing’s flagship programme for building infrastructure and buying influence abroad. Saudi Arabia received nearly $20 billion in contracts. Xi cannot say so out loud but the money has moved to Riyadh, and Tehran gets little of it. The optimistic read is that Beijing is simply upgrading, swapping Iran for richer partners in the Gulf. There is something to this. China’s deepening relationships with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the broader Gulf are real and accelerating. What Xi has lost is harder to replace than a trading partner. Iran kept Washington tied down in the Middle East, unable to focus on China. That was extraordinarily useful, and it cost Beijing almost nothing. Which brings us back to the room in Beijing where Xi and Trump will sit across from each other.
The conventional wisdom is that Trump arrives weakened. The Supreme Court struck down his emergency tariffs on 20 February, ruling that the President does not have the power to impose them. Chinese goods still face steep duties under other trade laws, but Trump’s ability to raise them at will is gone. That take misses what the Iran strike has done to the room. Trump walks into Beijing as the president who signed off on the killing of the supreme leader of one of China’s most important partners. Whatever leverage he lost at the Supreme Court, he recovered over the Iran strike. His threat of 25 per cent tariffs on any country doing business with Iran puts Beijing’s oil imports squarely in the crosshairs. He walks into the summit with the stronger hand – and Xi knows it. As Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, which tracks Beijing’s military footprint across the Middle East and Africa, told me, Xi will try to ‘convey an image of a strong China, but their grand strategy is not functioning as they wish it to be’. Xi arrives boxed in on every front. He cannot defend Iran without alienating the Gulf states. He cannot abandon Iran without appearing weak to the remaining members of the coalition he spent a decade assembling. He needs a trade deal to stabilise China’s economy, which is slowing far faster than Beijing admits. Official figures claim 5 per cent growth, but Rhodium Group, a widely cited independent research firm, puts the real number at closer to 2.5 to 3 per cent. He needs Trump in a generous mood.
The deepest damage, though, is something Xi cannot afford to acknowledge: what losing Iran means for Taiwan. Most analysts think about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in military terms. Can Beijing’s forces actually land there and take the island? But invading Taiwan would also trigger western sanctions far worse than any-thing imposed on Russia. And after what happened to Khamenei, Beijing knows that escalation does not end with sanctions. To survive all that, China needs countries willing to sell it oil off the books, help it move money past western banks and provide political cover. Iran and Russia were supposed to be those countries. China could still invade Taiwan, but not with any confidence that the CCP would survive the consequences. Some will argue that makes Xi more dangerous, that a leader who sees his options shrinking might act before they disappear. But everything he is doing points the other way. He is shoring up his economy, not preparing for war. The summit will be conducted in the language of trade. Iran will hang over every session, but don’t expect that in the communiqué. Every government from Tokyo to Riyadh will read the subtext. Xi will sit across from Trump and speak the language of a strong and ascendant China. The image is no longer the reality.
Quite interesting and it's a school of thought, but it's very speculative and working on the assumption that the killing of Khameni makes any discernible difference to the Iranian leadership/strategy (it doesn't). The other point I'd question is whether the strategic position is changed with regard to Taiwan, in a way that makes Xi and China weaker. It would be a gamble, but you could also speculate that Xi will see the position internationally as becoming more confrontational and that it's worth him now going for Taiwan. The thing with Trump is who knows whether or not it would "trigger sanctions far worse than anything imposed on Russia". Also not sure that Beijing "knows that escalation does not end with sanctions" - nobody is going to attack China militarily or we all may as well say goodnight to our loved ones right away.
All I know is that having world leaders as mental is normally a worry. Having one as a billy big balls mental case is more worrying.
And with the motivation to do anything distract from his sick perverted past connections to Epstein.
Did you see the official White House message about the war with footage mixed with COD scenes to somehow glorify what's happening?
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The Iranians have planned for this attack since the regime's inception as I posted previously with this quote from a Jeremy Bowen article.
"The killing of the supreme leader and his top military advisers was a hammer blow to the regime. But it does not necessarily mean that it will collapse.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and its other founders nearly 50 years ago designed its institutions to survive wars and assassinations. It is not a one-man show. The Syrian and Libyan states under Assad and Gaddafi were built around ruling families. When the families were removed – Gaddafi was killed and Bashar al-Assad fled – the regimes collapsed.
Iran's regime is a state system, resting on a complex and dense network of political and religious institutions with overlapping responsibilities. It is engineered to survive wars and assassinations.
That does not mean it will. The Islamic Republic's system faces its sternest test. But it has planned for this moment."
I agree, it's an opinion piece that does speculate in places. He does put a lot of store in the fact that now Khamenei is out of the picture it changes everything but as you say the new Iranian hierarchy is unlikely to have a different strategy. He doesn't explain why he thinks the deal with China is at an end, other than a change in leadership.
I also can't believe he was suggesting military intervention with China is a possibility following sanctions but he doesn't put up an alternative either.
But for all the questionable parts of this article, I think there was enough in it that was unknown (at least to me) to post it.
If you can put aside the morals behind the motives, the true intentions of third party involvement can make interesting reading. And conspiracy theories involving governments, in my eyes, are quite believable even if they are eventually shown to be untrue.
Agreed - one of the other points I'd have to question, is that there's genuine 4D-Chess about what he's speculating on, and I'm sorry but I just don't believe (despite what his supporters might say) Trump (or any of his chosen advisors) have anything like the ability or intellect to play that game.
Beginning to think this war is never going to stop. When Iran is turned to rubble, where will Israel and the USA turn their attention next? I don’t see Trump or Netanyahu ever practising restraint now both are drunk on the thrill of violent power.
It is NOT a fact that now Khamenei is out of the picture it changes everything. As LTL said it doesn't make any discernible difference to the Iranian leadership/strategy. It's a hammer blow as Jeremy Bowen writes but not necessarily meaning the regime will collapse nor will it unconditionally surrender as demanded by Trump.
Most likely next thing is China going for Taiwan, the US getting bogged down in the Middle East is going to open a nice little window for them.
Think Venezuela went to Trump's head big time, Iran and the Middle East in general is a different beast. No one has ever managed to get a handle on it, including the US.
People who think other Presidents didn't go for this simply because they didn't have the balls don't understand. The US is not benevolent, if previous Presidents thought they could do this they would have, they didn't go for it because they knew it would be a **** show and there would be consequences for the US.
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Hope not we transit through Taiwan later this year. We booked our flights Friday before it kicked off, the price has jumped best part of €100 since.