Let’s Do Better

🚨 China openly sides with the U.S. over the Islamic Republic on key Iran issues. Several of Iran’s core pressure points are weakening fast: 1️⃣ Nuclear leverage weakening China stated that Iran should never obtain a nuclear weapon, effectively following the United States’ position and further isolating the Islamic Republic internationally on nuclear energy rights. 2️⃣ Hormuz leverage weakening China also emphasized that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open and stable for global trade and energy flows, while signaling opposition to Iranian tolls or restrictions on commercial shipping. That directly undermines one of the Islamic Republic’s strongest geopolitical cards: threatening global shipping and energy markets through Hormuz. 3️⃣ China is prioritizing itself, not Iran China is prioritizing trade stability, energy security, and broader economic interests over protecting the Islamic Republic. China buys Iranian oil because it is cheap and useful. It is not going to sacrifice its far larger global interests for Iran. 4️⃣ The relationship was never equal United States-China trade still exceeds $400 billion annually, while China-Iran trade is only a small fraction of that even with discounted oil and sanctions evasion. Iran needs China far more than China needs Iran. Xi called China-U.S. relations the “world’s most important relationship,” which shows the Islamic Republic’s leverage, partnerships, and bargaining power are far weaker than it believed.

🚨 After Trump and Xi’s latest meeting, the Islamic Republic suddenly looks like a regime watching its last major lifeline slip away. Right after reports came out that China and the U.S. agreed the Strait of Hormuz needed to stay open, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rushed out and announced the Strait was now “completely open” again. That is not confidence but a regime scrambling in panic as its leverage rapidly collapses. The Islamic Republic spent years acting like China desperately needed Iran. In reality, the relationship was always massively one-sided. U.S.-China trade is still worth over $400 billion annually even after years of tariffs, tensions, and economic rivalry. China-Iran trade is tiny by comparison, even when including shadow oil shipments and sanctions evasion. Iran’s discounted oil is useful to China, but stable economic relations with the U.S. are vastly more important to Beijing. That is the brutal reality Iran’s leadership seems to be crashing into right now. Even the heavily publicized 25-year China-Iran agreement increasingly looks less like a strategic partnership and more like a dependency arrangement where the Islamic Republic became economically beholden to Beijing while receiving far less in return than originally advertised. China gets heavily discounted oil, leverage, and access. Iran gets deeper dependence, sanctions exposure, shrinking alternatives, and an economy increasingly tied to Beijing’s calculations. And when China has to choose between a $400+ billion relationship with the U.S. or a heavily sanctioned Iran selling discounted oil through shadow networks, the answer was always obvious. For decades, the Islamic Republic relied on three big cards: ⚪️ Threatening Hormuz ⚪️ Selling cheap oil to China ⚪️ Using proxy militias and instability as leverage Now all three are weakening at once. The Islamic Republic increasingly looks like a regime that badly overestimated how important it actually was to China.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee: I hear people say, “I don’t want anything to do with Israel.” Okay, give up your cell phone. Give up car navigation. Give up some medical innovations that may have saved some member of your family’s life. Be sure, by the way, to give up some conveniences like cherry tomatoes and seedless watermelons while you’re at it. And let’s just go ahead and don’t buy anything that has an Nvidia or an Intel chip. Let’s get rid of most of your computers and a whole lot of the software that you use because it was innovated here. And I’m sorry to break it to you, but if you hate Israel that much, you’re going to be living a very different kind of life.