But with an election on the horizon, the U.S. isn't inclined to clamp down on the world's most genocidal, warmongering tyrants
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Three events, separated in time and space. All part of the same story, the same war.
Last May in Malaysian waters, near the mouth of the Malacca Straits, an explosion destroyed the rusty Gabon-registered oil tanker Pablo, tearing off its deck and prompting the ship’s 28 crewmen to jump into the sea for safety. Three went missing and were never recovered.
This past New Year’s Day, Vladimir Putin’s Russia launched a record 90 suicide drones at various targets across Ukraine. All but three of the drones were intercepted, but a 15-year-old boy was killed and seven people were wounded in the Black Sea port city of Odesa.
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In a massive response to six months of persistent rocket attacks from across Israel’s northern border, the Israel Defense Forces hit 40 fortified targets in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, killing half of Hezbollah’s commanders in the area, according to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The fulcrum balancing these three events is the Quds Force of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The money behind it all is Chinese.
It’s not called a “shadow war” for nothing.
Despite years of United Nations sanctions, on-again, off-again unilateral American restraints and the Khomeinist regime’s standing with North Korea and Myanmar on the 200-nation Financial Action Task Force blacklist, Iran performed better than any other member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) last year. Iran held its title as OPEC’s third-biggest producer, with crude oil exports up 50 per cent in 2023, reaching a five-year output high of about 1.29 million barrels per day.
China buys between 80 and 90 per cent of Iran’s sanctioned oil exports. Iranian crude is carried by a growing global fleet of creaky, often uninsured and opaquely-owned oil tankers, like the Pablo, which turned into a bomb from fumes in its hold. Its owner, ostensibly a company registered in the Marshall Islands, is nowhere to be found.
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The “dark fleet” of perhaps 1,400 tankers also carries Russian crude to buyers around the world, often showing up with the Iranian oil that’s delivered to several dozen below-the-radar refineries that have sprung up along China’s Shandong coast over the past decade. Those refineries now account for about one-fifth of China’s crude oil imports. China is the world’s biggest oil importer.
While the IRGC controls about one-third of the Iranian economy, it’s China’s purchase of the IRGC’s oil that has been financing the Quds Force terror network of proxies across the Greater Middle East. Among them: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah in Lebanon, entire divisions integrated into Bashar Assad’s army in Syria, the de facto Houthi government in Yemen and Kata’ib Hezbollah, which is now the leading element in a consortium of militias embedded in the Iraqi military’s chain of command.
Meanwhile, those suicide drones that Russia has been launching into Ukraine by the hundreds are Iranian Shahed and Mohajer drones. Iran has also helped Russia replenish its stockpile of artillery shells, and has assisted Russia in building its own Shahed factory in Tartarstan. In return, Tehran is looking forward to acquiring Russian Su-35 fighter jets and Mi-28 attack helicopters.
According to indictments drawn up last year by the United States Justice Department in its first-ever convictions involving the illegal sale of Iranian oil to China, the Iran-China oil trade funds the IRGC’s “full range of malign activities, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, support for terrorism and both domestic and international human rights abuses.”
Last month, General Michael Kurilla, the head of the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, “So, in effect, China is funding Iran’s subversive and malign behavior in the region.”
This is not the sort of thing the White House likes to talk about too candidly. After having revived the effusively Iran-friendly policy of the Obama years, President Joe Biden quietly reversed course around the time that his handpicked Iran envoy, Robert O’Malley, had his security clearance pulled last summer. O’Malley’s predicament remains a mystery, but it appears to be connected to a scandal involving an inside-the-beltway Iranian influence operation, the “Iran Experts Initiative,” that was exposed by a Semafor open-source intelligence investigation last year.
The Iran-China oil trade is not the kind of thing Biden is likely to do much about anyway.
The $95 billion foreign aid package approved by the Senate Tuesday night includes a new and tougher package of sanctions on Iran’s oil sector, which covers transactions between Chinese financial institutions and sanctioned Iranian banks. Biden signed that new sanctions law Wednesday, but it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll bother to make much use of it. There’s a presidential election coming in November, and the last thing the Democrats need is an oil price wobble sufficient to knock the U.S. economy off balance.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China this week to plead with Xi Jinping’s regime to trim the economic lifelines China provides to Putin that allow him to prosecute his war of conquest in Ukraine. China is also the main customer for Russian oil.
With global oil prices in mind, the G7 and European Union countries are enforcing a rule allowing Russian oil to get to global markets so long as Russia sells at no more than US$60 (C$80) per barrel. But with their transponders turned off and their flags of convenience traded back and forth, sometimes several times a month, hundreds of “dark fleet” tankers are carrying Russian crude to buyers to get out from under the price cap. Nobody wants China to monkey around with that.
The Europeans are similarly reluctant to rock any boats.
More than $300 billion in Russian central bank assets were frozen by Kyiv’s nominal allies after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. That’s five times the size of the $60 billion Ukrainian aid package the U.S. Congress authorized the White House to spend on Ukraine’s defence last weekend. And it’s just sitting there.
Roughly $200 billion of those frozen Russian assets are held by a single financial services conglomerate in Belgium — the securities clearinghouse Euroclear. But Euroclear is fighting European efforts to free up those funds for Ukraine. The European Central Bank is skittish about a run on the euro, about retaliation against European companies with investments in Russia, and lawsuits.
Last month, the European Commission proposed that at least the interest generated by Euroclear’s Russian assets should go to Ukraine. But Kyiv is being made to fight even for that much, and Ukraine is desperate for hardware sufficient to defend itself against Russia’s growing armada of Iranian-supplied drones and missiles.
Some of that hardware is finally on its way. The Americans are hurrying along with IM-7 and AIM-9M missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a $500 million support package this week that will include more than 1,600 air defence missiles and long-range precision-guided missiles.
Meanwhile, last April, Ottawa announced that a $406 million National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System was already en route to Ukraine. But it wasn’t, and still hasn’t, been sent. The Department of National Defence says it’s still getting things in order.
None of this is exactly evidence of Churchillian resolve to defeat the 21st century’s most genocidal, warmongering tyrants.
There’s a U.S. presidential election coming up in November. Ukraine is fighting for its life. Hamas has sacrificed the people of Gaza on its bloody altar of jihadist “resistance.” The fulcrum balancing the barbarism is the Quds Force of Tehran’s IRGC. The money behind it all is Chinese.
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