Alice Han

What's your take on this?

Yeah, I would generally agree with you that it hasn't been a good start for China, but I might take a slightly different tack.

If you look at beyond the short term, I think a lot of these regimes' sticking power is pretty pronounced.

I mean, my own take is that even though the Iranian regime is at its weakest in decades, it's hard to see, given the strength of the IRGC, how there would be a massive regime collapse or regime change overnight.

But to your point about going back to Venezuela and Latin America, I think what people don't quite understand or realize about China's Latin America strategy is that it is pretty comprehensive.

I mean, beyond just the economic element of oil and lending, for instance, Latin American countries buy a lot of Chinese military equipment and dual-use technologies.

Venezuela is the top, obviously, purchaser of Chinese military equipment.

But also Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, they buy a lot of Chinese military aircraft, vehicles, equipment.

And the PLA does extensive military training with the Cuban military and reportedly a degree of intelligence sharing, which obviously rubs Washington up the wrong way.

And this is, I think, one of the causes of

for concern shared by Washington and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is very much fixated not only on Venezuela, but the Cuba issue.

And then beyond that, huge adopters, Latin American countries of Chinese 5G telecoms.

And China has been trying to push a lot of these countries to adopt

The Beidou Navigation Satellite System, which is also a pretty significant form of dual-use technology.

But I came across this paper on China's Latin America policy, which I think is really floated under the radar.

And this happened just on the heels of the U.S.

's National Security Strategy report.

And I think it was timed later in the year specifically because they wanted to see what was going to come out of Washington in terms of their national security strategy.

And just to quote this report, which is the third policy paper on Latin America and the

on December 10.