Jonathan Schanzer

And they definitely don't have the ability to send it out because the U.S.

is imposing this blockade.

As far as reserves go, I don't have a clear sense of cash reserves.

The one thing that I am actually really interested in is over the course of the last decade, the regime has been stockpiling gold.

And of course, gold is a commodity that is fungible and can be used in payment.

It stores value pretty well, and it's probably going up, or will go up, the more this crisis plays out.

And by the way, I think it should be noted here that it's really the Turks, the Emiratis, a little bit of Venezuela, that there were three countries that helped the Iranians get there.

I think they've yet to really pay the price for having done so.

But there, I think you've got billions of dollars stored in gold, and that's going to be something to watch.

hopefully they start to spend that down and that crisis continues to deepen.

But the big resource that I think we need to be looking at right now for the Iranian regime is actually China.

The Chinese continue to provide a massive amount of support to this regime.

They want to try to keep it up.

They want to not let this thing collapse.

That is Xi Jinping's primary objective here.

At FTD, we talk a lot about what we call the axis of aggressors, how China...

Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran work together.

They're like a three-legged stool.

The idea here is block the Chinese from giving the Iranians what they need.

And eventually we might be able to kick one of the legs out of that three-legged stool and to really destabilize this axis.