Victoria Coates

And then they stop paying salaries for the police and the soldiers as of this week.

So those guys aren't getting paid.

That bill is going up every day.

And the currency problems, the inflation problems, they're not getting better.

And then you also have the region turning on them.

So you have UAE opening investigations into their illicit terrorist financing networks through Dubai.

You have the government of Syria cracking down on the drug running that's going on with Hezbollah and Captagon.

which was another source of income for the regime.

All of those individually wouldn't bring down the government, but collectively they start to put more and more pressure on them to find some kind of economic lifeline.

Yeah, China has an interesting situation here.

They have disproportionately the largest oil reserve system in terms of stockpiling supplies.

And that whole ecosystem for the Chinese energy world has thrived on the cheap Iranian and cheap Venezuelan and cheap Russian gas.

that they have secured over the course of the last seven years.

And when you start to cut that off for them, and they can't get as much supply, you have energy prices going up in China in a way that's a problem for them.

So I do think they have a powerful motivator to wrap this up.

Now, that said, we just interdicted a ship this week, which was carrying the chemicals you need to create for missiles that was coming from China to Iran.

And so they are also, the president called it a nice little gift.

This is a deeply dangerous thing for them to be doing, to be expected, of course.

But it shows you that they want to meddle, but their capacity to do so is fairly limited.

Kaya Kalas is one of those, the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Policy, who has been saying Iran is not Europe's war.