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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
King Charles' visit to the U.S. this week is in part a delicate reminder that even America's closest allies are not on board with the war in Iran. No nation can go it alone, the king told the Congress yesterday.
But in this unpredictable environment, our alliance cannot rest on past achievements or assume that foundational principles simply endure.
Despite the fact that many of America's friends have chosen not to fight in Iran, limiting the number of combatants, the effects of this war are rippling out globally. They're affecting gas prices, food prices, travel, jobs, entire industries. Some analysts and experts have even asked if this is yet another world war. World War 11. Oh, 2. Sorry. No, it'll be World War 3.
Today on Today Explained from Vox, the world is feeling the strain of the war in Iran, but China, in some surprising ways, is benefiting it. Support for Today Explained comes from CNN. Cool. Cable News Network, what's up? Do you want to live forever? What? Yes? Maybe? I haven't thought about it that much.
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This is Today Explained. I'm James Palmer and I'm a deputy editor of Foreign Policy Magazine. I also write our weekly China Brief newsletter based on my 15 years living in Beijing. Beautiful. All right. So today we're talking about the war in Iran and China. What does China have to do with America's war in Iran? Well, China is watching this war very closely.
China's always been interested in how America fights, going back to the first Gulf War, which caused Beijing to really rethink its military, rethink how far ahead the US was. And one of the things they've noticed this time is just how fast America is burning through its munitions.
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Chapter 2: How is China benefiting from the war in Iran?
running out of ammunition should a future conflict arise in the next few years.
They're also looking at where does America go to in terms of allies? Who can it draw on? Who will stand with America when America goes into a really stupid war?
Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in attacks on Iran. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz claims the U.S. has no exit plan and says the U.S. is being humiliated by the Iranian state leadership.
And so China wants to know how this will affect any potential conflict with the U.S. in the Asia Pacific in the future. What is the relationship between Iran and China? They're communicating. Are they friendly? Yes, they're very friendly. You know, if you go to China, you'll run into Iranians a surprising amount because there's a ton of exchange programs, including, for instance, pilot training.
There's an Iranian medical school at the Beijing Traditional Chinese Medicine University for some reason. So all these ties. And it's very odd because, of course, you know, China is a communist state. And the Iranian regime has regularly murdered communists in the past. And equally, like, at least in theory, Iran is all about protecting Muslims.
And China is the world's greatest persecutor of Muslims. You know, millions of Uyghur arrested, imprisoned, put in camps, forced into labor. But it's a very practical relationship. They see themselves as having shared interests, both commercial and geopolitical. They see themselves as both opposed to the United States.
And in particular, I think China sees Iran as a fellow victim of the current world order. Okay, so China has its reasons to be united, allied with Iran, and China is watching this war play out very carefully because it is trying to learn a couple of things, including what the U.S. military can and presumably can't do. What is it learning about our military strengths and weaknesses?
I would say the main thing they're looking at is really the question of production chains and the ability to replenish munitions, which seems to be even weaker than people thought. And people have been warning about this for many years. They were designed to be essentially craft produce or bespoke produce, like you'd buy them on Etsy or something. They were not designed for mass production.
The primary challenge we see in the research we've done with the U.S. industrial base is that it is not adequately prepared for the security landscape that now exists. In a major regional conflict, such as a U.S. war with China in the Taiwan Straits, the U.S. would exceed in that war the current stockpile of the Department of Defense.
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Chapter 3: What military lessons is China learning from the U.S. actions in Iran?
So aircraft carriers, mobile assets, those are the sort of things you're going to have probably enough warning to move back, and we've got a ton of them in the Asia-Pacific anyway. You know, there's It is festooned with American bases. What this is costing America, what moving stuff out of the Asia-Pacific is costing America is mostly political credibility.
And the big example of this is THAAD, which is this very expensive, very technologically advanced missile defense system that we put in South Korea in the 2010s. China was really opposed to the deployment, and it punished South Korea very harshly for allowing the deployment of THAAD in South Korean territory. Most notably, there was a complete boycott of the
South Korean supermarket chain Lotte, which was trying to break into China and was basically driven out of China as were a bunch of other South Korean businesses. South Korean pop stars were banned from entering the country for a while.
According to China's Ministry of Culture website on Tuesday, no Korean stars have been granted permission to perform in China since October. South Korean actor Lee Joong-ki is likely to be banned from the Chinese premiere of his latest film.
They really paid a price, and now they see the Americans treating them like shit in the way that, you know, Trump has treated all of America's allies like shit. The US military says it hasn't moved every part of THAAD out and that it's just moved some components, but the damage has been done anyway.
The South Korean press has widely reported it as THAAD itself being moved out, and the reputational cost is already there. Okay, you said it, not me. President Trump treats America's allies like shit. And that raises some interesting questions here about diplomacy.
President Trump has not been able to get America's usual allies on board with the war, despite various, you know, pleas and whining and whatnot. What does it mean for China that America's allies are like, uh-uh, guys, not this time? Well... America's entire power projection in the Asia-Pacific is very dependent on allies.
At any conflict in the Taiwan Strait, you're running a supply chain all the way up from Australia or from Japan. You're dependent not only upon the big countries, or relatively big countries, you're also dependent upon these little island states on the way, where America has complicated historical relationships, but which have traditionally looked to America as a security patron.
So all of this is dependent on goodwill, and That goodwill falling apart, as a lot of it has been doing as Trump has made the U.S. increasingly a pariah state, is going to affect our readiness. All right. So I think someone might be hearing us talk and thinking this war in Iran has been entirely upside for China. It's been great for China and nothing else. Is that the case? Not really.
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Chapter 4: What is the relationship between China and Iran?
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Akshat Rati is a senior climate reporter for Bloomberg News and author of the book Climate Capitalism. We called him up because we'd seen stories about the war and the rising oil prices due to the war being great for clean energy. And China makes and uses a lot of energy. So China is the world's largest consumer of energy, period. It consumes essentially more of everything.
Oil, coal, gas, and of course, a bunch of renewables. And China has been thinking about its huge energy consumption for a long time because it knows that if somebody wants to attack it, it can just shut down all this fossil fuel that it imports from different places, including, of course, the Strait of Hormuz. And one of the ways it has been dealing with that is trying to make energy at home.
It has a bunch of coal, so it depends on coal. But what else does it have? Well, it has a lot of sun and a lot of wind. And so it's been building up the industry to make solar panels and wind turbines, and of course, then to store that renewable energy in batteries, and of course, use it in electric cars for the last 20 years.
And today, it is the world's largest manufacturer of all these technologies, And now the rest of the world, which has not been planning as clearly as the Chinese have been planning, have looked at what the Chinese have done and they want more of it. And the world sees now clean energy as an energy security option, just as it used to see fossil fuels as the energy security option.
Okay, so you said that China has been preparing for a moment like this for a long time, which means China's renewable energy sector has been a booming. What was it like before the war? What was going on? I don't know, six months ago, a year ago? China has been the world's largest manufacturer of almost all clean energy technologies.
Solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries, electric cars, and even electrolysers, which turn renewable energy into hydrogen. Now, before the war, the thing that China was probably having the biggest capacity to produce is solar panels.
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