Cracks in the Crinks play into Trump’s hands
But for team Trump, the 12-day scrap was always about more than fixing the Middle East. It was about clearing the decks, creating global room for manoeuvre in the coming stand-off with China. The resolution of that multi-layered conflict with Beijing will be the true measure of Donald Trump’s success.
What counts now is not the number of years Tehran will take to get close to a nuclear arsenal but rather spurring on the collapse of confidence within the Crinks. That’s China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, the Marvel comic super-villains who seem determined to end what they see as Captain America’s grip on all corners of the world.
Fact is, the Crinks were already in trouble even before American bombs hit the Fordow nuclear lair. Russia, once desperate for Iranian Shahed 136 combat drones for its war against Ukraine, now produces them in Russia without Tehran’s help. Russian military bloggers are contemptuous of Iranian assistance: a batch of Iranian Fath-360 missiles was delivered last autumn but appears not to have been deployed yet in Ukraine.
Iran is plainly the most dodgy member of the axis of evil, a liability. China and Russia make their own calculations, reassessing perhaps whether a nuclear-armed Iran enhances their collective potential to disrupt or drags them into an utterly unpredictable all-out war. If the clerical state collapses, its failure will end the illusion that the Crink club is in some way a collective security arrangement. Iran’s do-or-die choice now - whether to make a secret dash to weaponise what remains of its nuclear programme - wouldn’t just threaten the West. It would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and deeply compromise China and Russia as would-be global players.
North Korea too is being sidelined in the Gotterdammerung of the Crinks - just study Kim Jong-un’s tear-swollen face this week. He was watching footage of himself laying flags on the coffins of North Korean troops killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Perhaps he was commiserating with the families of the fallen - 15,000 North Korean soldiers have been sent into Russia’s war - but more likely he was crying tears of humiliation. Despite sending millions of artillery rounds to Russia, he has so far received in return only body bags, a hug from Vladimir Putin and some Russian help in modernising air defence.
Kim wanted more. Carefully edited film of his trips to arms factories in North Korea and Russia shows what he really expected from the Kremlin: Russian help in building a supersonic cruise missile, AI-equipped suicide drones, air-to-air missiles. The whole world is cranking up its war economies and Kim wanted to be part of the show. Instead, when he rushed to launch a second destroyer in May, the ship capsized. A dozen officials were promptly arrested.
This axis of evil is being reduced to its core, China and Russia. And they too are at odds. A recently leaked planning document from the FSB, the security service, set out how Russian counterintelligence should deal with a surging Chinese spying effort. Beijing, it said, was looking to gather information about how Russia was dealing with a western-backed army, how drone warfare tactics were changing, the modernisation of software and the damaging potential of long-range western weapons.
China was on the hunt, said the nine-page paper, for former Russian pilots and engineers. Russia frets that China, despite swearing an oath of limitless friendship with Moscow, is building influence in Siberia and the Arctic while Russia was distracted by a full-on war in Ukraine.
Even limitless friends can spy on each other of course; it may even be the secret of a happy marriage. But stories about Chinese hacking of the Russian military establishment suggest core-Crink is confused and consumed by doubt.
If China’s biggest looming geopolitical challenge is a perceived independence push by Taiwan then it needs to overhaul its variously rehearsed battle plans. There have been multiple lessons from the current wars - Trump’s readiness to mount a jaw-dropping, one-off preventive attack that stops just short of an act of war, closer US supervision of Taiwan’s AI-enhanced drone fleet - and Beijing needs to game the risks. What new weapons systems does China need for an offshore war? Can it penetrate the Taiwanese army as deeply as the Israelis wormed inside the brains of the Iranian military?
These sensitive questions seem to demand a new approach to war - hence perhaps Xi Jinping’s purge of parts of the top brass including the recently arrested General He Weidong, former commander of the Eastern theatre. If nothing else, this shake-up suggests high-anxiety regime stress, part of the Trumpian everyday. Western allies try desperately to second-guess Trump. China and Russia meanwhile seem not to trust each other in their separate dealings with Trump. It is becoming a free-for-all, a meltdown of the blocs.
The Times
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A warm glow still emanates from the US security establishment. For once there is some consensus: America’s big beast bunker-busters have severely wounded Iran’s nuclear programme. The difficult, tough-nut Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu has been encouraged and praised throughout the bombing campaign, but also subtly reminded of his junior role. A hand-up has been given to Mohammed bin Salman and his ambitions to turn a modern Saudi Arabia into a US-backed regional leader. All this, without the spilling of American blood in a messy forever war.