PersuMedia Minutes

China's Special Envoy to the Middle East Zhai Jun is criss-crossing the Middle East in an effort to support regional peace efforts, but their continued lean towards the Palestinian side may have unintended consequences. 

The Gaza War and Iran’s role in it may indeed provide Iran with new opportunities and leverage to use against its neighbors, but it will not brake Iran’s continued decline.

With the Gaza crisis now in its third week, most media attention, in the West at least, is focused on the hard choices facing Israel and its ally, the United States. Israel, understandably, wants to destroy Hamas, but it is doubtful whether such a goal can be achieved, and even if it can be, Israel needs to figure out how to govern Gaza once Hamas is gone.

China has taken a relatively neutral stance towards the recent violence in Gaza, refusing to condemn either Israel or Hamas outright, but focusing a great deal of attention on the Israeli occupation and lack of a Palestinian state as the root cause of the conflict. How will this balancing act affect its prospects in the region?

The brutality and violence of Hamas and Iran’s uncompromising support for it have become yet another issue dividing the regime from the people. The Nezam has made the destruction of Israel a pillar of its identity as a revolutionary regime, giving the Iranian people one more reason to reject the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.

A central question is the degree of Iranian foreknowledge and active participation in the planning and organization of the Hamas offensive. As of this writing (podcast), the Israeli and US governments suspect an Iranian role, but admit that they have no evidence or proof of active Iranian involvement.

Whatever the calculations are that Khamenei and Ra’isi are turning over in their lizard brains, they are keeping their options open and their powder dry. The next few months may reveal how committed they are to détente with the Saudis and staying in good favor with China.

At the end of the day, faced with shrinking regional room to maneuver as the Middle East, true to historical form, becomes more penetrated by international players and increasingly independent and emboldened regional ones, Iran can be expected to resort to a “spoiler” strategy.

Bashar al-Assad has had a rough decade (to say the least), but on September 22nd, 2023, the future must have seemed bright for the once-disgraced Syrian president as he posed shaking hands with Xi Jinping at the West Lake State Guesthouse in Hangzhou. What are the implications of China's most recent diplomatic move in the Middle East?

The fact that unrest in Iran has been kept at bay while, at the same time, elite concern is rising suggests that the level of popular unrest is not the metric we need to watch, but the level of elite unrest.

One recent article in a respected journal darkly intoned that, thanks to the unstinting support of Russia and China, the Nezam is in a “triumphant” mood and “feeling more powerful and more secure than it ever has.” Really? What Iran are you looking at—because the one we see isn’t quite so full of itself and sanguine as such articles portray.

Last week’s news that Iran had joined BRICS and concluded several deals with China was welcome news for supporters of the Islamic Republic’s “Look East” policy, but new details - and old realities - suggest that any celebration may be premature.

Savoring the ignominious US retreat from Afghanistan two years ago, the newly inaugurated Iranian President Ebrahim Ra’isi declared that the American defeat there was “an opportunity to restore life, security and durable peace.” As Khamenei’s lieutenants treat the Taliban with kid gloves, do they perhaps reflect that in this case their cynical hedging may have turned an opportunity into a threat?

China has been doing well with deepening its ties with all of the countries in the region recently, but some of the other dividends expected from the Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran agreement, like peace in Yemen, seem increasingly in doubt.

Iran’s agreement to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia suggests that it was driven by the political and security crisis of the Women, Life, Freedom protests last year. Facing the most acute challenge to the Nezam’s authority in forty years, Tehran sought to reduce external pressure on Iran and give the government the breathing room to suppress or coopt domestic opposition. Read more here .

The United States is moving forward with plans to officially designate China as a developed, rather than developing country, which could have implications for how China is treated under US law. China, in turn, strongly asserts its status as a member of the so-called "Global South" and the "Developing World." But as China looks more and more like a world power in regions like th...

A surprisingly social constructivist sentiment from an arch-realist. Is this what we see happening in Iran?  Are Iran’s pundits and political elites finally reimagining Iran’s identity as compatible with working within the system as opposed to being rigidly and ideologically opposed to it?  Is their reimagining a reflection of official policy?

No doubt the prisoner swap means some money will be freed up for the use of the IRGC and other instruments of the regime’s power—Iran has always prioritized the security of the Nezam—but given the magnitude of Iran’s economic needs any such funds are unlikely to give Iran a decisive advantage or dangerous new capabilities it does not already possess. Read more here .

Iranian officials made an unusually frank admission about the lackluster state of Iran-China state-level economic cooperation this week, but the view from Beijing is much more positive. Our very own Bill in the China Shop helps make sense of the competing narratives - who is really to blame for the lack of Chinese investment in Iran?

Iranian observers have been looking a little enviously at Saudi Arabia’s recently concluded summit in Jeddah that brought together representatives from more than forty countries and international organizations to discuss the Ukraine war and Kyiv’s ten-point plan for peace. Read more here .

In this episode of Reading Beijing, Bill Figueroa (Bill in the China Shop) shares his latest thoughts and reflects on recent PersuMedia analysis : Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRI, and BRICS; All Blind Eyes are on Xinjiang; Iran’s deepening economic dependence on China.

The risk for the Islamic Republic is that its success is a narrow one. As we have noted before, the Nezam is something of a “hedgehog” in that it focuses on one big thing—regime survival. At that it has succeeded, but is it an achievement upon which further triumphs may be built? Read more here .

Iran’s political system has become a marvelous machine for obscuring and diffusing responsibility. And when that doesn’t work, one can always resort to outright lies. The Nezam was Orwellian before such behavior became all the vogue. Read more here. <--

It is nonetheless interesting that Iran has thrown a bigger fit over the Russian statement than they did over the Chinese statement last year. In part that may be due to the sting of a second “betrayal” by a “strategic partner,” and in part, perhaps, because of Russia’s checkered track record in Iran. But Iranian officials can be tougher on Russia than on China because they know that Russia needs...

As the year progresses, Iran’s political players increasingly are likely to factor into their decisions how a given action or event may affect the succession to Khamenei, because the outcome of the succession may strongly influence their own political fortunes. Buckle up—it’s likely to be a bumpy flight. Read more here <--