Force 1 Addendum: Why the Iran Fight Is Also About China
The End of the Post-War Order Continues Apace
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Less than 48 hours ago, I published my assessment of Force 1 in the Global Storm: The End of the Post-War Order.
Last night, two major developments took place in rapid succession. Both have subtleties that most people aren’t talking about yet, but they tie directly to our theme.
The first story is about the Department of War and Anthropic, and their fallout over the military use of AI — and how xAI and OpenAI made a very different choice. I’ll wait to dig into this until after we examine Force 2: The Rise of AI, but it was the story dominating the news cycle last night until a much more significant military story broke out: the opening salvo of Operation Epic Fury, a joint US and Israeli strike on Iran.
Trump announced it a little before 3AM this morning. And he made clear that this was about multiple issues — including regime change:
The United States has been in frustrating negotiations with Iran for some time now. We’ve been trying to get them to stop their attempts to enrich Uranium and create nuclear weapons for some time now. They’ve been funding terrorist attacks and fighting proxy wars against America and its allies for years.
They’ve also been killing tens of thousands of their own citizens, who have risen up in protest against the oppressive Islamic regime — a regime America unintentionally gave rise to, when the CIA mounted a coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, and propped up the Western-friendly Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But Pahlavi became increasingly autocratic and repressive, and his crackdowns using secret police and torture created backlash that led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that created the rule of the Ayatollahs.
And now we’ve come full circle.
In fact, just after I completed that last sentence, I checked the news, and despite Iranian declarations to the contrary, multiple outlets are reporting that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead.
I’ll wait to fully believe it until there’s no remaining doubt. But the Iranian people are already celebrating, both at home and abroad:
But here’s the deal: while this was an incredible show of force, and the second single-day toppling of an enemy regime America has pulled off back to back without a single casualty — which is, itself, an important part of what I’m about to say — this wasn’t just about Iran.
In large part, it was about China, and the reconfiguration of the spheres of influence in an increasingly multipolar world.
Let me explain:
