The People’s Daily — the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the most authoritative vehicle for Beijing’s policy positions — recently published an editorial-length commentary condemning the US-Israeli military strikes against Iran. The piece, which carries the unmistakable imprimatur of the Party’s propaganda apparatus, constitutes one of the most explicit Chinese articulations to date of how Beijing interprets the unfolding crisis and, more broadly, of how it wishes to position itself within the resulting geopolitical realignment. The Core Argument: International Law as a Red Line The People’s Daily article is built around a single organising principle: that the US-Israeli strikes, conducted without the authorisation of the United Nations Security Council, represent a fundamental violation of international law and the norms governing interstate relations. The commentary traces the prohibition on the use of force back to the Kellogg-Briand Pac...
A Russian Perspective: Washington’s Energy Imperialism: How Moscow Views the US Drive to Control Iranian and Venezuelan Energy Resources
Writing in the Russian daily Izvestia, economist Nikita Illeritsky — a senior research fellow at the Centre for Central Asian Studies of the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences — offered from Moscow’s perspective a sweeping energy-geopolitical reading of the current US-Israeli military campaign against Iran. The article, entitled “By Right of the Strong”, frames the American posture toward both Iran and Venezuela as fundamentally driven by Washington’s long-term energy insecurity, rather than by the Arab-Israeli conflict or nonproliferation concerns per se. Iran’s Untapped Gas: A Strategic Prize Illeritsky’s central argument, as articulated in Izvestia, is that Iran remains the last major holder of natural gas reserves — an estimated 33 trillion cubic metres, or roughly 17% of the global total — that have yet to be monetised on international markets. Despite Tehran’s considerable progress in developing its gas sector over the past three and a hal...