By Arnaud Bertrand, Twitter, 3/1/26

These takes about China not intervening in Iran are, quite literally, obscene.

I mean, the sheer insanity of a former U.S. ambassador to China publicly taunting China and Russia for not intervening against them – and thereby triggering full-fledged WW3 – is genuinely unhinged.

And completely stupid, I might add: these people are so high on their own propaganda that they’re mocking nuclear-armed powers for exercising the very restraint that’s keeping them alive.

Because it IS propaganda: the notion that there exists a so-called “alliance of authoritarianism” has absolutely zero basis in reality. Heck, “authoritarianism” itself has zero basis in reality: it’s a purely propaganda term designed to flatten the enormous diversity of non-Western political systems into a single derogatory category.

It’s the geopolitical equivalent of calling everyone you don’t like the same insult – it says nothing about them and everything about your inability, or unwillingness, to understand them.

That’s often the thing about U.S. propaganda: they invent completely artificial and self-serving concepts like lumping every country they dislike together as an “axis of authoritarians” and then, when said axis doesn’t materialize in practice – simply because it actually doesn’t exist – they mock these countries for not living up to a fiction they made up.

It’s true that China is friendly to Iran and that they do not follow Washington’s unilateral sanctions against it – because why would they? These are American sanctions, not international law. The actual offense here is independence, the refusal to go along with U.S. aggression.

But not being a US vassal is not the same thing as being in a military alliance. The distance between “we trade with whoever we want” and “we’ll go to war with the U.S. for you” is absolutely enormous. Confusing the two is the product of a worldview so distorted by U.S. imperialism that any act of independence registers as an act of war.

Lastly, let’s not forget what’s actually happening: the U.S. is bombing a country of 90 million people, killing religious leaders (Ayatollah Khamenei), public servants and diplomats, massacring schoolgirls, etc.

And the discourse in Washington – even by the opposition (Burns was in the Biden administration) – isn’t about the chaos, death and destruction their country is once more unleashing on a region that they’ve been destroying for decades (for what result?), coming right on the back of a genocide they sponsored, but it’s about point scoring against China, as if not waging war was a character flaw…

All in all, this tweet 👇 is actually a perfect encapsulation of how profoundly sociopathic U.S. elites have become: mid-massacre they’re taunting others for their lack of bloodlust – against them (!). Which is, when you think about it, an inadvertent confession: you don’t expect retaliation for something you truly believe is justified.