This is John Batchel, a conversation with Jack Burnham of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy about China and Iran, China and Venezuela.

What products, what participation, what a relationship between China and Venezuela, China and Iran.

Jack looks to the air defense systems. Jack looks to the surveillance of software and hardware.

But at the same time, China looks to be standoffish. So here's Jack Burnham to explain what we know now

about China in the conflict zone, both Tehran and Venezuela. However, there's more that can

be poured in there, such as Cuba as well. Here's Jack. I think that's an interesting point

to bring up Venezuela, and that's a key, I think a key difference is that China has sold some air defense radars to Venezuela, that it didn't necessarily prioritize selling to Iran, particularly after the Russian systems that Iran was relying on were knocked out by by Israel during its 12-day war in June with Iran.

I think something to note, though, is that I would be cautious in

comparing the capabilities of Chinese equipment from the Venezuela example to an example like

Taiwan or other types of export variants in which Chinese air defense may become more important.

It's clearly the case that China, that the

Venice, reports have come out that the Venezuelan military certainly is not the most capable

military in the world and that may have not been able to actually integrate the Russian and Chinese

equipment properly into its own military infrastructure. And so I think it's

interesting to see, you know, we've had now multiple examples of Chinese military equipment being

tested against Western military equipment, whether that be in the India-Pakistan example, with Chinese

jets, whether that be in Venezuela, with air defense systems. But I think in each case, it's difficult to pull away real lessons because in both of those

cases, you had Pakistani military, an Indian military, Venezuelan military, that doesn't

necessarily operate the same level of capability or competency to be as maybe that the Chinese military or the U.S. military might operate at.

So drawing those lessons, I think, can be complicated and dangerous from the perspective of Washington to underestimate China's capabilities.