You're invited to pull up a chair on Lisa Harper's Back Porch, where faith meets real life. Welcome to Back Forch Theology. Each episode helps you dive deeper into God's word and discover that the gospel isn't just good news for eternity. It's great news for everyday life because God is for you and he's always been restoring our value and drawing us closer to him. With honest conversations, a few laughs and guests ranging from close friends to brilliant theologians. Back Forch theology is thoughtful, meaningful, and never stuffy.

So grab some coffee or sweet tea and join Lisa Harper on Bat Forch Theology. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to today's podcast, sponsored by Hillsdale College, all things Hillsdale at Hillsdale. I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there. And, of course, I'll listen to the Hillsdale Dialogues, all of them at Hugh for Hillsdale.com or just Google Apple, iTunes, and Hillsdale. Good morning, Gloria and evening grace. America has promised. I'm pleased to welcome back to the program, Haviv. Ret Higour, Chief Middle East correspondent for the free press.

He's also the host of Ask Haviv Anything. You should join his Patreon community because that's also an additional, wonderful advantage to people who find Haviv to have a unique and important perspective.

Haviv, first I want to start with my congratulations on your podcast, episode 94 on

the grand strategy as China sees this war. I don't know that anyone else had done that yet.

What inspired you to take a look at things from China's perspective?

I interviewed an expert who runs a for-profit business risk shop that deals with these issues.

Melissa Chen, I don't know, five episodes ago, something like that.

And she opened my eyes to the sheer scale.

Now, this is something that, you know how you can learn a lot of facts about a topic over many years,

but nobody ever puts them in the right order for you so you don't see the picture.

What's actually happening? She did that for me on China. The extent to which Iran is a second

front for China, the extent to which China's energy choke points, China is a country that

uses 15 million barrels of oil a day. So it's the fourth biggest oil producer in the world, but it can't possibly produce as much as it actually needs for its economy not to collapse or not to slow down dramatically. If it ever wants to replace the American-led world order, which it officially wants, its official geostrategic goal, it's going to have to create massive energy supplies.

Iran is 15% of its energy, and it built out for it a 1.2 billion barrel energy

stockpile that allows China, if America ever has to choke off all of the sea lanes to China,

because there's a full-on war over Taiwan,

for example, gives China a hundred days breathing room of oil. So for China, Iran is strategic. And

China has been upgrading, literally in the last two years, Iran's missile arsenal to include

a certain kind of missile that can reach Mach 3 and hit the American ships in the Persian Gulf and actually seal off the Persian Gulf and create a second front and tie down half the American Navy in case of an actual war with China.

What the Trump administration is doing here, I'll just finish. Sorry, it's going on. But what the Trump administration is doing here, I'll just finish, sorry

what's going on, but what the Trump administration is doing here is knocking out the second

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