Hua Bin – The Unz Review March 4, 2026

In psychology, there is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It’s a phenomenon that essentially describes the paradox that people with low ability or knowledge tend to overestimate their own competence and judgement.

The Trump administration is Exhibit A.

From Trump to Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth, the entire US political leadership responsible for waging war against Iran is composed of a clueless orange-colored fraud and his incompetent sycophant entourage.

As described by the Dunning Kruger effect, this group of the stupidest and least qualified people have thought they were so smart to launch a sneak attack on Iran and would win easily.

Things have not worked out the way they were hoping.

Predicting the outcome of any ongoing military conflict is tricky with the fog of war as well as non-stop propaganda and gaslighting.

But it seems reasonable to conclude the US and Israel (or USrael for short) have failed to achieve their primary war objective – regime change.

Trump and his Jewish handlers were betting on a sneaky decapitation attack under the cover of fake negotiations that would trigger a domestic insurrection to overthrow the Iranian government.

This way, they would achieve a quick victory (4 to 5 days, in Trump’s first estimate) and avoid any serious retaliation.

Reality hasn’t quite worked out the way the real estate mogul and “reality” star hoped for.

The Iranians didn’t capitulate. They have fought back. They didn’t fragment and rise up against the regime. They have united and rallied around the flag.

In short, USrael just kicked a hornet’s nest.

Supporters of USrael are celebrating the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the extensive bombing of Iranian cities as signs of success.

However, serious observers ask –

• How has murdering an 86-year-old cancer patient under the pretence of negotiation diminished Iran’s capabilities and advanced USrael’s war objective?
• How is the war progressing for USrael beyond the first day’s “success”?
• How is it working for Israel and the Gulf lackeys?
• Have the Iranians risen up to overthrow the government or have they united to seek revenge?
• Can USrael bomb Iran into submission when it has failed to do that in Gaza?

Sure, Iran is taking a pounding and probably will suffer heavier losses than USrael and their vassals in the region.

However, the success of a military campaign is not how many bombs you have dropped and how many people you have killed. By such measures, the US won the Viertnamese War.

True victory is measured by the achievement of political goals.

In this case, the ultimate political goal of the USrael war against Iran is regime change. Iran will win as long as it survives and defies USrael’s war objective.

In other words, Iran doesn’t have to win, just not to lose.

As the war broadens to involve all the Gulf states, it is turning into a protracted conflict. In such conflicts, winning is not just about who has the ability to inflict pain, but also who has the endurance to absorb pain.

Iran is demonstrating its capacity to absorb attacks while inflicting its own destruction against its foes.

Let’s turn to some lessons the world can learn from the war. Specifically, what China has learned so far and how it can help Iran to survive the existential war posed by USrael.

Lessons learned

• There is no low that is too low for the US and the Jews.

USrael launched a sneaky attack under the cover of “negotiations” and during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. They did the same low blow last June.

This is a repeat of the terrorist “decapitation” tactics USrael has carried out numerous times – with the Hamas and Hezbollah negotiators, with Iranian scientists, with Maduro in Venezuela, and with Ebrahim Raisi, the last Iranian president who died in helicopter “accident” in May 2024.

It is the same tactics USrael proxy Ukraine has deployed repeatedly against Russian generals.

Not so long ago, nations in war didn’t sink this low. Even in World War 2, the bloodiest conflict in human history, no significant assassinations of political or military leaders were carried out at this scale and with such duplicity.

However, the Jew state Israel and its vassal the US have pioneered this lowly behavior since the Cold War. Now, they have sunken to a new low.

USrael is also attacking civilians indiscriminately – girls’ schools, hospitals, and local cafes. This is a large-scale demo of Israel’s “Dahiya doctrine”, which calls for using disproportionate force against civilians to pressure populations.

To USrael’s dismay, the killing of Khamenei and the massacre of civilians not only failed to foment a rebellion against the regime, it has served to unite the country and mobilize Iran for a total war.

• The negotiations were a sham, designed to buy time and launch surprise attacks.

Trump’s chief “negotiator” Steven Witkoff told the Fox News the US made four demands on Iran during the “negotiation” – denuclear completely; give up all ballistic missiles; stop supporting regional allies; and dismantle the Iranian navy.

Such maximalist demands are capitulation terms for Iran to disarm. They are not designed for compromise but for buying time to ready the attacks.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, affectionately known as Shitkoff and Jarhead by their staff, are the chief US “negotiators” and are both hardened Zionist Jews. They sure represent US interests, rather than Jew interests (wink wink).

You should know the US has no honest interest to negotiate when you see who Trump sends to lead that.

• The American Perfidy: like its imperial predecessor, Britain, the US is a dishonest rogue state that cannot be trusted.

Like the “Perfidious Albion”, the US has shown habitual bad faith and treachery in diplomacy. In less than a year, it launched two sneak attacks on Iran under the cover of negotiations.

Like the perfidious Britain, the US hides its insidious foreign policies under high-mined moralistic façade such as “democracy”, “human rights”, “regional stability”, “rule-based international order”, and “Right to Protect”.

It uses such noble-sounding propaganda to incite unrest of the Iranian people against their own government and their own interests. USrael cannot care less about the lives of ordinary Iranians.

• The US is a pawn of the Jews. It’s not the tail that wags the dog; Israel is the head of the dog.

Trump & Co. has done yet another “bait and switch” with the clueless American electorate. MAGA is always MIGA.

5 days into the war, the US has already notified the Gulf sheikdoms that it will not protect them and only Israel is worthy of expending US air defense interceptors.

The military bases the Arab states host for the Americans are bull’s eye target for Iran. Any collateral damages are to be born by the Arabs themselves.

Kissinger was right – being America’s enemies is dangerous; being its “friends” is fatal, except for Israel and the Jews of course.

American servicemen must happily die for Israel to bring about the “second coming”, as demanded by Pete Hegseth.

• Most of the west is shameless vassal for USrael. Their self-righteousness is directed at the victim, not the perpetuators.

Predictably, Germany, France, UK, NATO, EU, Australia, and Canada have again chosen to stand with the aggressors and blame the victims.

Just like what they did with the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Alone in the West, Spain stood up against USrael, which it also did with Gaza. Salute to Spain, its leadership, and its great people.

Contrast the West’s support of USrael with the accusations of Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine.

Most of the West want to be spineless junior partners of the Mafia Don in the “rule-based international order”. They want to live on their knees when Iran is willing to die on its feet.

The West’s indignation towards the US is reserved for the time when the gun is pointed at their heads like with the Greenland takeover.

Of course, even such offenses are quickly forgotten and forgiven.

The rest of the world now know the true nature of the beast.

• The ruling class in the West resorts to foreign wars to distract its bewildered and clueless public from domestic scandals and corrupt rule. And it works every time.

Since the start of the war, the Epstein Files is forgotten. Nobody is talking about the ICE killings in Minnesota or the supreme court’s ruling about Trump’s illegal tariffs.

The sheeple is easy to rule. Just show them a new shiny object.

• Most importantly, the USrael military might is a mirage.

Apart from the under-handed assassination of Khamenei and the criminal massacre of nearly 200 schoolgirls, the USrael attacks have achieved few obvious victories.

The Iranians are retaliating with missiles and drones; Israel and all the regional vassals have been hit; and the Iranians have closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Three F-15Es have been shot down in one morning on March 2. The US claims they were downed by “friendly fires”, which I am not sure makes it less embarrassing.

The last time such a “friendly fire” happened was when USS Gettysburg shot down a F/A-18F Super Hornet in Yemen in December 2024, when the “world’s greatest military” was fighting the Houthis to a tie.

Three multi-million-dollar jets downed in a single morning by “friendly fire” must be a world record worthy of a golden trophy.

The lie sounds less plausible for people who have heard of Identification of Friend or Foe (IFF) system that every military uses in the world.

A $1.1 billion AN/FPS-132 Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar was blown to pieces by a $10,000 Iranian suicide drone.

Three Patriot and THAAD air defense systems were destroyed in the region, according to al Jazeera.

US carrier and warships have been attacked and had to retreat hundreds of miles to stay out of the Iranian missile range.

Iran has deployed ballistic missiles with cluster bombs to attack Israeli targets. Hezbollah has launched multiple rounds of rockets into Israel.

Social media videos clearly show a majority of Iranian missiles and drones are breaking through air defense and impacting targets in Tel Aviv, Dubai, Doha, and Bahrain.

The famed Iron Dome, Patriot, David Sling, and THAAD systems have failed quite spectacularly. Perhaps they are running low with interceptors and preserving ammo for the more valuable targets.

Most US bases in the region are now closed and the GIs pulled out to hide elsewhere. US embassies, CIA stations, Israel military and government facilities, and hotels housing USrael personnel have been struck.

In addition, the cost exchange is horrible for USrael – they are firing 2 or 3 interceptors costing between 2 to 4 million dollars each to shoot down a single Iranian missile or drone that cost less than 5 or 10% of each interceptor.

If you compare Iranian firepower against its military budget, the battle so far is simply lopsided in Iran’s favor.

Iran’s 2025 military budget is $7.9 billion, less than half of Singapore’s ($17 billion), while Israel spends $47 billion a year on top of US aid.

Saudi’s military spending is $80 billion and the US over $900 billion. Almost every Gulf Arab state spends more than Iran.

However, Iran has not only withstood the pounding by USrael, it has taken on the whole region.

The vaulted military power of USrael simply hasn’t delivered a knockout blow to a weaker opponent. Instead, Iran is punching back hard.

While it is too early to tell which side will prevail, it is clear that this war will last more than 4 or 5 days.

The day before yesterday, Trump changed his timeline to 4 or 5 weeks.

Yesterday, Trump angrily denied USrael is running short on ammo, claiming the US has the weapons to “fight forever”. Now it’s becoming a new “forever” war?

There is an old Chinese proverb exactly for such occasions called 此地无银三百两 (don’t look; there is no silver buried here).

Implication for China and how it will support Iran

I wrote about China’s perspective on the Middle Eastern conflict last June when Iran was attacked in the 12-day war.

https://www.unz.com/bhua/what-role-china-should-play-in-the-iran-israel-war-a-realist-view/

Beijing’s position remains largely the same, although there is an elevated need for China to help Iran to resist USrael and defeat their war objective this time.

The main difference is the 12-day war was mainly about Iran’s nuclear capabilities while the goal of current USrael aggression is regime change.

Iran is a critical node in the multipolar world order China envisions. It is also in a critical geostrategic region that the world depends on for energy security.

Beijing’s position on the war seems to consolidate around several pillars, based on a review of official pronouncements, think tank analysis, and social media commentaries.

First, China will offer continued diplomatic and economic support to Iran. About 20% of Iran’s economy depends on trade with China, which also helps Iran get around the sanctions and dollar restrictions imposed by the West.

Secondly, China is deepening intelligence sharing and supplying critical technologies to Iran.

Chinese firms such as MizarVision have been supplying and publishing high-definition satellite images of US military deployment in the Middle East.

Beijing has supplied Iran with the Beidou navigation and guidance system, which has massively improved the accuracy of Iranian missile strikes since the US cannot switch off or jam Beidou signals as it does with the GPS system.

Space-based intelligence is a critical node in high tech wars and beyond the reach of most. Such support can deliver a step-function improvement to Iran’s attack lethality.

China has accelerated parts and components supply to Iran’s missile and drone production, including the propulsion fuel for Iran’s ballistic missiles.

China is also providing AI-enabled surveillance technology to help Iran’s security forces to identify and capture moles and infiltrators within Iran.

Despite Beijing’s traditional posture not to provide kinetic weapons to countries in war (including Russia), it is accelerating military cooperation with Iran and likely to transfer both defensive and offensive weapons in the future.

Third, the US is indeed a “paper tiger”. It is physically incapable to fight a prolonged war with large casualties despite its posturing.

The US military industrial complex suffers from the same issue as the rest of the financialized economy. It is not optimized to deliver weapons at scale and cost to win wars. It is optimized for profit maximization.

The MIC is driven by just-in-time efficiency and zero surge capacity in order to achieve highest return on capital, rather than to achieve resilience for large scale conflicts.

The high-tech, overengineered weapons in the US arsenal can be easily exhausted and, once depleted, almost impossible to replenish.

Just 5-days of high-intensity conflict with Iran has shown its vulnerabilities.

The US is simply incapable a war of attrition with China, with its inexhaustible industrial capacity (called “overcapacity” by the West) and national resilience.

Given its ever expanding strength over the US, China can afford the long game and strategic patience to wait for the inevitable decline and implosion of US power.

Fourth, Beijing is keenly aware the need for caution when navigating the cesspool of Middle Eastern politics.

The war has shown the Gulf monarchs are still very much vassals of the US and Israel.

According to the Washington Post, Mohammed bin Salman was heavily lobbying Trump to attack Iran.

This is despite the rapprochement Beijing brokered between Iran and Saudi Abria in 2023. Clearly, the sheiks are not to be trusted.

Turkey’s Erdoğan is a double-headed snake who publicly decried Israel’s genocide in Gaza while supplying Israel with its oil lifeline.

He stabbed Russia in the back with treacherous collusion with the Jews in Syria to overthrow Bashar Assad.

The Middle East will return to camel land once oil and gas is exhausted or becomes irrelevant as a result of the green energy revolution China is driving.

For now, China is managing its energy vulnerability by strategic stockpiling and diversifying its supplies away from the Middle East to countries like Russia, Brazil, and Angola.

Fifth, the Iran war is proving the US military bases in the Persian Gulf are not strategic assets, but liabilities and sitting ducks.

If Iran can prevail the defenses of these bases with its missile and drone salvos, China can hit the US bases in the First Island Chain with much bigger barrages.

The US air defense doctrine is simply technically and financially unsustainable against high-velocity saturation attacks.

Those states hosting US assets, including Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, are targets with a bull-eye painted on their back. They will face the same fate as the Gulf states hosting US bases.

Lastly, Beijing is fully aware of the American Perfidy. The US is a rogue state unworthy of trust.

By launching an unprovoked war against Iran, the US is operating as an interloper that believes it can fundamentally alter the cultural and political trajectory of a 5,000-year old civilization through the application of air power.

And it launched the war under pretense of “negotiations” – behavior of a “barbarian” state.

Clearly, the US is willing to destabilize an entire region to pursue its hegemonic dominance. It is a state that believes power is a substitute for legitimacy.

The US actions serve as a clear warning to small and medium-sized powers that if international law can be suspended to remove the leadership of a nation as significant as Iran (the most populous country in the Middle East), no nation’s sovereignty is truly secure.

Beyond the US, the collective West is a hypercritical and bad-faith actor.

By supporting USrael’s illegal war against Iran while condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine as “unprovoked”, the West has revealed its ugly double standard and its total vassalage to the US and Israel.

There is an old Chinese saying “国虽大，好战必亡；天下虽安，忘战必危。” It translates as “Though a state may be large, if it is fond of war, it will perish; though the world may be at peace, if one forgets about war, one will be in danger.”

In the West, similar phrases include “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword” and “He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind”.

The warmongering by the US will eventually boomerang back to damage itself.

Beijing understands wars are easy to start, but hard to stop. It is pleased to see the US step into a bear trap of its own making, yet again.

By exercising strategic patience, Beijing is waiting for Washington’s inevitable implosion.

What we are witnessing today

In the peak of its global power, the US military interventions over the past two decades have cost trillions of dollars and caused millions of civilian casualties.

These interventions utterly failed to achieve their intended geopolitical goals and have significantly weakened American strengths and legitimacy.

Now the US is already in a weakened state, these past interventions pale in comparison with the likely new disaster awaiting the US as Iran is much more powerful than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria.

As the proverb warns, even the most powerful nation, if strategically overextended, faces resource depletion and national decline.

The Trump regime, like its predecessors, has failed to understand military superiority doesn’t equal strategic success.

With the Operation Epic Fury, the US has dropped the pretense of any “rule-based order”. It is now openly acting as a hegemon using force to reshape an old civilization, on behalf of Zionist Jews.

The fact that Iran has immediately retaliated by striking US and Israeli assets across the Gulf suggests that the Iranian state is not going to collapse, even with the death of its leadership.

What we are seeing is a 5,000-year-old civilization, even when wounded and destabilized, is more resilient than an interloper state that relies on the “sham” of temporary military dominance.

Breaking News: President Trump has threatened to unleash what he calls “America’s deadliest weapon” on Iran, saying that if they refuse to surrender, he will completely destroy their country by becoming their next president.

 

(Republished from Substack by permission of author or representative)