Proliferation and terrorism financing analyst
Xi Jinping’s promise to Donald Trump that China would not arm Iran is being tested by Tehran’s alleged pursuit of Chinese MANPADS, relatively cheap weapons that could make future US and Israeli air campaigns more dangerous and expensive.
In April, an American F-15 fighter jet was shot down over southwestern Iran, likely by a Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile. Both crew members ejected and were rescued, one of them after two days on the ground in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.
The loss was historic. No American fighter had been downed by enemy fire in decades.
Iran has reportedly been sourcing these weapons from China, through schemes Washington has been watching for months.
In early May the Treasury Department put one scheme on the public record, sanctioning a network of middlemen arming the Islamic Republic with Chinese weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles. Days later, President Trump traveled to Beijing for a state visit with Xi Jinping.
In late July, he told the public that Xi had personally assured him China would not, “under any circumstances,” sell weapons to the Islamic Republic.
Five days later Reuters reported that a Chinese company had agreed to supply the Islamic Republic with 300 to 400 shoulder-fired air defense missile systems in a deal worth $60 to $70 million.
While the two leaders met and traded assurances, the Islamic Republic appears to have kept buying, likely working several supply channels at once.
The reported deal could help the Islamic Republic close a dangerous gap at exactly the wrong time for Washington. During the 12-day war in June 2025, Israeli aircraft operated over Iran almost at will after the opening strikes severely damaged the country’s air-defense network. The United States later joined the campaign with strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
A shoulder-fired missile will lose most encounters with a modern fighter, but it only has to win occasionally. After the April shootdown, every pilot flying low over Iran has to assume there may be a missile team underneath him, so planners may fly higher or less often, and spend more time and aircraft clearing threats before anyone goes in.
It’s the same effect CIA-supplied Stinger missiles had during the Soviet–Afghan War after 1986, when they made low-altitude flying dangerous enough to force Soviet pilots to change their tactics.
We’ve already seen the effect of this strategy at sea, where the Islamic Republic’s missiles, mines and drones along the Strait of Hormuz have sunk few ships yet collapsed traffic and multiplied insurance costs.
These missiles reach only a few thousand meters into the sky. They cannot touch high-flying aircraft or ballistic missiles, and they will not rebuild the air defense shield the Islamic Republic lost. What they will do is make low-altitude missions—including helicopter operations and some strike and support flights—riskier and more expensive
Since the ceasefire, Basij and Revolutionary Guard units around the country have been training with shoulder-fired air-defense weapons. They also won’t all stay in Iran.
Iran has previously been accused of supplying MANPADS to allied armed groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah, raising the risk that some systems could leave the country. Shoulder-fired missiles have also posed a longstanding threat to civilian aviation worldwide.
China’s answer to all of this has been denial. When NBC reported that a Chinese missile likely downed the F-15, Beijing dismissed the reporting as a groundless smear. When Reuters described the new deal in July, the foreign ministry called it “completely groundless” as well.
Reuters reports that the contract runs through a company registered in Hong Kong and that the missiles are set to travel from Urumqi in western China through Pakistan into Iran. Pakistan, which brokered April’s ceasefire, denies any role.
Strategic credulity?
Trump has taken America’s adversaries at their word before. Xi told him China would not arm the Islamic Republic, and he repeated the assurance to the public as though it settled the matter.
When Volodymyr Zelensky said in late July that Russia was feeding the Islamic Republic satellite imagery to help target American bases, Trump said he would ask Putin about it. He says what he says with a purpose.
Repeating Xi’s promise keeps the relationship warm and the Washington visit on track, while his own government sanctions the middlemen and works to stop the shipments. The message serves diplomacy and the action deals with the missiles, and he sees no contradiction in running both at once.
The Islamic Republic never puts all its eggs in one basket. Washington got ahead of one channel, and we are starting to see the others. The network Treasury sanctioned in May ran through Hong Kong, Belarus and Dubai, while the reported July deal runs through a different Hong Kong company and a different route, through Pakistan.
As the reported Chinese deals advanced, Tehran also signed an agreement with Russia, as reported by the Financial Times, for roughly half a billion euros’ worth of Verba shoulder-fired missiles.
Every route runs at once, and the Islamic Republic plans on losing a few. The first Chinese shipment is said to be weeks away. It should be one that the Islamic Republic loses.
Speaking on Iran International's Titre Aval (The Lead) program on Wednesday, Des Roches said the United States had limited military options after adopting an air campaign and argued Trump was unlikely to accept the political cost of ending the operation without achieving his objectives.
Three options
"The United States went in with an air power-only strategy," said Des Roches, now an associate professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Security Studies.
"That usually is flawed because once you do that, and if you look historically at how we've used an air power-led strategy in Korea, Vietnam, even World War II, but I think the illustrative point is Kosovo."
"If you don't achieve your strategic goals initially against a small target set, your options are to either introduce another element of warfare, and we don't have time to do that. To have a credible ground invasion force would take a year to build up, or you bomb more intensively."
"You widen the target list to include dual-use infrastructure, like bridges, the power grid, the national communications, television, and radio. This is what the US did against Serbia to stop the massacre of Muslims in Kosovo, or you leave."
"Those are really your three options, and I think that President Trump does not relish the prospect of leaving. That's too close to Joe Biden."
More strikes likely
Des Roches said he believed the White House was most likely to increase military pressure rather than expand into ground operations.
"So I think, you know, he doesn't really have the ability to introduce another domain of warfare," he said.
"But really, I think his main option is to try to increase pain on the regime, and I think that that will mean an expansion into the targets towards dual-use targets and an expansion of intensive bombing to include not just areas adjacent to the Persian Gulf, but also areas inland, and especially the capital Tehran."
Politics driving the conflict
Asked about reports that Trump had been advised against escalating the conflict because of concerns about US weapons stockpiles, Des Roches said he believed political and economic factors were more important than military constraints.
"Some, but I think it's not really driven by military action or missile inventories," he said.
"I think it's political and economic. So we have midterm elections coming up. The Islamic Republic knows this. The leaders within the Islamic Republic know it, and they have calculated that if they can draw the war out, keep gasoline prices high, that President Trump will be in a worse position, or may even be impeached and removed."
"I think that they're kind of overplaying their hand."
Revolutionary Guards and internal divisions
Des Roches said recent Iranian actions might not reflect a unified government position.
"I'm not sure if the actions we're seeing reflect a unitary position of the Iranian government, but rather the actions of different factions of the Iranian government, probably the Revolutionary Guard, who are vying for supremacy and are trying to wreck any possibility for negotiations."
He argued that an end to the conflict would shift public attention inside Iran toward domestic issues.
"Obviously, if peace breaks out, then the focus within Iran goes from a national rally around the flag, oppose the Zionist entity and the Great Satan, towards looking at things like where has all the money gone over the year? Why is Tehran running out of water when the Revolutionary Guard controls the major construction companies in the country, and why are their children driving Lamborghinis in Spain and ours are having a hard time getting water in Tehran?"
"So it's a challenging period, but I think the hardliners, particularly in the Revolutionary Guard, are at risk of severely overplaying their hand."
Regime change
Asked whether regime change had become part of US strategy, Des Roches said he believed Trump was pursuing a different approach from previous US interventions.
"My view is President Trump's theory of victory is not that the US will impose a new regime the way we did, for example, in Iraq, because that didn't work out well."
"I think he feels that economic pressure will lead the Iranians to have their own regime change."
Des Roches said Trump appeared to believe the anti-government protests in late 2019 had brought Iran close to internal political change.
"I think he feels that in December that was about to happen. It was only the violence of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, the massacres of between 1,300 and 4,000 Iranians - we don't know the exact number - that would have done it."
"I think that's why we're here now. It's not because Netanyahu led it. It's because, in the face of what he saw as a vindication of his policy, I think he believes that had he remained president after 2020, regime change would have been accomplished from within by about 2022."
