Iran ships most of its oil to China, and China sends back the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction.
Laden Iranian ships depart Chinese port tied to key military chemicals (March 7, 2026)
... “China could have held these vessels at port, imposed an administrative delay, invented a customs hold — any number of bureaucratic tools, but didn’t,” said Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to The Post. “That’s a deliberate policy choice made during an active war in which Beijing publicly calls for restraint.”
Although IRISL operates as a large commercial carrier, Kardon said the circumstances of these shipments strongly suggest the cargo is sodium perchlorate. “Given the track record, the most parsimonious explanation is that they’re loading the same commodity they’ve been shuttling for the past year-plus,” he said. ...
The U.S. and Israel strikes have hammered Iran’s missile storage bunkers and underground depots. “Tehran’s need for propellant precursors just went from urgent to existential,” Kardon told The Post.
Western intelligence says Iran is rearming despite UN sanctions, with China’s help (October 31, 2025)
... European intelligence sources say several shipments of sodium perchlorate, the main precursor in the production of the solid propellant that powers Iran’s mid-range conventional missiles, have arrived from China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas since the so-called “snapback” mechanism was triggered at the end of September.
Those sources say the shipments, which began arriving on September 29, contain 2,000 tons of sodium perchlorate bought by Iran from Chinese suppliers in the wake of its 12-day conflict with Israel in June. The purchases are believed to be part of a determined effort to rebuild the Islamic Republic’s depleted missile stocks. Several of the cargo ships and Chinese entities involved are under sanctions from the United States. ...
