Russia & Iran Are Changing Global Power Balance | Professor Jiang

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Okay, so let me start with something that most people are not actually thinking about clearly. And that is what happens when two of the world's most strategically isolated powers decide to stop playing defense and start playing offense together. Because when you map this out properly, when you actually sit down and look at the pieces on the board, you realize this was never random. None of this was random. This was always heading somewhere specific, and that somewhere is where we are right now. I am Professor Jang, and this channel exists to decode power shifts before the headlines catch up.

[00:00:34]Subscribe, hit the bell, and stay locked in because this one gets worse the deeper you go. Let me start with Russia first. Russia is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. It is an authoritarian state built around one central belief system, and that belief system is survival. The Russians have been invaded more times in their history than almost any other nation on Earth. Napoleon came, Hitler came, and every single time Russia absorbed the pain, bled out, and then turned the tide. So, when you understand that psychology, when you understand that Russian political identity is built entirely around the idea that the West wants to destroy them, everything Putin does starts to make complete sense. Their grand strategy is simple: create a buffer zone between Russia and NATO. That is it.

[00:01:24]Ukraine is not about Ukraine. Ukraine is about making sure that American missiles are never positioned two minutes from Moscow. That is the entire war in one sentence. Now, their attack vectors. The first is their energy infrastructure.

[00:01:38]Russia supplies a significant portion of Europe's gas and oil, and they have weaponized that repeatedly. When you control someone's heating, you control their politics. The second attack vector is their nuclear arsenal. Russia has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, and they use it not by firing it, but by mentioning it. Every time the West escalates, Russia reminds the world that escalation has a ceiling, and that ceiling is a mushroom cloud. The third attack vector is information warfare.

[00:02:07]RT, Telegram channels, aligned media across Eastern Europe and the global South. Russia does not need to win the battlefield if it can win the narrative, and they are exceptionally good at winning the narrative. Now, Iran Iran is a theocracy, and the fundamental thing you need to understand about a theocracy is that death is not a deterrent. When your soldiers believe that dying in battle is a direct path to paradise, you have an army that no amount of bombing can fully break. That is Iran's greatest strength, and also its greatest internal weakness, because the majority of ordinary Iranians are not religious zealots. Most are educated, young, frustrated people who want a normal life. So, the regime walks a permanent tightrope between projecting power outward and managing pressure from within. Iran's grand strategy is to become the undisputed leader of the Muslim world, and to push American and Israeli power entirely out of the Middle East. That is their North Star. Their first attack vector is their proxy network. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen. These are not just militant groups. These are Iran's forward-deployed military assets positioned around Israel like a ring of fire. The second attack vector is asymmetrical warfare. Iran cannot match America in the air or at sea, so they do not try to. Instead, they use cheap drones, ballistic missiles, and naval harassment in the Strait of Hormuz to impose costs that far exceed what they spend. That is the genius of asymmetrical warfare. You make the enemy spend $1 million to stop your $10 drone.

[00:03:46]The third attack vector is their geography. Iran is a mountainous fortress. The terrain alone makes a land invasion almost suicidal, and every military planner in Washington knows it.

[00:03:57]Okay, so what happens when these two players, Russia and Iran, formally align their grand strategies? Right now, they are already cooperating. Iran is supplying Russia with Shahed drones being used against Ukrainian cities.

[00:04:12]Russia is supplying Iran with military technology and diplomatic cover in the United Nations. They are already in facto alliance. But what happens when that alliance becomes official? What happens when it becomes coordinated? Let me be very clear about what happens next. America is suddenly fighting a two-front economic war simultaneously.

[00:04:33]Russia controls the energy supply lines into Europe from the north and the east.

[00:04:37]Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, which is the single most important oil choke point in the entire world. Nearly 20% of all global oil supply passes through that strait. If Iran closes it even temporarily, oil prices explode globally. Combine that with Russian energy leverage over Europe, and you have the two most powerful energy weapons on Earth pointed in the same direction at the same time. And here is where it gets even more serious. China is watching all of this very carefully because China needs Iranian oil. China needs Russian gas, and China is tired of conducting its energy trade in American dollars. So, when Russia and Iran move together, China does not oppose it.

[00:05:19]China quietly enables it, and suddenly the entire dollar-denominated energy order, the system that has underwritten American global power since 1973, starts to crack. Let me address something directly. America is not expanding its navy because it wants war. America is expanding its navy because it knows that if Russia and Iran successfully redirect global energy flows away from dollar systems, the American empire does not end with a bang. It ends with a very quiet, very slow economic suffocation.

[00:05:52]But here's what most people miss. Russia and Iran do not even need to win militarily. They just need to make the cost of American dominance unbearable.

[00:06:00]Think about that for a second. You do not need to defeat the most powerful military in the world. You just need to make it too expensive to keep showing up. And that is exactly what this alliance is designed to do. Every drone that forces an American aircraft carrier to change course costs Iran almost nothing. Every month that Russia ties down NATO resources in Ukraine is another month that China has to quietly build its alternative financial infrastructure. The strategy is not confrontation. The strategy is exhaustion. And now look at what is happening on the ground. Russia has rebuilt its military supply chains in ways that Western sanctions were supposed to make impossible. They are producing artillery shells faster than NATO countries can supply Ukraine. Their defense industry has gone on to a full war footing. Meanwhile, in Iran, the nuclear program has advanced to a point where independent analysts now say they are weeks, not months, away from weapons-grade enrichment capacity if they choose to cross that threshold.

[00:07:04]Okay, let me bring in one historical parallel that illuminates this dynamic.

[00:07:09]In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and China were aligned communist powers. And when they formally split, the entire Cold War architecture shifted. The United States suddenly had room to maneuver. It could play China against the Soviet Union. It could extract concessions. But when two powers align, when they coordinate their pressure points simultaneously, a hegemonic power loses its ability to divide and conquer. That is what is happening now. Russia with conventional military momentum, Iran on the edge of nuclear breakout. And these two countries are now formally exchanging intelligence, weapons, technology, and economic lifelines. That is not a small development. That is a fundamental restructuring of global power. And then there is the wildcard that nobody wants to name out loud.

[00:08:00]>> [groaning] >> Pakistan. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with deep institutional ties to both China and the broader Muslim world.

[00:08:09]If the Russia-Iran axis gains enough momentum, and if American pressure on Pakistan intensifies through India, the question becomes whether Pakistan's military establishment quietly begins tilting toward this emerging block.

[00:08:23]Because Pakistan does not want to be on the losing side of a restructured world order any more than anyone else does.

[00:08:30]And the losing side is increasingly looking like whoever ends up isolated from the new energy and trade corridors being built from Moscow to Tehran to Beijing. So, where does this leave the ordinary person, the person watching this right now, who is not a general, not a politician, not a billionaire with money in five different currencies? It leaves them in a world where the price of everything is about to become unpredictable. Because when energy markets get weaponized, when the dollar system gets challenged, when supply chains that were built on 40 years of assumed stability suddenly have a question mark over them, the person who feels it first is not the one sitting in a government office. It is the one paying for groceries. It is the one filling up their car. It is the one trying to run a small business in a world where the cost of importing anything keeps climbing without explanation. That is why this matters.

[00:09:26]Not because of flags and armies and political speeches, but because the grand strategy of nation-states always always eventually lands in the pockets and the lives of regular people. And the game that Russia and Iran are playing right now with China watching silently from the side is a game whose consequences are going to be felt everywhere in every market, in every household, in every country that thought it was too far away to be affected. That is the grand game. That is what is actually happening right now underneath all the noise, and we are only just getting started. I am Professor Jang.

[00:10:02]Stay curious, stay skeptical, and never mistake a quiet news day for the absence of history being written.