Modern Diplomacy:

BY NICHOLAS OAKES

While Iran grapples with economic collapse, domestic unrest, and escalating confrontation with Israel and the West, it has not retreated from the international stage. Instead, Tehran is doubling down on a familiar survival strategy: projecting influence through conflict, repression, and sanctioned trade wherever opportunity permits. Nowhere is this clearer than in Myanmar, where Iranian jet fuel and industrial materials are quietly sustaining one of the world’s most brutal air campaigns against civilians.

Over the past fifteen months, Myanmar’s military junta has dramatically expanded its use of airpower against villages, schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure. This escalation has not occurred in isolation. It has been enabled, quite literally, by Iranian fuel deliveries conducted through a shadow fleet designed to evade sanctions and accountability. According to a Reuters investigation, Iran has delivered roughly 175,000 tons of jet fuel to Myanmar since late 2024, plenty to sustain thousands of fighter jets, alongside massive shipments of urea, a chemical used not only as fertilizer but as a core input for explosives.

These transfers reveal more than a transactional relationship between two sanctioned regimes. They expose a deeper strategic pattern: Iran’s determination to remain an indispensable partner to embattled authoritarian governments, even as its own domestic legitimacy erodes. By fueling Myanmar’s air war, Tehran is not merely selling fuel, it is asserting relevance in a world that increasingly seeks to isolate it.

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