(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — Following the Trump administration’s move to target Iran with fresh sanctions while ending sanctions relief, China has come to Iran’s aid with an extraordinary gesture. According to the Times of Israel, the president of Iran’s central bank announced that a Chinese state-owned investment firm has provided a $10 billion credit line for Iranian banks.

The contract for this credit line was allegedly signed in Beijing between China’s CITIC investment group and a delegation of Iranian banks. The funds are intended to finance water, energy, and transport projects.

As the Times of Israel notes, Iran is “vital to China’s trade ambitions as it develops its trillion dollar ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy aimed at dramatically boosting its ties to Europe and Africa.”

The “One Belt, One Road” strategy is a major push by China to create a permanent trade route connecting China, Africa, and Europe. One wouldn’t know it from reading and watching the mass media, but China’s project is one of the reasons why the U.S. has targeted China and China’s allies so heavily recently. Anti-Media has covered this extensively (the mainstream media has almost all but refused to).

The credit line will use euros and yuan to bypass the U.S. dollar, just one of the latest blows the dollar has taken on the world stage in recent weeks. Iran has already been bypassing the dollar and using the yuan for some time now, and this latest move only appears to strengthen China and Iran’s increasingly cooperative relationship.

Despite what one might make of Iran’s actions towards its own people or in the Middle East, it was Iran that provided Syria with a billion-dollar credit line in an attempt to prevent Syria from experiencing a total collapse. Now that the U.S. may be winding up its desire to destroy Syria (having successfully destroyed as much of it as possible) and has turned its attention towards Iran, China has been the country to come to Iran’s financial aid.

According to Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Li Hulai, Iran is days away from joining the so-called Shanghai security bloc, a military alliance led by China and Russia. China is already Iran’s biggest oil consumer and accounts for at least a third of Iran’s overall trade, the Times of Israel notes.

Iran is set to emerge as a major player in Asia and Europe in its desire to use its natural resources to help itself and these partnering nations to become very rich, very fast. Even American allies like Austria, France, and Germany want in on the share of Iran’s abundant resources and the projects it plans to implement. The United States is unilaterally preventing all of these countries from doing so under the guise of concerns about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately for Donald Trump and his plans, China may end up providing Iran with a lifeline so all of these projects can be pursued in the meantime, even as the U.S. attempts to derail the Iranian nuclear deal, which has been working effectively.

It appears as though the rest of the world wants to get on with its financial ambitions, and the U.S. is the only country attempting to hold them back in a poor, desperate attempt to try to stay relevant and prevent its inevitable demise as an empire.

Op-ed / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo