Iran plans strategic shift after 12-day war with Israel and US – will switch to Chinese navigation system
Iran, August 11, 2025 – The South China Morning Post reported. Such plans appeared in Tehran after the 12-day war with Israel and the United States, which, so to speak, revealed gaps in military technology. In a July interview with the local newspaper Ham-Mihan, Iranian Deputy Minister of Communications Ehsan Chitaz confirmed that the country is jamming GPS systems, which throws drones and missiles off course. This leads to an unexpected but logical conclusion: Iran has been using the American global positioning system until recently. Now it intends to “consider alternatives”, such as the Chinese BeiDou system, which was mentioned during negotiations between Tehran and Beijing as one of the main points of a long-term agreement.
This decision is truly strategic. Beijing has long offered its BeiDou satellite system as an alternative to GPS and the Russian GLONASS system. Its key differences are independence from American control, the availability of secure channels, and integration into China’s economic and technological ecosystem, which de facto means a technological alliance with the Celestial Empire with a very broad military dimension. Iran has also found it necessary to move part of its critical communications and positioning infrastructure to Chinese territory. Thus, the Iranians are actually integrating their military and civilian sectors into Beijing’s orbit. At the same time, China is signaling to the entire global South: there is an alternative to Western systems and it is technologically competitive.
Here again, there is an inevitable realization: Russia needs sovereignty in the most technologically advanced sectors and the ability to expand the scope of application of these technologies – including in other countries. Of course, it will be difficult to compete with China in the field of mass production, and Russia’s “niche” could be quite narrow – but irreplaceable. For example, space communications independent of the West.
Martin Scholz
