In two months, the United States has taken military action against two countries that supply cheap oil to China: Venezuela and Iran. The pattern is not accidental.
Two months before these military incursions, Washington (for the first time under president Donald Trump) imposed direct sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.
Rosneft is the single biggest corporate supplier of oil to Beijing. One by one, the US is shutting off China’s oil taps.
We like to think of Trump as irascible and impulsive and of course he is. His war aims in Iran jump around from one day to the next. His tariff policy has a backsliding quality.
But behind his aggressive posturing, there is one common thread: to check China’s rise.
A fundamental tenet of both the Biden and Trump administrations was the need to face China down and reassert the US’s geopolitical hegemony.
In response to Beijing’s threat last year to cut off rare-earth exports, seen as vital to US industry, Washington is now attempting to squeeze China on energy.
This game of brinkmanship between the world’s two superpowers is playing out indirectly in several parts of the world.
Trump’s demonstrable appeasement of Vladimir Putin can be seen as an attempt to pull Moscow away from Beijing, the reverse of what his predecessor Richard Nixon attempted in the 1970s when he pursued a detente with China to pull it away from the Soviet Union.
In January, the US kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and took control of the country’s Venezuelan oil fields. China had been Venezuela’s largest buyer of oil, taking about 80 per cent of its crude oil exports.
Now the US is involved in a regional war against Iran. Prior to the conflict, China had been buying roughly 90 per cent of Iranian oil exports.
China is the world’s largest crude oil importer, purchasing roughly 11.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2025, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy.
Analysts estimate that about 2.6 million barrels of these imports consist of discounted or sanctioned crude, including 1.38 million bpd from Iran, which equates to about 13 per cent of China’s oil imports, making Tehran one of China’s biggest suppliers.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its ballistic capability and its proxy militias might matter to Israel but they are not a top priority for Washington. No one believes the current Iranian regime posed an imminent threat to anyone other than its own people.
If anything, the past 12 months has proven Tehran to be a paper tiger rather than Middle East powerhouse.
But Israel’s war goals have coalesced with Washington’s China policy with entirely unpredictable consequences.
Trump’s assurances that its war on Iran is almost won are attempts to reassure markets that the spike in energy prices will be short-lived.
But Tehran, while being decimated militarily, will feel its gambit to weaponise energy by keeping the Strait of Hormuz shut and by attacking oil and gas infrastructure in the region is working.
Oil and gas prices spiked again on Wednesday after three more cargo vessels in the Gulf were hit and despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) promising to release 400 million additional barrels from its oil stockpile.
The boss of Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has warned of “catastrophic consequences” if the situation continues.
China’s response to all this has been strangely muted, criticising the attack without singling out the US for condemnation.
Competition with China is less about territory and oil and more about semiconductors and artificial intelligence
This is tactical. Beijing is preserving the diplomatic peace ahead of a planned summit with the US in Beijing later this month, which promises to yield a breakthrough in its trade war with Washington.
For China, keeping the US onside outweighs solidarity with Tehran. None of the Chinese condemnations has been directed at Trump personally.
China has also been stockpiling oil as a shield against rising geopolitical tensions. In the first two months of the year, before supply lines in the Middle East were compromised, it ramped up its oil purchases, buying 15.8 per cent more than than it did in the first two months of last year.
That makes the current disruption, from Beijing’s perspective, manageable.
But there is a growing risk that Washington’s “one and done” tactic in Iran may come unstuck, spreading the conflict and economic turmoil in ways we can’t yet predict while depleting US military resources.
[ Iran now knows Trump’s price point: soaring energy pricesOpens in new window ]
The Pentagon has deployed a significant portion of its air defence systems and aircraft in the current conflict, including Patriot and THAAD-missile defence systems, and F-35 fighter jets at a huge cost.
The war in Iran could cut off flows of defensive weapons to Ukraine and Taiwan.
The old adage about generals fighting the last war might well apply to the current US regime.
Competition with China is less about territory and oil and more about semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
While Washington drops bombs, Beijing invests in cutting-edge technologies. While Washington is fracturing relations with allies, Beijing is building partnerships and doing trade deals.