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.<\/p>\n
Two months before these military incursions, Washington (for the first time under president Donald Trump<\/a>) imposed direct sanctions on Russia<\/a>\u2019s two largest oil companies, Rosneft<\/a> and Lukoil.<\/p>\n Rosneft is the single biggest corporate supplier of oil to Beijing. One by one, the US is shutting off China\u2019s oil taps.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> policy has a backsliding quality.<\/p>\n But behind his aggressive posturing, there is one common thread: to check China\u2019s rise.<\/p>\n A fundamental tenet of both the Biden and Trump administrations was the need to face China down and reassert the US\u2019s geopolitical hegemony.<\/p>\n In response to Beijing\u2019s threat last year to cut off rare-earth exports, seen as vital to US industry, Washington is now attempting to squeeze China on energy.<\/p>\n This game of brinkmanship between the world\u2019s two superpowers is playing out indirectly in several parts of the world.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s demonstrable appeasement of Vladimir Putin<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n In January, the US kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a> and took control of the country\u2019s Venezuelan oil fields. China had been Venezuela\u2019s largest buyer of oil, taking about 80 per cent of its crude oil exports.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n China is the world\u2019s largest crude oil importer, purchasing roughly 11.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2025, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s oil imports, making Tehran one of China\u2019s biggest suppliers.<\/p>\n Iran\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n If anything, the past 12 months has proven Tehran to be a paper tiger rather than Middle East powerhouse.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Trump\u2019s \u2018little excursion\u2019 could leave Iran even more fragmented, unstable and violentOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n But Israel\u2019s war goals have coalesced with Washington\u2019s China policy with entirely unpredictable consequences.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s assurances that its war on Iran is almost won are attempts to reassure markets that the spike in energy prices will be short-lived.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Oil and gas prices spiked again on Wednesday after three more cargo vessels in the Gulf were hit and despite the International Energy Agency<\/a> (IEA) promising to release 400 million additional barrels from its oil stockpile.<\/p>\n The boss of Saudi Arabia<\/a>\u2019s Aramco, the world\u2019s \u200cbiggest oil exporter, has warned of \u201ccatastrophic consequences\u201d if the situation continues.<\/p>\n China\u2019s response to all this has been strangely muted, criticising the attack without singling out the US for condemnation. <\/p>\n Competition with China is less about territory and oil and more about semiconductors and artificial intelligence<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n For China, keeping the US onside outweighs solidarity with Tehran. None of the Chinese condemnations has been directed at Trump personally.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That makes the current disruption, from Beijing\u2019s perspective, manageable. <\/p>\n But there is a growing risk that Washington\u2019s \u201cone and done\u201d tactic in Iran may come unstuck, spreading the conflict and economic turmoil in ways we can\u2019t yet predict while depleting US military resources.<\/p>\n