President Trump has claimed that the US military campaign against Iran is to “defend the American people”, while many critics – even some outriders on GP – have alleged that it’s to distract from the Epstein Files, but few observers have copped on that it’s actually all about Chyyyna………. It’s becoming clear that Trump’s four-and-a-half-month rampage across the Western Hemisphere, and now into the Middle East, increasingly looks like a massive blitz to acquire – or control (even by proxy) – energy assets and maritime chokepoints as part of a broader economic pressure campaign against China, which itself depends heavily on the Gulf and Venezuelan crude, and thereby coerce it into a lopsided trade deal that would derail its superpower rise and thus restoring US-led unipolarity.
The US trade deals with the EU and India are there to be weaponised & will ultimately result in them curtailing China’s access to their markets under pain of punitive tariffs if they refuse. In parallel, the US special operation in Venezuela, pressure on Iran, and simultaneous attempts to subordinate Nigeria and other leading energy producers will curtail China’s access to the resources required for fueling its superpower rise. The resource dimension that’s relevant to Iran is a major part of the US “Strategy of Denial”, & the brainchild of Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby. At a recent Chatham House seminar it was noted that the administration was methodically building a portfolio of assets to stack up against China : the Panama Canal, which is the only exit route for oil and gas from the Gulf of Mexico to China; Venezuela and her oil that used to go to China; Kharg Island and Iran’s oil which used to go to China, and Hormuz, through which Iran’s and all Arab countries’ oil used to go everywhere but mostly to China.
Just this week, with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s commenting that “the international order is slipping into “disarray,” the larger picture comes into sharp focus. This remark was made during a meeting with Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez in Beijing. He used a Chinese expression indicating not only chaos but also moral decay. What Xi calls disorder increasingly looks like the unwinding of the global order that embraced & encouraged China to blithely act unhindered across markets, resources, and trade corridors for years. But in the Trump 2.0 era, that ability appears to be systematically dismantling – to some degree – in just four months. Xi’s comments are his first public statements on the US-Iran conflict, as new economic data shows the conflict took a sharp toll on Chinese exports in March.
China has criticised Trump’s military action against Iran and called the US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “dangerous and irresponsible,” while warning it could respond if Washington links the conflict to a new round of tariffs on Chinese exports. For more context, about half of China’s crude imports came from the Gulf/Middle East before the war disruption. Reuters reported the region accounted for 52% of China’s oil imports. That share recently fell to 31% as Hormuz-related disruptions forced China to replace crude supplies with imports from Brazil and Russia. The game is clearly not to control Venezuela and Iran but to choke China & level the playing field between the two countries. President Trump has previously said his meeting with Xi in Beijing was pushed to May because of the conflict. The question now is whether Washington and Beijing can still strike a deal………
© DJM 2026
