Venezuela was next. The famous operation that led to the capture of the country’s drug lord also cut off China’s supply of cheap Venezuelan oil from that country. What’s more, it destroyed billions of dollars in Chinese-made military equipment — and effectively ended China’s influence over the remaining regime.
By Steven W. MOSHER
With Ark Island — Iran’s main oil export terminal — up in flames after Saturday’s US-led attack, China’s vital energy pipeline is going up in smoke. Ignoring international sanctions, oil-hungry China had long been the main buyer of Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime. To be sure, China was a cheap customer, paying well below the current market price for Iran’s smuggled oil. Not only that, it insisted on paying in Chinese yuan, not dollars, ensuring that the money would flow back to China.
Beijing, with its manipulative offers, persuaded the Iranians to spend their billions from oil on Chinese military equipment and telecommunications – such as the “state-of-the-art” radar systems that now lie in molten ruins after failing to detect approaching American air strikes. But eliminating Iran’s leadership and destroying its Chinese-made defensive arsenal are not Beijing’s worst problems in the Middle East. Iran’s reckless missile barrages have united the entire region against it – causing a huge loss of prestige for its main international backer. Two years ago, China was at its peak in the Arab world.
In March 2023, it brokered a normalization deal between Shiite Iran and its longtime Sunni rival, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih praised the new Middle East power broker. A multipolar world had emerged, he declared, and cooperation between the Gulf states and China would be “an important part of the new order.” A year into President Donald Trump’s second term, China’s role in that new order seems to be shrinking by the day. It’s not just that Iran, the linchpin of China’s ambitions in the Middle East, is now an international pariah. It’s the latest in a long line of geopolitical setbacks for America’s chief adversary.
China’s troubles began soon after Trump took office, when his tariffs dealt a major blow to Beijing’s predatory trade profits. Then, Trump targeted China’s inroads into Latin America, starting with the Panama Canal. He warned the Panamanian government: If it doesn’t secure this vital strategic waterway, Trump will. Panama’s Supreme Court just terminated the contracts of a Chinese company that managed ports on the Atlantic and Pacific, ending China’s ability to block the Panama Canal at will.
Venezuela was next. The famous operation that led to the capture of the country’s drug lord also cut off China’s supply of cheap Venezuelan oil from that country. What’s more, it destroyed billions of dollars in Chinese-made military equipment—and effectively ended China’s influence over the remaining regime. Then came Greenland, to which China had already begun its overtures. Claiming that control of the giant island was vital to the defense of the United States, Trump ignored concerns among European elites that tiny Denmark would lose its colony. His fiery rhetoric achieved what he had wanted all along: effective sovereignty over parts of the island that are needed for missile defense or resource development. That would surely include any areas that China might now, or in the future, have as targets for its own envious interests.
With the US cutting off oil supplies to the island nation of Cuba, the liberation of another key Chinese client state has just begun. It is almost inevitable that this story will end not with an invasion, but with a cooperative Cuban regime, willing to cooperate with the United States – if only to stay alive. And, incidentally, with another geopolitical obstacle for China.
Are you seeing the pattern now? From Panama to Venezuela, from Greenland to Iran, the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. Trump is thinking big. As U.S. energy production grows, China is not only being deprived of cheap oil from Venezuela and Iran, but also of the ability to pay for it by printing the renminbi. Beijing will be forced to pay full price for its oil at U.S.-owned refineries — in U.S. dollars. The China-Russia-led effort to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is dead.
As Trump strengthens alliances with Japan and other Asian countries, China is losing allies that could pose a challenge to the United States—and it is also losing control of important sea lanes. Iran is not the opening act in the larger race against China: Trump is already in his fourth or fifth round of dismantling Beijing’s strategic architecture—wherever it exists. His goal is to transform the global order in America’s favor—which means he will certainly significantly reduce the malign influence of communist China. “To win without fighting is the pinnacle of the art of war,” the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu aptly said. And, as far as China is concerned, it seems that one of Sun Tzu’s best students is a yangguizi—a “foreign devil” named Donald J. Trump. (Politico.eu)