Senator Rick Scott, speaking without the usual diplomatic gauze, recently told a reporter that blocking the Strait of Hormuz was “fine from my standpoint,” adding that if no oil ever reached China again and its economy was destroyed, that would be “a really wonderful day for me.” Strip away the theatrical enchantment, and what remains is devoid of a fringe position; it is, contrarily, in raw terms, the operational logic of what the United States has been constructing across three interconnected theaters since January. The architecture is not new; the bluntness, however, is unprecedented.

I wrote an earlier version of this argument two months ago, when Nicolás Maduro had just been extracted from Caracas, and the threats against Iran’s leadership were still threats. The claim was that Washington was assembling a comprehensive energy coercion framework targeting China’s most acute structural vulnerability: its deep dependence on imported hydrocarbons flowing through maritime chokepoints that others, in a crisis, could choose to close. What has unfolded since does not disprove the thesis; if anything, it sharpens it. What we are witnessing is its harsher validation—unfolding faster than expected, more chaotic in form, and far more consequential than its original framing ever allowed for.

The Architecture, Now Operational

The original framework spanned three theaters. In the Western Hemisphere, the seizure of Maduro and the declared intent to manage Venezuelan oil production amounted to active denial of a critical Chinese energy partner—Beijing had invested roughly $3.1 billion in Venezuelan oil infrastructure between 2016 and 2023, and Reuters noted plainly that the operation was a signal to China to keep away from the Americas. In the Middle East, threats against Iranian leadership served a dual purpose: menacing a pivotal Chinese supplier while placing the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly 42-45% of China’s crude imports flow—under a permanent cloud of strategic uncertainty. And in Southeast Asia, the steady expansion of maritime domain awareness networks around Malacca was designed to transform a neutral passage into a latent lever.

All three theaters are now active simultaneously. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and triggering Iranian missile barrages across the Gulf. Iran responded by functionally closing the Strait of Hormuz—the largest disruption to world energy supply since the 1970s oil crisis, according to IEA head Fatih Birol.

On April 13, following the collapse of the Islamabad negotiations, CENTCOM announced a naval blockade of all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports, to be enforced “impartially against vessels of all nations.” And on the same day—the same 24-hour window—Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed a major defense cooperation partnership with Indonesia at the Pentagon, focused specifically on maritime domain awareness, subsurface and autonomous systems, and special forces training along the Malacca corridor.

The simultaneity of the Hormuz........

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