In Blockading Iran, the US Forgot About China

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The Trump administration’s improvised naval blockade may prompt China to retaliate with its own trade restrictions.

When the recent US-Iranian peace talks in Islamabad failed to yield an agreement, President Donald Trump faced an immediate dilemma: how to increase the pressure on its adversary without paying the steep price of renewed military escalation? The answer Washington settled on—a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, layered atop Iran’s own blockade—seemed odd but viable in theory. Stop Iran’s exports, squeeze its economy, force a more desperate leadership back to the table. Project strength without putting boots on the ground—and without threatening to “annihilate a civilization” again. It was a classic, if improvised, application of economic coercion. It was also a strategic miscalculation of the first order.

The problem is not necessarily the blockade’s intent. It is its effects. Roughly 90 percent of Iranian oil exports flow east, to China. When Washington announced it would enforce a blockade of the Strait, it was not merely pressuring Tehran. It was, functionally, blocking Beijing’s access to energy supplies it considers critical to national security—especially in an increasingly scarce oil marketplace due to the war. The Trump administration appears to have walked into this confrontation without fully appreciating what it was triggering.

The Chinese defense minister, Dong Jun, issued a careful yet quietly menacing statement establishing Beijing’s position: China’s ships were transiting the Strait with the permission of Iran, which controls........

© The National Interest