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I agree with a lot of your concerns, but a clear case for Iran now can be made as part of a pivot to Asia. That basically gives US full control over the global oil market. It would just be Russia outside of the American block. US would have a credible card of cutting Chinese oil supplies 80% during a Taiwan War.
"simply blockage the Malacca strait" needs to stop. I honestly might make a copy pasta for this.
Here's a lazy version:
it is likely, but not guaranteed, that the USA could station enough forces to maintain a blockade , but we'll assume it does for the rest of this analysis
blockades are effective, but not a kill switch. Germany got blockaded quite hard in both world wars. It definitely contributed to its downfall. That downfall still took many years and massive amounts of boots on the ground effort and death.
China shares a massive land border with a massive oil producer who hates the USA, Russia. They don't have enough pipelines, and it's actually odd that China is slow rolling the power of Siberia 2, but they could speed it up if they wanted.
a clear part of belt and road was to start hedging against a Malacca blockade (and to soak up absurd domestic construction capacity), it's not going great , but they're thinking about it
speaking of thinking about it, China is a world leader in solar and EVs , you ever wonder why they're going balls deep into tech that reduces oil dependency??? They can run their warships and planes for years on domestic production, storage, and Russian imports.
China is calorie self sufficient. They import a ton of food, but they could live off their own rice if they had to. They also share a giant land border with a country that grows a ton of food and hates America (it's Russia again!).
the Chinese people can soak a lot of pain. They won't like having no gas and eating rice, but their grandparents remember way worse.
if you think China has an energy/calorie import problem, you should look at Taiwan and Japan. Both of them need to import WAY WAY more of their energy/calories as a % of demand. Japan could get away with only offloading with Pacific ports, although that would suck. Taiwan just immediately starves to death and collapses. There are no (0) ports that Taiwan can use that can't be missile/mine spammed from the Chinese mainland.
on another note, a ridiculous amount of global trade goes through Malacca. The USA will deeply upset the rest of the world by doing this. You can say "yes but fuck the rest of the world, we have super carriers" which is true. But when you're in a peer fight against a peer who's got home field advantage, you are not helping yourself by doing this.
I'm so fucking sick of "erm, we'll simply blockade the straits of Malacca and they'll fold, gg" when the entire population of Taiwan will have starved 5 times over before China even starts going "damn are we sure we want to spend the fuel on this sortie right now?"
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The US already had those cards given its ability to sanction or blockade pretty much any oil exporter at will and/or blockade China. The only reason that Chinese purchases dominated Venezuelan and Iranian exports in the first place is that they were pretty much the only ones who would buy from them thanks to US sanctions, and as much as the sanction discount was easy money for the Chinese it isn't that important. China also buys lots of oil (much more than from Iran and Venezuela combined) from Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries, along with Iraq. Are we going to sanction all of them as well?
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