When President Donald Trump landed in Beijing this week for a two-day state visit, he brought a wish list for Chinese President Xi Jinping: more business deals, greater access to the Chinese market and, most immediately, help with reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Speaking about China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent remarked that it was “very much in their interest to get the strait reopened.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Beijing possessed the leverage over Iran to push the regime into serious negotiations with Washington on ending the war.
But though Trump reportedly received some vague assurances from Xi on the first two items, he essentially walked away empty-handed on the last. Trump suggested that Xi agreed to put pressure on Tehran to open the regional choke point, but nothing from the summit suggests that China has changed its mind about bailing the Americans out of the hole they have dug in the Middle East.
While China does import a lot of oil via the strait, Beijing has done a good job of diversifying its energy sources in order to reduce dependence on any one country.
In factual terms, Bessent and Rubio are correct. More than 55% of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East, and a sizeble portion of that flow goes through the Strait of Hormuz before reaching Chinese refineries. When the Trump administration’s maximum-pressure sanctions against Tehran were in effect, China single-handedly kept the Iranian economy afloat by continuing to purchase Iranian crude oil, despite the risk of getting cut off from the international financial system. According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, about 90% of Iran’s oil exports go to China.
In other words, if Xi wanted to make the Iranians bleed economically, he certainly could. But why would Xi do Trump any favors unless he received something substantial — like a change in U.S. policy on Taiwan — in return? The possibility of a trade like this was always slim, particularly given the political costs for Trump of throwing Taiwan under the bus.
Even if the U.S. president was desperate enough to consider such an arrangement, though, there are numerous reasons why Xi would continue to let the United States stew.
For starters, while China does import a lot of oil via the strait, Beijing has done a good job of diversifying its energy sources in order to reduce dependence on any one country. The Chinese Communist Party has a long-standing policy of ensuring that it’s not reliant on any one source, which maximizes flexibility and decreases the risk of an sudden crisis disrupting its energy supply. Iran is a significant energy source for the Chinese but hardly the most significant; Beijing has spent the past several years increasing imports from Russia at a discount and is expanding into Africa’s petrostates, trading loans for favorable oil contracts.
China’s massive investments in electric vehicles and renewable energy sources, along with the build-up of its strategic oil stockpile, means that the world’s largest energy consumer is becoming less dependent on fossil fuels and more insulated from global oil supply shocks. At 1.3 billion barrels, China has accumulated the world’s largest crude inventory over the past two decades. That’s enough to last three or four months, and as long as three or four years if Beijing continues buying from non-Middle Eastern suppliers.
In short, while China would prefer the Strait of Hormuz to return to its prewar status quo, it’s not going to bend over backward to compel Tehran to do it. Right now, Xi is content with letting Trump squirm.
The war with Iran has served Beijing’s purposes in a number of ways.
In the opening few weeks of the war, some analysts speculated that the attack on Iran was really about containing Chinese power in the Middle East, eliminating a threat that distracts the U.S. military’s focus on deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and removing a Chinese ally from the global geopolitical chessboard.
If that’s the case, Xi doesn’t appear all too worried about it. In fact, the war with Iran has served Beijing’s purposes in a number of ways. The war, which has cost U.S. taxpayers $29 billion so far, is a drain on U.S. munitions capability, including the air defense interceptors and high-precision ship-to-ground missiles that would be useful in any potential conflict over Taiwan. The Trump administration is so short of air defense assets that it’s had to delay arms shipments to the Europeans and pull some from South Korea. For Xi and the People’s Liberation Army, every day that the U.S. military is effectively stuck in the Middle East is another day that the U.S. posture in China’s periphery is a little less worrisome.
The war is not just a drag on the American consumer in the form of higher gas prices. It is also a living, breathing example of what strategic malpractice looks like. The once formidable U.S. alliance system isn’t going to implode, but the United States is almost entirely on its own, with even normally docile NATO members unwilling to join a conflict they weren’t consulted about and never thought was a sound idea in the first place.
The same thing could be said about Washington’s partners in the Gulf, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, many of which spent weeks trying to persuade the White House not to attack Iran due to the regional economic costs that would ensue. Those pleas fell on deaf ears. Trump attacked anyway, and the Gulf Arab states have had to deal with fallout in the form of lower oil sales and infrastructure damage ever since.
If Trump and his administration sincerely hoped the Chinese government would help them out of a jam, it’s hard to see why. China is sitting comfortably on the sidelines, and Xi Jinping is taking Napoleon Bonaparte’s advice: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Daniel R. DePetris
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.