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Conrad Black: With Iran war, Trump boxes China in

The U.S. is at minimal risk from high oil prices, not so for China

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The Iran war was unleashed so suddenly and has proceeded so swiftly that some of its principal objectives and consequences have scarcely been noticed. A few commentators have recognized the pattern of the Trump administration’s removal of Venezuela and soon Cuba and by the actions of Israel, Syria, as well as Iran, as Russo-Chinese allies. But the real background to the status of the Strait of Hormuz as a conduit for 20 per cent of the world’s oil exports has not been seriously publicly explored. There is no doubt that the United States could force the Strait open and it has substantially prepared to do that by obliterating the missile firing capability on the southern Iranian coast and by severely reducing the number of potential interoceptive Iranian warships and swift boats.

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Those addicted to the assumption that the Trump administration is incapable of ingenious strategic planning have failed to notice that while the United States is not at all dependent on Middle Eastern oil and the European Union receives only six per cent of its crude oil and nine per cent of its natural gas through the Hormuz Strait and 16 per cent of its petroleum and 45 per cent of its natural gas from the United States, China receives almost half of its crude oil imports from the Hormuz Strait. The flow of oil through the Strait to China has been reduced by up to 75 per cent and the rise in domestic Chinese gasoline prices would send any Western public into the streets in protest. The world oil price is supposedly uniform but the United States could ignore it almost completely if it wished and Europe certainly could, with American assistance, seriously mitigate its impact. China does not have that luxury.

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The United States has relaxed its interception of so-called ghost-tankers delivering contraband oil from Iran to China, to take some upward pressure off the world oil price, but it could stop oil shipments from the Persian Gulf to China anytime it wished. Our generally strategically unsophisticated media have assumed that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz at will, and that this gives it a chokehold on Western Europe, as well as an ability to endanger the financial security of the Gulf states. It really does not have much impact on the Europeans and if the Gulf states were seriously inconvenienced, they can cease to finance Iran and inflict much more financial damage on the Islamic Republic than the shattered and punch-drunk Iranian leadership could have on them.

Since the United States could assure passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz anytime it wished, it is not only giving its ostensible allies the time to consider if they do not in fact find their interests to be well-served by cooperation with their great American ally. More importantly, it is inviting the People’s Republic of China to determine whether it puts higher value on its access to relatively affordable oil as to half of its consumption, or more highly values its opportunistic association with the deranged theocratic despotism in Iran, even now that it is in its death throes. When Donald Trump returned to the presidency of the United States a year ago, China appeared to have a strategic advantage in several areas. It was pouring a vast quantity of lethal narcotics through Venezuela and Cuba and Mexico into the United States at great profit to itself, had substantially assembled dominant positions as a source of a number of strategic minerals, and was threatening the entire West’s supply of semiconductor chips from Taiwan. The era of plausible predictions of the Chinese overhaul of the United States as the world’s greatest economy has mercifully ended, but the proportions of its failure have only become clear in the last year as the Chinese economy is now slowing down and the American economy, barring short-term flutters in commodity prices, is growing at an accelerating rate.

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The United States, at minimal risk to itself and brief and modest upward impact to the domestic gasoline price, has put its chief rival, its principal ostensible allies, and the ambiguous powers of the Middle East, all on the horns of a dilemma. As the Chinese determine whether clinging to the alliance with the terminally diminished terror state of Iran can justify accepting steeply higher oil prices, and the Europeans reflect on whether they should get used to the relationship with the United States becoming a somewhat more reciprocal operation; the Gulf states, who have received four times as many missiles from Iran as Israel, must finally consider the virtue of coming off the fence they should not have been on between Iran and the United States and Israel, and committing their own armed forces to this war and pulling the financial plug on the evil and faltering regime in Tehran.

The Americans are taking practically no casualties and are under no appreciable pressure at all to stop or moderate their daily pummelling of the terrorist ayatollahs. Europe, after testing the waters with their haughty affectation of neutrality and moral equivalence between the country that pulled them through the World Wars and the Cold War, and the lunatic clerical gerontocracy in Tehran, which has now developed missiles that could reach Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London, are now among the 30 countries pledging to contribute to the long-term accessibility of the Hormuz Strait. The United Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are daily receiving outrageous and completely unprovoked acts of war from Iran, and cannot conceivably imagine that turning the other cheek as they have is a viable response.

Given its ambition to hold the entire world to ransom by its promotion of terrorism and its pyrotechnic cheerleadership of antisemitism, the indiscriminate belligerency of the Iranian government, such as it is, roiling and wallowing in a St. Vitus’ dance, makes some sense, although it is hopeless. Europe, mostly run by left-wing governments dependent to some extent on Islamic voters to remain in office, will have to determine if the old continent can shake off its enfeeblement, hypocrisy, and envy of the rise of America, and can reinject some promise into the European project. They need America much more than America needs them but above all they need to rediscover some of the distinction of Churchill, Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle and Thatcher. The spectacle of the great original nation-states and cradle of Western civilization cowering before terrorists is deeply sad. And China is about to receive a lesson, as within living memory, Germany and the U.S.S.R. did, on the difficulties of speeding past the United States as the world’s leading power. Underestimating America, and especially Trump’s America, remains a hazardous business.

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