As things grow worse for the Trump administration in Iran, they are beginning to show their true colors and reveal a harsher tone toward China. According to an April 14 report in Reuters, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that China has become an “unreliable global partner” during the war in Iran due to its hoarding of oil supplies and limiting exports of some goods. Bessent told reporters he had spoken with Chinese officials about the issue.
“China has been an unreliable global partner three times in the past five years; once during COVID, when they hoarded healthcare products, second on rare earth,” Bessent said, referring to Beijing’s threat last year to restrict its exports of rare earth materials. The third is presumably today with regard to Iran.
Then Bessent escalated his rhetoric against China. The new American blockade of Iranian oil exports would ensure that no Chinese ships or others would be allowed to pass the strait, Bessent said. “So they’re not going to be able to get their oil. They can get oil. Not Iranian oil.” Bessent added that China had been buying more than 90% of Iranian oil, which constituted about 8% of its annual purchases.
Bessent’s sharp focus on China echoes the orientation dreamed up by the Anglo-American geopoliticians, who have been attempting to coerce the Trump administration into a full-blown confrontation with China, starting with deeper controls over its gas and oil imports. Max Meizlish, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neocon-infested institution which has played an influential role in guiding the administration’s policy in Iran, put it this way in a post on X: “China is Iran’s most important sanctions evasion partner. It buys Iranian oil through a mix of conventional payments and barter-style arrangements, and if the regime survives this war, Beijing will likely help keep it afloat afterward. That leaves Washington with two real choices after the war: interdict the ships carrying Iranian oil to China, or apply far more serious economic pressure on Beijing to force a break with Tehran. Either way, absent regime change in Iran, any serious U.S. strategy will have to confront the China problem directly.”
