How China Can Strangle The World

Over the weekend an editorial in an Iranian newspaper funded by the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei suggested that Iran close the Strait of Hormuz to South Korean vessels until Seoul releases $7 billion in frozen funds.

“We can and must close the Strait of Hormuz to South Korean cargo ships and oil tankers and all ships that carry South Korean commodities … and not allow them to navigate through the Hormuz Strait as long as they have not paid their $7 billion debt to our country,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the chief editor of Kayhan, wrote in an editorial entitled “Let’s Begin Imposing Sanctions on South Korea”.

To the casual observer, this statement may simply seem like another in an endless stream of Iranian pronouncements. This is what the ayatollahs do. They rant and rave.

Unfortunately, this is much more serious than that, and it has perhaps as much to do with Beijing as Tehran.

The United States is seemingly devoid of any coherent geopolitical strategy. Our focus vis-a-vis the Chinese seems to be on how much money certain American billionaires can make in the short term from doing business with a corrupt, totalitarian Chinese regime.  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has no such myopic view. It is thinking long-term with the goal of succeeding where the Soviets failed.

Beijing wants to dominate the planet, and one of the keys to doing that is controlling the flow of energy and trade.

Well over a decade ago the CCP began an aggressive island-building campaign in the South China Sea, one of the world’s most strategic waterways. Unimpeded by the United States or its allies, Beijing has now completed the construction of these artificial islands and fully militarized them. The CCP can effectively shut off the flow of trade through the South China Sea anytime it wants.

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