Since the outbreak of what may become the Middle East’s most aggressive and enduring open conflict, much of the analytical debate has concentrated on the regional security architecture that may emerge once the fighting ends, and on the terms under which that architecture might be rebuilt. Yet a less examined dimension of the confrontation between the US-Israeli coalition and the Islamic Republic of Iran is the way the crisis around the Strait of Hormuz could reshape not only the security order surrounding the Persian Gulf monarchies, but also China’s perception of strategic risk, the balance of economic and political power between Washington and Beijing, and both powers’ diplomatic relationship with the wider world, especially the Indo-Pacific. The weaponization of Hormuz, first through Iranian pressure and then through the prospect of a US blockade, also raises the possibility that similar dynamics could one day affect other critical Asian chokepoints, with potentially greater consequences for China and for the world economy.
Like Russia in Europe, China rejects the premise of enduring American supremacy in a unipolar world. Beijing increasingly reads the decline of the West as slow but inevitable, driven by internal contradictions, fractured cohesion, and, in its view, deepened by the Trump administration’s willingness to undermine traditional alliances, sideline international institutions, and weaponize trade against political partners. In parallel, a more multipolar order appears to be gathering strength through the rise of emerging economies such as China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. This interpretation of global change was reinforced after the 2008 financial crisis, when emerging powers recovered and rebounded more dynamically than the older industrialized economies of the West. As the Western bloc loses legitimacy to command the international system, China increasingly sees itself as entering the driving seat of world management, according to its own worldview and interests.
At the same time, Beijing does not assume that the decline of the United States will occur quietly. On the contrary, the Chinese security establishment fears that Washington will force its hand while it still possesses overwhelming hard power. As the United States retreats from its role as guardian of the existing international order, the resulting vacuum is not filled by an orderly transfer of power, as occurred when the declining United Kingdom gave way to the rising United States in the late 1940s. Instead, it is filled by disorder, instability, and insecurity. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric around a possible takeover of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark and therefore linked to a NATO ally, together with unilateral interventions in Venezuela and Iran, the latter coupled with a US-led all-in/all-out blockade of Hormuz without international consent, strengthens Chinese fears about what internal circles in Beijing describe as the “law of the jungle” in world affairs.
For China, the preferred scenario is not necessarily a strong United States, but a structurally weaker and consistently predictable one. A volatile United States, operating in an increasingly unpredictable global order, forces Beijing to redraw its strategic perimeter in response to its own expanding national insecurities. In such an anarchic environment, China seeks to position itself diplomatically as a bridge to stability. Behind these fears also lie important diplomatic opportunities: Beijing can engage the outside world, win allies where the long-standing American presence previously made this almost impossible, and protect Chinese assets at a moment when a bleeding US hegemony appears to be pushing back against emerging powers.
China’s security interests in an increasingly anarchic world, intensified by Washington’s contradictory foreign-policy messages and actions, sit uneasily beside Beijing’s ambition to lead the next industrial revolution and President Xi Jinping’s vision of national rejuvenation. China requires secure access to trade routes and critical resources not only to sustain economic expansion, but also to feed the high-tech industries that will define the era of artificial intelligence and strategic competition with the United States. From Beijing’s perspective, US interventions abroad and coercive diplomacy toward friends and adversaries alike increasingly look like the actions of a declining hegemon trying to obstruct China’s rise.
The more America’s normative power declines, the harsher its interventions abroad become in order to secure its interests while leverage remains. The Trump-approved direct interventions in Venezuela and Iran, occurring within weeks of one another, suggest not only an appetite for resolving old conflicts through unilateral means, but also the wounded pride of a hegemon under pressure from an emerging world. Washington, in this reading, is determined to secure strategic territories, resources, and assets while it still can. For Beijing, the use of force abroad is therefore not merely regional crisis management; it is part of a broader strategic pattern directed against China. The Chinese security establishment is consequently focused on protecting overseas economic interests, including infrastructure investments, access to critical resources, and passage through international maritime crossings.
In this geostrategic context, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), both under the umbrella of the Chinese-funded Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese investment activity in Greenland, presence in South America, Africa and South-East Asia, and the guaranteed free flow of goods through the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca, all become essential to China’s modernization and its competition with the United States. In 2025, China dispatched private security personnel along CPEC in Pakistan to protect Chinese workers and assets from militant groups that have targeted Chinese projects on the grounds that they represent external interference in Pakistan. The security of infrastructure is no longer a peripheral issue for Beijing; it is part of China’s larger strategic exposure abroad.
Greenland has also become a focal point of intensifying strategic rivalry between the United States and China over critical minerals. A Country and Region profile published in April in Asian Atlas emphasized Greenland’s value as a strategic asset for the United States in diversifying supply chains of critical minerals, particularly rare earth elements, which are indispensable for high-tech competitiveness and military capability. This matters because China currently dominates critical-mineral supply chains and maintains a major share of extraction and refining capacity. The issue intersects directly with the Trump administration’s territorial ambitions regarding Greenland and with Chinese concerns that Washington could succeed without serious opposition from the European Union in support of Denmark. And the Chinese anxieties do not end with Greenland.
Trump’s transactional approach to negotiations with countries rich in critical minerals, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Brazil, Bolivia and Myanmar, is a growing source of concern for China. This strategy appears to rely on political favours and targeted investments in exchange for preferential arrangements from national leaders for American companies interested in rare mineral extraction. Beijing is particularly uneased especially when such negotiations intensify ahead of national elections, as this creates incentives for African and South American governments to accept short-term gains that may help incumbent politicians consolidate or retain power.
This dynamic is especially visible in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Washington’s push to secure preferential access for American companies in the critical minerals sector may be perceived as coming at the cost of democratic principles. In exchange for rapid access to resources coupled with extensively accepted anti-China strategic alignment with US interests, Washington risks appearing willing to overlook attempts by political leaders to weaken constitutional constraints, including the two-term presidential limit.
For Beijing, this reinforces the perception that the United States has moved away not only from defending the rules-based international order, but also from upholding the democratic principles it has long invoked in its criticism of China. Seen from Beijing, the US is prepared to trade normative commitments for better commercial terms, strategic leverage and privileged access for American companies at the expense of the Chinese. This is particularly significant because negotiations between the United States and emerging economies remain for the time being highly asymmetric, still allowing Washington to exert considerable influence over economically weaker negotiating partners.
China has long interpreted the United States’ renewed activism in Africa, including its interest in the Lobito Corridor, as part of a broader effort to reduce its diplomatic and investment deficit on the continent relative to Beijing. From this perspective, Washington’s critical minerals diplomacy is not merely commercial, but also forms part of a wider, explicitly anti-China foreign policy strategy.
Despite the strategic importance of Greenland, Africa and South America for securing critical resources, the 2026 Middle East conflict highlights even more forcefully the centrality of maritime gateways to Chinese economic security. Roughly one fifth of global hydrocarbons pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz, most of them bound for the Indo-Pacific. China alone depends on Hormuz for approximately 40% of its crude oil imports and 30% of its liquefied natural gas. The Hormuz crisis also demonstrates that unilateral action against maritime transit routes, whether by Iran or by the United States, can pay little regard to international law. Blocking access through Hormuz contradicts the principles of free navigation under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Under the legal regime of transit passage, straits that are 24 nautical miles or less, such as Hormuz, should allow ships and aircraft to pass without interference.
The Trump-announced all-in/all-out blockade contradicts these principles and confirms one of China’s deepest strategic anxieties: that the United States is operating in an anarchic global order in which the law of the jungle overrides international law, while Hormuz becomes a playground where Iran and the United States flex their muscles and animal spirits at the expense of other countries’ economic interests. Once the weaponization of straits was confirmed in Hormuz, Chinese fears inevitably shifted to the Indo-Pacific and, above all, to the Strait of Malacca. Malacca carries at least 80% of China’s energy imports, making any blockade there a far greater nightmare for Chinese economic interests. This insecurity is not new. Since the early 2000s, when President Hu Jintao referred to the “Malacca Dilemma,” Beijing has understood that its energy lifelines are exposed to maritime coercion.
Malacca is not important only as an energy corridor. As the passage linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, it connects Chinese manufacturing hubs to European and Middle Eastern markets for consumer goods. A blockade of Malacca would constrain not only China’s energy-intensive industrial capacity, but also the manufacturing model that turned China into the factory of the world. For Beijing, the lesson of Hormuz is therefore not local. It is systemic: once a chokepoint can be weaponized in the Gulf, a much more consequential chokepoint could be weaponized in Asia.
For the Chinese security establishment, operating in an anarchic order in which a volatile and vengeful United States may seek to obstruct China’s rise by any means, the central imperative is to ensure that China can continue functioning even in the event of an imminent and unilateral blockade of the straits through which essential commodities flow. One possible answer would be Chinese military intervention in the affected regions to break a blockade by force. Yet such a strategy would be costly, risky, and politically damaging. It would also jeopardize China’s preferred diplomatic posture: that of a state presenting itself in 2026 as a bridge to stability, as an adherent of international law, and as the responsible alternative to American unilateralism.
Diplomacy therefore offers Beijing a more attractive path. China can deepen engagement with littoral states and with countries able to provide physical alternatives to vulnerable maritime gateways. At a time when the Trump administration is launching trade wars in multiple corners of the world, Beijing has a rare opening to present itself as moderate, pragmatic, and multilateral. The more Washington appears coercive, the more China can frame itself as the actor willing to build infrastructure, share costs, and reduce systemic vulnerability.
The vulnerability of Hormuz is tied not only to Iran’s capacity to disrupt passage, but also to the geography of the strait itself. Its operation is effectively shared between two states: Iran to the north and Oman to the south. This gives Tehran unusually strong leverage and places the passage close to hostile shores. Geography is therefore a strategic weakness for the Gulf. Saudi Arabia can rely on its Red Sea coastline and can move some oil from the Gulf in the east to the Red Sea in the west through the Saudi Petroline. Oman has direct access to the Indian Ocean. By contrast, other Gulf monarchies, especially Qatar and Kuwait, remain trapped inside the Persian Gulf, with no meaningful ability to export energy outside Hormuz. The United Arab Emirates has invested in the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to bypass Hormuz, but with capacity below 2 million barrels per day, most of its oil exports would still remain trapped inside the Gulf.
Reducing the impact of a Hormuz blockade would require nothing less than an energy-infrastructure revolution inside the Arabian Peninsula. This would not be easy, and it would certainly not be cheap. New pipelines, such as an alternative route connecting the Saudi Petroline with Oman for direct access to the Indian Ocean, or a revival of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPLINE), active from the 1950s to the 1970s and designed to carry oil from the Persian Gulf to Mediterranean terminals in Lebanon through Jordan, would be difficult to materialize. Oman may find few incentives to share the cost, while Saudi Arabia may lack the resources or political appetite to build such infrastructure entirely on its own.
A more viable medium-term option would be to expand the existing Saudi Petroline and the Emirati Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, while creating interconnections linking Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar to this infrastructure. Cost-sharing would be easier to facilitate among the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia already operates the Petroline and would benefit from greater capacity to move Saudi oil from the Gulf to the Red Sea. Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait have strong incentives to pool money into infrastructure that allows them to escape the Hormuz trap. Similar arrangements could connect the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to the energy systems of other Gulf states, creating alternative access to the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Oman and bypassing Hormuz entirely.
This is precisely where China can present itself as a useful financial and diplomatic actor. By supporting a new configuration of Gulf energy infrastructure, Beijing can portray itself as the sponsor of a multilateral solution built on free access to resources and secure passage, rather than on a law-of-the-jungle order in which geography and resources become political weapons. Yet behind this diplomatic language lie serious national-security calculations. In Beijing’s inner security circles, Trump’s blockade of Hormuz is interpreted as a test of strength: Washington is demonstrating how easily it can control a critical checkpoint for the global economy, including for China. Financing the expansion of energy infrastructure in the Arabian Peninsula would therefore mean, in practice, financing China’s own national security.
China could fund such projects through loans as part of a Gulf extension of the Belt and Road Initiative. This would also pressure the United States either to remain financially present and contribute to the region’s resilience, or to risk watching Gulf states depend more heavily on Chinese financing and gradually drift into a post-American order shaped on Beijing’s terms. China’s interest in maritime infrastructure and strategic checkpoints predates the conflict in Iran. It already has a visible investment presence in the Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal.
In the United Arab Emirates, COSCO’s CSP Abu Dhabi Terminal at Khalifa Port is commonly described as a BRI maritime logistics project. It strengthens China’s access to Gulf trade routes and connects with the Maritime Silk Road. In Oman, the China-Oman Industrial Park in Duqm is one of the clearest BRI-linked projects in the Gulf region, located in a strategic port zone on the Arabian Sea, close to routes connecting the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, East Africa, and South Asia. China’s cooperation with Saudi Arabia is strongly linked to energy, industrial capacity, and Vision 2030. The Jazan/Jizan industrial cooperation project is often discussed in relation to BRI, even though Jazan is geographically located on the Red Sea rather than the Persian Gulf. In Kuwait, the Mubarak Al-Kabeer Port and Bubiyan Island project is tied both to Kuwait’s development strategy and to China’s BRI connectivity ambitions.
Chinese financing of regional energy infrastructure would also serve broader diplomatic purposes. Despite China’s extensive investment and commercial ties in the Gulf, it has often been portrayed in the region as a political enabler of Iran, alongside Russia. By helping the Gulf escape the Hormuz trap, China would also be helping weaken Hormuz as a source of future Iranian leverage. This would strengthen China’s position not only regionally, but also globally, as a non-aligned geopolitical actor focused on its own economic and security interests. After all, China has never intervened on behalf of Iran in the way a geopolitically aligned Russia intervened on behalf of Assad’s Syria.
Any Chinese concern over Hormuz cannot be separated from Malacca. A blockade of Malacca modeled on the American blockade of Hormuz would turn China’s commercial empire into something close to a landlocked power outside the maritime traffic of the South and East China Seas. Beijing has understood this danger for decades. It has therefore invested in alternative land routes toward Central Asia, Russia, and Myanmar, while increasing its presence at Indian Ocean ports that can move resources inland through economic corridors. This logic was central to the launch of China’s two main corridors under the Belt and Road Initiative: the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor.
In Myanmar, a country long regarded as central to China’s economic interests, particularly through the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), President Trump appears increasingly willing to depart from the approach of previous White House administrations, which had sought to support and nurture an emerging pro-democracy movement in a state long dominated by successive military juntas, but also endowed with significant critical mineral resources. This intersects with the Chinese broader economic interests in the South-East Asian country.
CMEC gives China a route from the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean into Yunnan, allowing some oil and gas to bypass both the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea. Myanmar is geographically valuable because it connects Kyaukpyu, on the Bay of Bengal, to southwest China. The energy-security dimension is not theoretical. The Myanmar-China gas pipeline became operational in 2013, followed by the oil pipeline in 2017. Reported full capacity is approximately 12 billion cubic meters of gas per year and roughly 400,000 barrels of oil per day, giving China a partial alternative route for Middle Eastern and African oil shipments.
Yet this is not a complete solution. Even at full utilization, the Myanmar route covers only a limited share of China’s total energy imports. It reduces vulnerability but does not eliminate it. One analysis estimates that the pipelines account for around 6% of China’s oil and gas import needs, meaning they diversify China’s routes but cannot replace Malacca in a crisis.
CPEC also has an energy-security logic, centered mainly on Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. In theory, China could move oil from the Persian Gulf to Gwadar and then transport it overland through Pakistan to Xinjiang, reducing the need to ship everything through Malacca. Academic work on CPEC often presents this as a potential oil-route diversification project. In practice, however, CPEC is far less operational than Myanmar as an energy-import corridor for China. Most CPEC “energy projects” are power-generation projects inside Pakistan: coal, hydro, solar, wind, and transmission infrastructure designed primarily to address Pakistan’s electricity shortages, not to physically move oil or gas into China. The official CPEC project list is heavily focused on Pakistani power plants and grid capacity.
The Gwadar route nonetheless remains strategically important. China and Pakistan continue to describe Gwadar as a key connectivity node, and in 2025 they discussed further development of Gwadar, railways, and offshore oil and gas cooperation. But the route faces serious obstacles: difficult terrain, very high costs, limited infrastructure, and major security risks in Balochistan. Repeated militant attacks targeting CPEC-related projects, Gwadar, and Chinese workers have undermined the reliability of this corridor.
Alongside long-term corridor development, China can pursue a shorter-term and less costly strategy: cultivating friendly relations with the coastal states around Malacca, namely Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Unlike Hormuz, the probability that these states would deliberately block access to Malacca on the Iranian model is reduced by their limited incentives to do so. Yet this does not mean access will remain cost-free. Political leaders with populist or nationalist instincts in Malaysia or Indonesia could raise the cost of passage through instruments resembling environmental taxes. Recently, Indonesia’s finance minister invoked a logic comparable to the Iranian model by raising the idea of passage tolls, before the foreign minister later dismissed it.
China cannot allow its energy security, or even the export capacity that runs through Malacca, to depend too heavily on changing political moods in Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. For this reason, the Chinese National Security Ministry has carried out a wide-ranging operation to prevent and anticipate security risks to China’s overseas interests. This includes broader information collection and better coordination with regional states in the fields of security and intelligence. China’s objective is twofold: first, to better secure its economic assets in the region through cooperation with states that possess more information about risks on their own territory; and second, to ensure that Chinese interests are fully aligned with, or at least acknowledged by, domestic policymaking in the region.
As with Hormuz, alternatives to Malacca are not readily available. Bypassing Malacca would push shipping toward longer routes through the Indonesian straits of Lombok and Makassar, or even around Australia. These routes would add time, risk, and cost for shipping companies. An open conflict around Malacca, unlikely but possible in an unstable and volatile world, would also increase insurance risk premiums and make maritime transit more expensive. For the world’s largest trading empire, this is not a marginal concern. It is a strategic vulnerability.
Good relations with its neighborhood are easier for China as a diplomatic objective than its actions sometimes suggest. China has long been viewed as an expansionary power with regional ambitions, and its years of assertive behavior in the South China Sea have been received poorly across Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, China and Southeast Asian states can still build constructive relations, even where doubts persist about Beijing’s ultimate intentions. The reason is simple: the region needs China, and the current energy crisis makes this clearer than ever.
After the closure of Hormuz and the removal of roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas from the market, fossil-fuel importers were hit hard, with the impact felt more strongly in Asia than in Europe. Many Asian economies lack significant oil and gas storage capacity and, at the same time, have plans to reduce or eliminate coal from their national energy mixes. Their only real path to reducing dependence on Middle Eastern fossil-fuel imports is to accelerate investment in renewable energy, including solar, wind, and hydroelectric power.
This is where China has a genuine comparative advantage, at least relative to the United States. As the world’s leading clean-energy producer, and as a state pursuing a long-term strategy of electrification and decarbonization, Beijing has spent decades investing tens of billions of dollars in companies producing green technologies, especially batteries and solar panels. These companies are now exporting at scale, and Southeast Asia could become one of their most important client regions because of its energy dependence. Chinese manufacturers such as CATL in batteries and BYD in electric vehicles are already expanding sales across Southeast Asia.
Indonesia, a long-standing non-aligned state positioned astride the maritime geography of the Strait of Malacca, has been among the regional actors most interested in expanding renewables. President Prabowo Subianto has announced plans to add 100 gigawatts of solar power capacity and to phase out the country’s extensive fuel-subsidy system within three years. He has also stated that Indonesia ultimately intends for all vehicles nationwide to become electric. The more Southeast Asian countries seek a renewable-energy revolution with Chinese support, the greater their dependence on China becomes. The alternative is to remain locked into fossil fuels whose supply and price fluctuate according to maritime gateways, one of the most important of which has been controlled or disrupted by Iran.
Tehran managed to block Hormuz with relatively inexpensive tools, and it could repeat the action. But dependence on foreign powers narrows diplomatic maneuvering space. Asian countries have already discovered, since the war in Iran began, that dependence on fossil fuels complicates any effort to criticize either Iran or the United States so long as energy flows remain shaped by their actions in Hormuz. In the short to medium term, it will be equally difficult to criticize China while importing cheap Chinese clean technology and transforming national power systems away from fossil fuels with the help of Chinese renewable manufacturers. This is the card Beijing hopes to play: to ensure that Malacca remains open for China even while Chinese ambitions continue to generate concern across the region.
Consequently, the Gulf conflict and the Hormuz crisis could reshape the power symmetry between China and Washington. The United States appears to be underinvesting in renewables while overspending on hydrocarbons that Asia may increasingly seek to avoid. As more regional states look to Beijing for solutions to national energy crises, and as the United States acts with less regard for the wider repercussions of its decisions on other states, China expects to gain strategic ground at Washington’s expense. Through expanding bilateral and multilateral economic partnerships, Beijing can offer direction and clarity to an increasingly disordered global order. In Chinese eyes, this disorder is the product of America’s abdication of responsibility for order and its embrace of a world governed less by law than by the law of the jungle.
Bibliography:
Beneath the Ice: Greenland’s Role in the Future of Critical Minerals - Asian Atlas
China Was Ready for the Age of Anarchy | Foreign Affairs
The Winners and Losers of the Iran Energy Shock | Foreign Affairs
Iran’s New Oil Weapon | Foreign Affairs
Hormuz Is a Warning for the Indo-Pacific | Foreign Affairs
Myanmar and the Belt and Road Initiative. A solution to China's
Prospects of Pakistan–China Energy and Economic Corridor - ScienceDirect
Pakistan PM says militant attacks aimed at thwarting China cooperation | Reuters
China, Pakistan pledge to boost cooperation on infrastructure, mining projects | Reuters
Kuwait to sign $4 billion Mubarak Al-Kabeer port contract with China’s CCCC next week | Reuters
Success of BRI Port Paves Way for Future China-UAE Joint Projects | HKTDC Belt and Road Portal
Countries With Critical Minerals Seek to Capitalize on Trade Boom
Washington Wants Myanmar's Minerals
