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Tingbin Zhang, Zero Hedge: China’s Worst Nightmare - The US’s Oil Weapon
China’s islanding building on the four-mile-long and two-mile-wide Subi Reef in the South China Sea has put The US in a tight spot. To protect its ally from China’s aggression, The US will be left with little choice but to constrain China by military means. However, the US won't directly engage China in the war in the foreseeable future, because the US dominates China with its superior naval and air force and the only way for China to level the playing field is to apply nuclear weapons. The nuclear nature of Sino-American warfare will make both the world no.1 and no.2 economy the fallen giants.
So there is a possibility that The US might use its oil weapon instead to strike at the core of China’s weakness - it’s huge dependence on oil import. At the moment, China imports 55% of its oil, almost half of which sails from countries in the Persian Gulf?which accounts to 5.3 Million Barrels per Day and is around 75% of Saudi Arabia’s production. As a matter of fact, China’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil has gradually grown in line with its rapid-increasing demand for oil. Right now, China has achieved the equivalent of the peak of U.S. Oil import dependence and is not slowing down a bit. The single largest source of China's crude oil imports is Saudi Arabia.
WNU Editor: Energy has always been China`s Achilles Heel. But cutting off oil supplies from the Persian Gulf will impact everyone .... not only China.
1 comment:
China is very vulnerable to this, not only what could be done as it was described in this article, but road, rail and oil pipelines coming from the north and west of China are easily compromised as are the rail lines from China's coal and oil fields. But the big question as always is how vulnerable are we, I'm sure they would have a surprise or two for us, after all it's not like were dealing with tiny Serbia or a backward third world Iraq.
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