Iain Davis

"Chinese imports fell by 5 million barrels a day, which is about 40-45% of pre-war import levels, and refining runs in China fell by 3 million barrels a day, which is the largest contraction of refining activity we've seen in China since the bottom of COVID-Zero in 2022. The optimistic view here is China is playing the good regional kind of hegemon saying 'OK we're going to take the brunt of this because we have the capacity to, and we're going to save East Asia and Europe from going into this economic tailspin'. The next option...is some kind of secret backroom bilateral deal between Beijing and Washington to basically support the US war in Iran in exchange for something. What Beijing has always wanted is more influence over Taiwan and the broader East Asian market, so this feeds into this idea of the Donroe Doctrine [where the] US gets the western hemisphere, Moscow gets Europe and Eurasia, and then all of Asia and basically the rest of Africa is ceded to Beijing. What if there was some kind of agreement that they said 'look, if you help us with this oil situation in Iran, we will start pulling back all of our security umbrella from Asia'. And this is essentially the death of the Obama-era Pacific pivot. There's one other option here, which is we know that Beijing has been preparing its energy security blanket effectively for some kind of future geopolitical shock. What if...this was a dry run...the perfect natural experiment to test Beijing's energy security blanket they're never going to get a moment where all of a sudden 10% of global oil supplies went up poof and they could basically test this in real time. If this is a test it's gone spectacularly well for them." Rory Johnston of CommodityContext.com 🛢 🔗 https://geopoliticsandempire.com/2026/07/08/rory-hormuz-china-russia-uae 🥷 ESCAPE TECHNOCRACY WORKSHOP https://ett.live ✈️ WW3 PLAN-B REPORT https://expatmoney.com/geopolitics