Geopolitics | U.S.–China Relations | Energy Security

The two most consequential leaders on the planet are scheduled to meet in Beijing on May 14 and 15. On the surface, it is a trade summit — a follow-up to months of tariff wars, rare earth brinkmanship, and fragile truces. But the ground beneath that summit has shifted dramatically since it was first conceived. The Iran war, now in its sixth week, has closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, sent Brent crude past $114 per barrel, and injected an entirely new variable into the U.S.–China equation. The question that serious analysts are quietly asking is this: does Washington now hold a card it did not plan to have?

When Trump confirmed the May 14 dates, his press secretary framed the visit primarily around trade — the unresolved residue of a year-long tariff cycle that had seen reciprocal escalations, a temporary truce in Busan, South Korea in October 2025, and a subsequent unraveling. The backdrop was familiar: tariffs, rare earths, soybeans, semiconductors.

Then February 28 arrived. The U.S. and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeting the country's missile infrastructure. Within days, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. By March 2, no tankers were broadcasting automatic identification signals in the strait. The largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1970s had begun.

Trump, who had initially planned his Beijing trip for late March, postponed it. The war, he said, needed to conclude first. It has not concluded. But May 14 is now locked in — and the strait remains an open wound in global energy markets.

To understand why Hormuz matters geopolitically, the numbers tell the story with unusual clarity.

China receives approximately 37.7% of all crude oil exports passing through the Strait of Hormuz — more than any other country by a wide margin. Half of China's total oil imports and nearly one-third of its liquefied natural gas imports transit this waterway. The United States, by contrast, receives just 2.5% of Hormuz oil flows, a reflection of its shale revolution and status as the world's largest crude producer at 13.58 million barrels per day in 2025.

This asymmetry is not new, but the Iran war has sharpened it into something tactically legible. For the first time in the modern era, the physical security of a chokepoint that Beijing cannot secure on its own has become an active, live issue — not a hypothetical stress test.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration data for Q1 2025 shows that Asian countries collectively absorb 89.2% of the crude oil and condensate that transits the strait. Japan, South Korea, and India are all acutely exposed. But China, as the single largest destination, bears the greatest absolute weight of any disruption.

China has spent two decades building hedges. It holds an estimated 104 days of strategic petroleum reserves. It has built overland pipeline capacity from Russia, whose seaborne crude deliveries to China surged from roughly 1.2 million barrels per day in 2025 to approximately 1.8 million by early 2026. Its domestic production contributes around 27% of total consumption. And its rapid buildout of renewable energy has reduced — though not eliminated — structural fossil fuel dependency.

But hedges have horizons. As Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy noted in April, "China has several options to manage disruptions in the near term" — with the operative phrase being near term. A prolonged closure would, in the words of Columbia fellow Antoine Halff, not only cause supply shortages but could trigger a "global economic slowdown due to disruptions in energy markets and international trade." Even OCBC analysts, who described China as "less sensitive to a prolonged closure than many of its Asian peers," acknowledged the exposure clearly: roughly one third of China's total crude supply is still linked to Hormuz flows.

China's response to the Iran war has been a study in calibrated restraint — and quiet opportunism.

Beijing has publicly called for an immediate ceasefire. It abstained on a UN Security Council resolution that would have authorized force to reopen the strait. It has, through diplomatic channels, negotiated preferential passage for Chinese-flagged vessels — the Newvoyager container ship slipped through the strait on March 25, broadcasting "ALL CREW CHINA," a vessel whose passage a Chinese company paid for directly. Iran, which has stated the strait is closed to all except the U.S. and its allies, has selectively allowed vessels from China, Russia, India, and Pakistan to transit.

On March 31, China and Pakistan jointly issued a five-point peace proposal calling for an immediate ceasefire, the protection of civilians, and the restoration of normal navigation through the strait. Trump's response, when asked specifically about the initiative, was characteristically ambiguous — he didn't criticize it, but simply said negotiations were going well.

Washington has been notably cool. Danny Russel, a former senior U.S. diplomat, described China's diplomacy as "performative," comparing the five-point proposal to Beijing's 12-point plan for Ukraine in 2023. What is harder to dismiss is what China has declined to do: use its documented leverage with Tehran to force the strait open at Washington's request.

Trump explicitly asked Beijing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. China said no.

China's foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said the situation had "impacted the route for international goods and energy trade, disrupting peace and stability in the region and beyond." China called on all parties to stop military operations. It did not call in its favors with Tehran on Washington's behalf.

There is a structural logic to this. China receives 80% of Iran's oil shipments — approximately 1.38 million barrels per day, according to Kpler data for 2025. It is Tehran's largest trading partner and has provided diplomatic cover, spare parts, and intelligence support throughout the war. China has influence in Tehran that no other country commands. The decision not to deploy that influence for Washington is, itself, a geopolitical act.

Here is where the analysis becomes genuinely interesting — and genuinely contested.

On one reading, U.S. control over the Strait of Hormuz is a reserve card Washington can play against Beijing. The logic runs as follows: the U.S. is conducting active military operations to reopen the strait. It announced Operation Epic Fury. It controls the naval infrastructure that any lasting reopening would require. If and when the strait reopens fully, it will reopen on Washington's terms — with a security architecture that the U.S. Navy would anchor. That architecture would, in theory, give Washington durable leverage over the energy supply of every Asian economy, China included.

In Thomas Schelling's classic formulation, this is coercive bargaining through the manipulation of shared risk. The U.S. doesn't need to explicitly threaten China's oil supply. The mere reality that Chinese energy security depends on a chokepoint whose fate is being decided by U.S. military action — and that China cannot independently secure or reopen that chokepoint — concentrates minds in Beijing.

The parallel with the rare earths dynamic from 2025 is instructive. When China imposed export controls on rare earth elements in October 2025, it was exploiting America's structural dependence on materials it could not source elsewhere. Washington blinked, lowering tariffs in the Busan deal. The Hormuz dynamic inverts this geometry: it is China that is structurally exposed, and the U.S. that commands the relevant coercive instrument.

Brookings scholars, analyzing the October 2025 Busan meeting, concluded that "the United States and China each command chokeholds over critical sectors of the global economy." That observation is more true now than when it was written. China's chokehold is in the supply chain — rare earths, critical minerals, manufactured inputs. America's chokehold, newly activated by the Iran war, is geographic and naval.

The case against treating Hormuz as a clean lever is equally serious.

China has, over two decades, built precisely the kind of resilience that reduces the coercive value of energy disruption. Its 104-day strategic reserve. Its floating storage, with nearly 40 million barrels of Iranian crude anchored in coastal waters as of mid-March. Its pivot to Russian seaborne crude, which does not pass through Hormuz. Its accelerating domestic energy transition — oil shipments through the strait account for only 6.6% of China's overall energy consumption, according to Nomura's chief China economist Ting Lu.

The Vortexa analytics firm found that the share of China's seaborne imports transiting Hormuz had already declined from 51% in 2025 to roughly 44% by early 2026, as private Chinese refiners stepped up purchases of Russian crude. "China is materially exposed but more flexible," was how Kpler's principal insight analyst put it.

The Stimson Center's Sun Yun framed China's posture in more strategic terms: the Iran war is "an opportunity China will not miss to demonstrate its leadership and diplomatic initiative." For Beijing, the crisis is not purely a vulnerability — it is also a narrative. Every day that the U.S. war in Iran generates global energy chaos, and every day that China positions itself as the responsible, peace-seeking alternative, is a day that advances Beijing's preferred frame of a stable, multipolar world order against an erratic, destabilizing America.

The Vision Times' Babak Bahrami put the stakes bluntly: "Iran's defeat in this war would amount to a long-term setback for the development plans of both China and India, as control over Persian Gulf oil would fall into the hands of the United States — an actor that has no interest in the advancement of its rival powers."

The agenda for the Beijing summit will be framed around trade. Tariffs, soybeans, semiconductors, TikTok — the familiar inventory of managed rivalry. The Busan truce from October 2025 gave both sides a temporary off-ramp: China paused rare earth export controls for a year, the U.S. maintained a 10% reciprocal tariff rate. Both sides agreed to revisit the more difficult issues another day. May 14 is, in part, that day.

But the Hormuz dimension will be present whether or not it appears on the formal agenda. Trump has already asked Beijing to help reopen the strait. Beijing has declined. The war continues. China is paying elevated oil prices and managing supply disruptions that its state-owned refineries were not designed to absorb indefinitely.

The question is not whether this creates leverage for Washington. It does. The question is whether Washington has the diplomatic architecture and strategic discipline to deploy it effectively — and whether Beijing, which has historically proven more patient and more systematic in managing coercive pressure, will allow the leverage to be translated into concessions.

The October 2025 Busan analysis from the Atlantic Council made a point that still applies: "it only takes one misstep or misinterpretation on either side for another round of tit-for-tat escalation." A summit where both leaders arrive holding leverage over the other's structural vulnerabilities is a summit with significant upside — and significant downside.

The academic literature on coercive bargaining offers a useful lens here. Schelling argued that the most effective coercive threats are not the most severe, but the most credible. The U.S. does not need to threaten China's oil supply explicitly. The Strait of Hormuz crisis makes the structural reality visible without anyone having to articulate it.

Equally, China does not need to threaten rare earth export controls at the meeting table. Beijing's demonstrated willingness to use those controls — and its selective refusal to help Washington reopen Hormuz — communicates the same message without requiring an explicit ultimatum.

What we are likely to witness on May 14 is not a dramatic confrontation, but a highly sophisticated negotiation between two powers that have each recently demonstrated their capacity to impose asymmetric costs on the other — and who are both, for domestic political reasons, constrained in how far they can escalate. Trump needs lower oil prices and a China deal he can call a win before U.S. midterms. Xi needs tariff relief for an economy that is still absorbing the shocks of 2025.

The Strait of Hormuz is, in this context, less a weapon than a variable — one that changes the geometry of the negotiation without necessarily changing its ultimate shape. Both sides want a deal. Both sides need the other to believe they can survive without one. The strait has shifted that calculus, however temporarily, in Washington's direction.

Whether Trump's team has the sophistication to translate a geographic advantage into a durable diplomatic outcome is the real question heading into May 14. The reserve card is on the table. Playing it well is another matter entirely.

Sources consulted: Al Jazeera, The Vibes, Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, CNBC, Axios, PBS NewsHour, White House Fact Sheet, Wikipedia (2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis), Vision Times, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Vortexa, Visual Capitalist/EIA data, Arms Control Association, Al Jazeera Opinions, EconoTimes.

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