Locked in a war that has provoked threats of genocide from America amid mayhem from Iran, Washington and Tehran are forming an accidental alliance to strangle global trade and cripple the world economy.
Donald Trump’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz to all Iranian shipping and to all vessels that have paid Tehran an illegally imposed toll for using the international sea passage, combined with Iran’s illegal blocking of the oil artery, drove the price of a physical barrel of crude oil up to $148.
Already the cause of a global economic slowdown and surge in the price of oil, gas, fertilizer, helium and dozens of other petrochemicals, the Israel-US war against Iran and Tehran’s retaliation put all three nations squarely in the dock for violations of international law.
These now include America’s threat to violate the Laws of the Sea by making threats against international shipping which move about a fifth of the world’s fuel through the Strait.
China imports about 31 per cent of the oil shipped, India about 14 per cent. In total about 86 per cent of all the oil shipped from the Gulf region by this route goes to Asia.
So China has called for “restraint” in the latest desperate effort of both the US and Iran to take their conflict to a place where each can declare some kind of victory.
It is unclear how a US blockade would be managed. China buys about 80 per cent of Iran’s oil exports – up to 1.5 million barrels a day.
So a threat against ships taking Iranian oil through the only route out of the Gulf is a strategic threat against China.
Sinking a vessel taking oil to China would be an environmental catastrophe. It could, in theory, be seen by Beijing as an act of war.
Boarding tankers from Iran by US forces in international waters could be interpreted as enforcing sanctions. But China and Tehran would also argue that such moves would be violations of international laws governing the seascape.
Beijing is unlikely to take a belligerent stand. But Xi Jinping would pocket the precedent of a pirate super power again ripping up regulations designed to ensure free passage of goods around the world.
China has been building artificial islands in the South China Sea for years in an effort to lay wider claims to sovereignty over a narrow sea passage which the US and United Nations have ruled are illegal efforts to cheat the international system of Laws of the Sea. The US, and the UK among other allies, regularly sails warships through the South China Sea and close to the new archipelago of fake islands to prevent China asserting sovereignty.
Trump’s latest bizarre threat against Iran included the claim that “other Countries will be involved with this Blockade. Iran will not be allowed to profit off this Illegal Act of EXTORTION,” he wrote in a social media post.
So far no American allies have agreed to participate in his illegal blockade.
