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China Could Exploit Middle East Oil Dependency: Retired US Marine Colonel 91%
4/1/2026, 2:24:04 AM
BS Summary: This video contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Appeal to Authority, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 34.1% saturation with 306 hits. Analysis detected 2,891 faulty-reasoning hits from 897 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 85.6% and a BS Rank of 91% (1,591 of 16,813 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 90.50% of the video peer group.
President Trump sending a message today to nations in need of jet fuel. Buy American and take over the state of Hormuse yourselves. The US, unlike some of its allies, is a juggernaut in domestic energy production. And it's paid off in this conflict, giving it some degree of buffer from rising oil and gas prices.
Meanwhile, countries like the UK, China, Japan, and Taiwan have relied on the Hampered Strait for different fuels.
We're now bringing in different fuels.
Grant Musham, retired US Marine Colonel and former US diplomat. He's also senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the author of When China Attacks.
Grant, thank you so much for joining us.
Always great to see you.
Now, President Trump called out the UK in his social media post for refusing to get involved in the decapitation of Iran.
Financial Times reporting that the UK is getting its last known shipment of jet fuel from the Middle East.
The report says the UK sourced at least half of its jet fuel from the Middle East in recent months.
Could this war lead to a restructuring of the global energy market which is tied to national security?
>> Well, I think it just might.
You've got the problems with Iran that have made the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf region in particular, a place where you're not so sure you have a reliable source and the Red Sea similarly with the Houthis causing trouble.
That's in question as well. So you have a place like America that has a ton of oil, ton of energy, Canada as well if they exploited it.
Australia as well is just sitting on all sorts of useful energy.
And it is possible that we might see really this reconstruction reconfiguration of the the energy market.
You might even see countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, the other Gulf states actually start routing their oil west and north and south so that it doesn't have to deal with the Persian Gulf, the Straits of Hormuz.
This will take a while, but you may see us sort of see things shifting away from what it's been for most of our lifetimes, which is the Persian Gulf Straits of Hormuz.
And looking at some other nations, nearly all of Japan's oil comes from the Middle East and Taiwan stateowned energy companies as about a third of its oil and LG came from the Middle East last year.
In a hypothetical attack on Taiwan or leading up to it, how could China exploit this dependence on Middle East energy?
>> Oh, it wouldn't be hard at all.
Particularly in the case of Taiwan, they don't have anywhere near the supplies or the storage oil or LNG that they need.
And all China has to do is to make some move that suggests that they're going to interrupt that those flows.
And even the psychological effect of thinking that there's going to be an interruption would cause immense damage to Taiwan's economy.
Japan's in a little better shape.
A little better shape.
It has much bigger reserves.
It's um got a military that's capable of keeping its supply lines open at least to the east.
So if Japan links up with America with Canada as its primary sources rather than this dependence on 90 plus% that comes out of the Middle East a huge part of that comes out to the Persian Gulf.
If they start looking for other sources they can then put themselves in a much better position.
But if they want to just continue doing what they've always done, well, that's potentially vulnerable.
China can fairly easily choke off the supply routes through the South China Sea, East China Sea.
and that's one of the reasons Japan is so concerned about China's military expansion and also China's designs on Taiwan and the South China Sea itself.
>> And in a big reversal, Nikay is reporting that China may be purchasing US oil and gas once again.
That's after bringing this trade to a halt last year.
Now, the report says 600,000 barrels are said to be loaded onto tankers headed to China in April, but that they could ultimately be diverted to Japan or South Korea.
Your reaction if they do go to Korea. China.
>> Well, it shows that the Chinese have some problems of their own.
We tend to think that they have the death grip on us via the rare earth minerals that they control so much of.
But it goes the other way as well.
China is dependent on energy imports and if they can't get it from the Middle East like they thought they could or from Venezuela that they were reliant on as well, well, they have to get it somewhere and America's got a lot of it.
Whether or not they will sort of go all in on that dependency is another question.
But China has its vulnerabilities.
Energy and oil is one of them.
And Mr. Trump and his administration understand this.
Grant, while the president is calling on nations to secure the strait, some experts say that European allies have weakened militaries, an issue that goes back to the end of the Cold War.
Are they and allies in the Indoacific
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