What Iran’s Strike Revealed About China’s Industrial Dependencies

Alexander Muse – Imagine two chess players who have studied each other for decades. One controls the queen. The other controls the board’s perimeter. For years, the player with the queen has dictated terms, threatening pieces everywhere, forcing concessions, extracting advantage with quiet menace. Then, unexpectedly, a third party knocks several squares off the board entirely, and the player with the queen suddenly realizes that some of her most critical moves depended on those very squares. The perimeter player did not plan this. He simply recognizes what has changed. The question is whether he is awake enough to see it.

This is, with some compression, the situation the United States finds itself in following Iran’s strike campaign against Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City. The attack did not merely disrupt energy markets, though it did that with considerable force. It did not merely rattle allies in the Gulf, though it rattled them hard. What it also did, almost as a byproduct, was expose a hidden fracture line running through China’s industrial economy, a dependence on helium that Beijing cannot easily remedy and that the U.S., almost by accident, is now positioned to exploit. Continue reading →