In a world of global financial markets, 5G networks and cyberwar, geography still rules. The two shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, each two miles wide, hold the key to the Persian Gulf and roughly half of the world’s proven oil reserves and production capacity. That is why the recent attacks, widely assumed to have been ordered by Iran, on tankers in the Gulf of Oman, a strategic waterway just outside the Strait, have frayed geopolitical nerves the world over.
...Likewise, the Americans know that in the constricted waters of the Gulf, their large warships are prone to attacks by Iranian swarm boats, even as Iran’s proximity to Saudi Arabia threatens that fragile kingdom and American ally. Truly, the Middle East faces a crisis of room.
Yet geography tells a more important story in the Gulf region: The current tensions are less about Iran and the Persian Gulf than about China and the Indian Ocean.
...In the southwestern corner of Pakistan, close to the Iranian border, China has completed a state-of-the-art container port at Gwadar, which Beijing hopes will eventually link up with roads, railways and pipelines to western China. And from Gwadar, the Chinese can monitor shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
....China and Iran will eventually find a way to cooperate and thwart the United States.
... China has a grand strategy that understands all this geography and culture. The United States, by contrast, is pursuing a myopic, war-by-choice strategy with Iran. Its withdrawal from the free-trading alliance in maritime Eurasia, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, shows that Washington has no plan to compete with the Belt and Road Initiative. The Americans are obsessed with the Persian Gulf as a small, distinct region; the Chinese see the larger, more fluid geographical picture.
regime change in Iran could lead to a worse state of affairs, with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp in direct control, rather than in indirect control as now.
The Chinese vision for Iran to be a hub for its Belt and Road Initiative is something the United States is simply not going to change.
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