China's Hormuz Calculus
- Richard Murff
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
Russia + Iran doesn’t necessarily equal Taiwan
Any Big Man worth his salt will has an entourage of goons to do the flexing and look like maniacs while he looks calm and in charge. The tactic has its dangers, and Beijing is learning a hard power lesson. Big Panda is seeing what happens when you loose control of your lieutenants: As Iran did wit Hamas leading to its current pummeling. The shocks are reverberating upstream and now threaten the entire global system China needs to survive.
Almost any complex system runs on its predictability. Without that, it loses superiority over mere chaos. People who study complex systems call the inevitable unpredictability generated within them “variety” and a system’s stability depends largely on how well it is managed. Practically speaking, White House seems to luxuriate in unpredictable chaos to gain short-term advantage, which is exactly the sort of variety China’s current entrenched model needs to avoid.
It’s a mistake to believe that because someone habitually breaks the rules, they aren’t invested in them. If constraints on the actions of others disappear, whatever advantage the rule-breaker has will vanish into anarchy of constant conflict. Chins used the US-led world order to pull itself out of medieval poverty and become the world’s second economic power. Without that order, its export-led economic model will collapse. The irony here being that Beijing needs America to maintain the stable order that Big Panda plans to dominate. It is also a trait of authoritarian regimes that they can operate a longer game that popular politics allows.
System Calculus:
Ukraine:
From a systems point of view, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced scads of variety, but China’s calculus to deal with it was fairly simple and straightforward. After the first six months of the war there were only two likely outcomes. The first was that the US and Europe would charge in quickly and turn Russia back. Chastened, Moscow would retreat, tying itself – as well as its oil and gas – closer to China. The second was that the West would waffle the way it does, splitting the NATO powers which would:
Isolate the US without destroying the order
Put a lonely, rich and weak Europe under the shadow of Russian energy and Chinese economic heft
Give China domination over the entire Eurasian landmass Which would
Deliver that disjointed, mineral-rich train-wreck that is Africa over to Chinese control and influence.
For China, neither outcome is too problematic.
Hormuz:
The second component to go haywire was Iran. Unlike Ukraine, the crisis in Hormuz is generating enough violent variety to plausibly collapse not only in the Axis Beijing built as a counter-weight to US dominance in the global order, but the order itself. The acute energy dependency of the Indo-Pacific puts the entire region into turmoil when Big Panda needs to be calmly in charge. It’s been planing for this crisis, a recent government report on “international maritime chokepoints” recommended not only investment in overland energy pipelines, but to “develop high-seas escorts and emergency support capabilities.”
Planning, however, doesn’t always equal readiness. Navel escorts sound like a good idea but may prove more expensive than effective in a world where great power competition is being brought low by asymmetrical warfare. If the AK-47 turned every guerrilla outfit into an army, then drones and AI have given every crack-pot militia an air force.
The first order effect of Hormuz has been spiking oil prices and to tie down China’s main rival down in a famously tricky region. It looks like a win, but the second order effects rattling what Beijing considers an internal issue may produce enough variety to bring the entire order down. Which brings us to…
Taiwan:
The US may be distracted, but it is also frustrated, incoherent and violently lashing out. It may be stretched thin, but it still has the most powerful military in the world. That matters because a conflict over Taiwan would not be like either Ukraine or Hormuz. First, it would involve blockades across the many Asian-Pacific chokepoints as well as the Chinese mainland – something Beijing fears because it can’t return the favor to the US. China’s navy may have more ships than America’s, but that won’t last long. The US submarine fleet is larger and, to Chinese tech, largely invisible. In short, we can see them and they can’t see us. Last month, a US submarine sank an Iranian warship, the first such attack since 1945.
The games, it seems, have begun.
Second Order Effects
The rules of war are quickly being scrapped by the ones who wrote them. For better or worse, the global sea lanes are now in play. Any war with China will see the sort of unrestricted attacks on shipping last seen durning the first and second World Wars making it impossible for any trading nation to sit the conflict out. Global shipping, and markets, will crater triggering an economic war of attrition.
For China, its model depends on getting its wares to market, without that its entire model collapses. This isn’t going to be too much fun stateside either: prices will rise as the economy stagnates. Yet, America has its insulation: We are a net exporter of energy as more sources come on line in the western hemisphere. We are likely to patch things up with Europe to keep the Atlantic open. Understand that there will be less of everything and it will be more expensive, but the American economic model is dynamo where creative destruction is a feature, not a bug.
The United States has the advantage because, for all its sins, it is simply wired to rewire itself.
