On the menu today: The Trump administration’s approach to China and Xi Jinping has left a lot to be desired, but as the pressure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers mounts, there are some encouraging signs that President Trump is taking a tougher line with Xi. On paper, the U.S. war against Iran is bad news for China, but that could change if the sense grows that the U.S. is tied down in another Middle East war. Meanwhile, three new details make the government’s actions regarding the Old Dominion University terrorist even worse. Read on.
Trump’s Tough Talk on China Might Have Teeth
A recurring complaint of this newsletter, and elsewhere, is that Donald Trump, the man who once said on the campaign trail, “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” has mostly proven to be about as tough as the Pillsbury Doughboy to Xi Jinping once in office, particularly in his second term.
From allowing Nvidia to sell advanced AI chips to China, to halting sanctions on the Chinese Ministry of State Security, to the TikTok deal, to reversing announced restrictions on Chinese students on American campuses, to blocking the travel of the Taiwanese president, to talking about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan with Xi . . . on front after front, Trump keeps making decisions that leave Xi smiling. We were promised a rottweiler, and we got a chihuahua.
You’ll recall that in a March 9 press conference, Trump emphasized how much the U.S. military operation against Iran is benefiting China, an unorthodox argument from the man who adopted the slogan, “America first”:
I mean, we’re doing this for the other parts of the world, including countries like China. They get a lot of their oil through the straits. So, we’re doing this. We have a very good relationship with President Xi and China. I’m going there in a short period of time. And we’re protecting the world from what these lunatics are trying to do, and very successfully, I might add.
Trump is correct; before the war started, almost 38 percent of the oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz went to China, about 5.3 million barrels per day. The next highest country is India at almost 15 percent, or a bit more than 2 million barrels per day. Just 2 percent of the oil passing through the Strait ends up being used in the United States.
As you’ll recall, Chinese ships are getting through the Strait just fine. Last night, CBS News’ 60 Minutes featured an interview with Matt Smith, who is an oil market analyst for Kpler, which tracks global trade and shipping:
And this past week, Smith and his team made a surprising discovery: that Iran has exported, daily, 100,000 more barrels of oil than it did before the war, most of it going to China. Smith says nine Iranian oil tankers have traveled through the Strait of Hormuz by turning off transponders that reveal locations.
Those of you with long memories may remember China and the Iran-backed Houthis having a similar arrangement in 2024, where the Houthis deliberately avoided targeting the ships of China’s state-owned COSCO in the Red Sea. At the time, Chinese professor and military expert Yun Hua, who is a faculty member at the PLA’s National Defense University, boasted, “China’s COSCO Shipping Holding has become the only major shipping giant able to navigate the Red Sea.”
Finally, there are some signs that Trump is losing patience with Xi. He conducted an eight-minute interview with the Financial Times on Sunday and told the newspaper that he could delay his summit with Xi, scheduled for March 31 in Beijing as part of a three-day presidential visit to China.
“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump told the Financial Times. After saying that U.S. allies in Europe should volunteer to help escort oil tankers through the strait, Trump added, “I think China should help too because China gets 90 per cent of its oil from the straits [sic].” He added he wanted to hear a decision from China before the summit. “We’d like to know before that. It’s [two weeks is] a long time.”
The Chinese government may not see much need to send its navy to the Persian Gulf, since their cargo ships are traveling unmolested.
But there’s another move the Trump administration made last week that largely got lost in a busy news cycle: United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced the initiation of new investigations into 60 countries about “excess manufacturing capacity” and forced labor.
“Despite the international consensus against forced labor, governments have failed to impose and effectively enforce measures banning goods produced with forced labor from entering their markets. For too long, American workers and firms have been forced to compete against foreign producers who may have an artificial cost advantage gained from the scourge of forced labor,” Greer said. “These investigations will determine whether foreign governments have taken sufficient steps to prohibit the importation of goods produced with forced labor and how the failure to eradicate these abhorrent practices impacts U.S. workers and businesses.”
Everybody in the world knows that forced labor is rampant in China; the only people who dispute this are cheerleaders for the regime in Beijing. On its last day in office, the Biden administration released its updated report on forced labor in China’s Xinjiang Region. (Real brave of them, huh?) From that report:
Over the last four years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has carried out a mass detention and political indoctrination campaign against Uyghurs, who are predominantly Muslim, and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang), a large region in western China. The courageous voices of survivors, their family members abroad, researchers, and international advocacy groups have thoroughly documented the PRC’s discriminatory use of surveillance technologies and trumped-up administrative and criminal charges to abduct and detain more than one million Muslims, including Uyghurs, ethnic Hui, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, ethnic Tajiks, and ethnic Uzbeks, in as many as 1,200 state-run internment camps throughout Xinjiang. Detention in these camps is intended to erase ethnic and religious identities under the pretext of “vocational training.” Forced labor is a central tactic used for this repression.
In Xinjiang, the government is the trafficker. Authorities use threats of physical violence, forcible drug intake, physical and sexual abuse, and torture to force detainees to work in adjacent or off-site factories or worksites producing garments, footwear, carpets, yarn, food products, holiday decorations, building materials, extractives, materials for solar power equipment and other renewable energy components, consumer electronics, bedding, hair products, cleaning supplies, personal protective equipment, face masks, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other goods — and these goods are finding their way into businesses and homes around the world.
Human rights abroad have never been a top priority of President Trump’s foreign policy worldview. But we know Trump loves tariffs — “Tariff is my favorite word. . . . I’ve loved it for 40 years” — and one of the clearest and most compelling justifications for a tariff is restricting the importation of goods produced with forced labor. Even the most ardent free trader has some problem with importing goods produced by slaves, because that is the opposite of a free market.
It may well be that the forced labor investigation was announced as additional leverage for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s meetings with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Paris that are wrapping up today. But the seeming truce on trade with the Chinese may prove short-lived if Trump doesn’t start seeing the kind of cooperation he expects from Xi and his regime.
You can find smart foreign policy analysts who disagree about whether the U.S.-Israeli joint military action against Iran is good or bad news for China.
Zineb Riboua is a research fellow and program manager of Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She wrote here on March 4 that Operation Epic Fury was proving “catastrophic” for Xi Jinping and his regime:
Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the U.N. Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.
Second, Xi’s own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people — that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection — does not match what happened in mere hours over Tehran. State media can suppress the footage, and the censors can scrub Weibo, but the ones who matter most — the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living — know what they saw. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether it was ever right about anything else.
Riboua points out that when push came to shove, China’s support for the Iranian mullahs mostly consisted of a statement that “Iran’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity should be respected.” Let’s also point out that Chinese air defense systems are proving to be Temu-brand quality, when up against U.S. and Israeli air power and long-distance strike weapons. If you’re a Chinese military official planning the invasion of Taiwan, that’s the sort of performance that will likely keep you up at night.
But Jianli Yang, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and one of our regular columnists, warned that a long-term military commitment to battling the Iranian regime could weaken the U.S. relative to China on the world stage:
As Trump prepares to travel to Beijing for a summit with Xi later this month, the potential drawbacks of sustained U.S. involvement in Iran are being brought into focus. If it became clear that the United States was gradually sinking into an Iranian quagmire while inflation at home rises because of war-driven energy shocks, Trump’s bargaining position would inevitably weaken in negotiations with Xi on trade, Taiwan, and a range of other geopolitical issues. Beijing would see little reason to compromise with a United States that appears strategically distracted and economically pressured. If Washington appears overextended in the Middle East, Xi Jinping will negotiate accordingly.
In geopolitics, timing is everything. It takes nimbleness and resolve to know when to start a war. But it takes even greater wisdom and vision to know when to stop.
Over at the Washington Free Beacon, my old India traveling companion Mike Watson argues that the outcome of this war with Iran will have enormous ramifications for how the U.S. and China see each other:
If Tehran knows we cannot prevent it from blocking the Strait of Hormuz, it will have tremendous leverage against Trump and the rest of the world. For example, Iran could race for the bomb with much less fear of an American strike against the program. This would create new and threatening possibilities for Beijing and Tehran to collaborate. Any attempt to weaken China in a crisis or conflict would be much harder if, for example, Tehran informed the Europeans that any collaboration with Washington would cost them their access to Gulf energy. The duo could attack their neighbors simultaneously, since the American military would struggle to defeat both at the same time.
The choice between deterring China and defeating Iran is thus a false one. Iran’s leadership must fail, and be seen to fail, to reduce the threat of further war in the region and elsewhere. Trump is facing one of the greatest tests of his presidency, and the country needs him to ace it.
Once you’re in a war, you must win it to avoid disastrous consequences. We must restore safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and if that means bombing everything that could launch a drone or a missile within hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf shoreline, so be it. The world’s supply of oil cannot be held hostage by a terrorist regime. (Man, it feels like 1990 and 1991 some days, doesn’t it?)
I would note that Trump’s unexpected attacks against Venezuela and Iran have added to his own personal version of the “madman theory.” Nobody knows what Trump will do in the near future, in part because Trump probably doesn’t know himself. Nicolás Maduro thought so little of President Trump that he mocked him with a little dance. He’s probably not dancing in his cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center this morning. Last October, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sneered that Trump’s speech to the Knesset was “empty words” and “buffoonery.”
The ayatollah could not be reached for comment, nor could his son.
ADDENDUM: Two details to add to Friday’s Morning Jolt about the terrorist attack on Old Dominion University’s campus . . .
First, as Fox’s Bill Melugin reveals:
The man charged by DOJ for selling the gun used by the ODU terrorist was caught straw purchasing three guns in 2021 (all of which were later recovered at crime scenes, including a homicide) but the Biden DOJ declined to prosecute. He got a warning & signed an apology letter.
Second, because of a law signed by former Governor Ralph Northam, Old Dominion University enrolled Mohamed Bailor Jalloh as a student and had no idea of his criminal conviction for attempting to help ISIS.
Earlier this year, Virginia’s current governor, Abigail Spanberger, appointed Northam to the governing board of Virginia Military Institute, where he will be advising on photo selection for the yearbook.
Third, as our Andy McCarthy reveals:
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was sentenced in 2017, but he was credited with time served beginning with his May 2016 arrest. Still, it appears he should have been in custody until the end of 2025. For reasons unexplained at this point, he was released on December 23, 2024, about a year early. He was given a five-year term of supervised release (post-sentence administration by the Bureau of Prisons). As the atrocious events of Thursday demonstrate, it’s a very passive form of supervision with no meaningful deterrent effect against terrorists and hardened criminals.
So, the government let this convicted ISIS terrorist out early, chose not to punish the straw buyer who sold him the gun, made it illegal for the school to learn about his criminal history, and chose to not put him under surveillance after he was released . . . and yet, in the mind of Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi, this is all somehow the fault of America’s gun owners?