Exports to the US is about 20% of China's GDP [2].
Regardless of any of China's contingency plans, US exports are well above noise-levels.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268173/countries-with-th...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location...
What you should take note of, is that China's trade surplus tracks the US trade deficit extremely closely, and this has been the case for the last 20 years.
Said another way, most nations in the world run roughly balanced trade. There is only one nation on earth that can sustain large and prolonged trade deficits. Only one. That is the US. So if you are a nation whose entire economic strategy rests on running large and sustained trade surpluses, then you are going to be exporting your surplus to the US, directly or indirectly, and only to the US.
Now in practice, some of that will be direct sales to the US, some will be indirect sales to the US, but at the end of the day, if you want to run a 1.2 trillion dollar trade surplus, then you have to hope to God that the US is willing to run at least a trillion dollar trade deficit, because no other country is going to do that for you, the entire rest of the world may be willing to accomodate a hundred billion or so, but for everything else, you will depend on the US, directly or indirectly, to absorb your surplus.
> Last year, the daily cost of hiring an oil supertanker (known as a Very Large Crude Carrier, or VLCC) to sail from the Persian Gulf to China was just $65,000, according to Clarksons, a London-based research firm.
> Now? It costs $1.6 million per day to hire a VLCC for that route, according to Clarksons.
Trust me, by almost any metric you can think of, this was a strategic defeat for the US.
Iran's leadership was replaced with more extreme leadership and America has spent countless billions.
Nothing is better.
Only a hyperpartisan brain could refer to that as any sort of victory.
Getting the oil supply back to prewar levels isn’t winning by itself, and I didn’t say it was. But it does open a path to winning, because holding the oil hostage is the only leverage the Iranian regime has.
Can the hyperpartisan brain not count past 113?
Please support this statement.
Imagine that your country - whose rulers you do not agree with - is attacked by two states unprovoked in the middle of negotiations, not once, but twice in a single year.
And how do they initiate this attack? They strike a number of targets, one of which the compound your head of state is living in along with members of his family, including a child (his granddaughter). Mind you, your head of state was not in a bunker, but was an 87 year old man living his life as normal. After executing this amazing operation, these two states then call on your people to rise up and overthrow the government.
What would you do?
Saddam, Maduro, Gaddafi, Assad—all those guys were mostly terrorizing their own people and shouldn’t have been taken out. I don’t think Khamenei should’ve been taken out either, but boy did he deserve it more than any of the others.
And I'm curious which sanctions by Russia are crippling "the west"?
Considering we only see Russian bots talking about lifting sanctions nowadays and everybody else moved on to other subjects in Europe, it must have some effect of some sort, otherwise they wouldn't talk about it.
> And Russia is in a winning position in the war.
At best, even if they took the full country tomorrow, I don't think there's any way to save Russia from medium term collapse.
They would need a Marshall plan of somebody giving them 300 billions for free and I don't see that happening and who would do that.
> but the West has bet everything on a victory which means they'd rather see it continue to the last Ukrainian
You have it backwards, Ukraine and Europe want a victory so that Russia doesn't continue to kill to the last Ukrainian. (And for Europe more importantly, not being the next one in line).
That's what Russia's policy of destroying cities and killing civilians do.
Well, Iran was offered similar amount by certain somebody, so never say never
It's never 4d chess. it's just a guy desperately trying to get diesel prices to temporarily decline _without_ having to admit that he's a fucking idiot for having dragged America into Israel's war on Iran.
And even then, it's only because of the mid-terms. The GOP does not give a single solitary fuck about the sorts of people who notice and are hurt by gas prices. The GOP despises American workers.
This is not GOP vs DNC. They are fully corrupted on both sides, and stopped representing their constituents a long time ago.