Question: Should China truly fear an oil embargo by the United States and its allies?
- No
- Yes
The perhaps surprising, and even deeply unsettling, answer to this question is an unequivocal “yes.” This is an assessment based on any sober analysis of past US embargo history, the current and considerable capabilities of the US Navy, and America's strategic intentions as expressed by the Pentagon in the event of a “China contingency.”
From a historical perspective, the first country in modern times to impose an oil embargo was not, as many Americans assume, Saudi Arabia, which led the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973–74 against the United States. Rather, it was the United States itself in its embargo of Imperial Japan in 1941. Ironically, at least within the context of our current investigation, this decidedly American embargo was implemented as a means of forcing Japan to withdraw its occupying troops from none other than China itself.
America's embargo on oil and gasoline and other key raw materials to Japan was a harsh blow to a country dependent on the United States for fully 80 percent of its petroleum needs. This embargo, which also included the closure of the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping and a freeze on Japanese assets in the United States, is indeed a cautionary tale as it would lead to one of the most infamous preemptive first strikes in world history—Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor a mere four months after the embargo was imposed.
America's embargo on Japan is, however, hardly the only one etched into the collective consciousness of Chinese Communist Party leaders. After China entered the Korean War on the side of North Korea in 1950, President Harry Truman imposed a complete trade embargo on China that would last for more than twenty years and inflict considerable damage before President Richard Nixon's “Ping-Pong diplomacy” ended the embargo in 1971.
In more recent times, the United States has also never hesitated to use the related tool of economic sanctions against a whole host of what it regards to be rogue nations. These countries—all of whom count China as a friend or ally—have included Cuba, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Syria, and the Sudan. Worth noting, too, are the various US sanctions slapped against Russia for its aggression in Crimea and the Ukraine.
The broader point here, detectives, is that embargoes and sanctions are an integral part of the historical DNA of the United States; and China, which to this day still is embargoed from buying weapons technologies from the United States, is well aware of this history and America's preferred modus operandi when it comes to exerting coercive pressure. However, it's not just what America has done in the past that so worries China. It is also America's formidable naval capabilities.
Indeed, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, no nation on earth has had a blue-water navy capable of globally challenging that of the United States. In fact, today, the Russian Federation Navy is only about one-fourth the size of the Soviet Navy at its peak while the Russian sub fleet has shrunk from almost four hundred boats in 1985 to less than one hundred today.1
For the world economy, the absence of a rival blue-water navy to challenge that of the United States has been a very good thing. This nautical version of a Pax Americana has meant absolute freedom of movement across international shipping lanes for virtually every nation, a concomitant and dramatic increase in world trade, and resultant robust growth levels in virtually every corner of the world—and one must hasten to add here that no country has benefitted more from the American Navy protecting the ocean commons than the world's largest trader: China. That said, even a cursory view of a map of American forces around the globe certainly proves that an American sea embargo on Chinese imports and exports could be highly effective.
Consider, for example, the Persian Gulf from which much of China's oil imports originate. Here, from their headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, commanders of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet direct warships that guard not just the Persian Gulf itself and the harrowing Strait of Hormuz but also patrol as far south as Kenya—one of many African states exporting oil to China.
America's Fifth Fleet is also responsible for protecting the southern end of the Suez Canal that exits into the Red Sea, and from the Red Sea, cargo ships on their way to China must pass through another key choke point a mere twenty miles across. This is the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait—translated literally as the “Gate of Grief”—and it is a critical strategic interface located between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa that helps connect the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
As for American command of that Mediterranean Sea, it is the US Sixth Fleet that roams from the north end of the Suez Canal all the way to the Strait of Gibraltar's gateway to the Atlantic Ocean. This passage through the Mediterranean is a particularly key journey for a large fraction of Chinese exports to Europe, Great Britain, and Scandinavia—and an equally key conduit for imported raw materials and agricultural products.
Meanwhile, in the central Indian Ocean, there is the lush, footprint-shaped seventeen-square-mile coral atoll known as Diego Garcia. This spit of land just south of the equator is one of the most strategic bases in the American matrix. It operates simultaneously as a naval base and marine base and is a key element of the American military's Global Positioning System. It also is an important landing strip for the long-range bombers that were used in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and from this base, B-2 stealth bombers can easily range any major city in China.
Of course, the United States also has air force, army, naval, and marine bases that start from San Diego, leapfrog first to Hawaii and then to Guam, and move inexorably over a seven-thousand-mile journey toward American forward-operating bases in Japan and South Korea—bases far from the US mainland that are well within fighter-jet distance of the Chinese coast.2
As for Guam itself—a key battleground in World War II and less than two thousand miles from the Chinese mainland—it is the strategic anchor and rough midpoint of America's “Second Island Chain” of defense which stretches from the Japanese home islands through Guam to Indonesia's Papua Province and Papua New Guinea. Just thirty miles long, this fortress island is a key transient berth for the Pacific aircraft-carrier fleet. It also bristles with the best weaponry America's military branches have to offer—from B-2 stealth bombers and fifth-generation F-22 fighter jets to nuclear attack submarines and the latest drone technologies.
Map 4.1. United States military bases in the Asia-Pacific.
Of course, America's “First Island Chain” of defense is even closer to the Chinese mainland. It includes South Korea within its perimeter and runs from the Kuril Islands to Japan's home islands and then through Taiwan and Okinawa to the Philippines and Borneo. Like Guam, this First Island Chain is deeply impregnated with American naval forces and considerable firepower.
South Korea alone is home to fifteen bases and close to thirty thousand troops. Japan, which is the headquarters of the US Seventh Fleet at Sasebo and Yokosuka, houses another thirteen bases and close to forty thousand military personnel while fourteen more bases occupy almost 20 percent of the landmass of the Japanese territory of Okinawa Island.
Note, however, that these forward bases and bulwarks of the American presence in Asia are hardly the only ones China has to worry about. After being booted out in 1992, the US Navy has returned to the massive Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines—in no small part (and with no small irony) because the Philippine government increasingly fears a militarizing China. But this is not even the end of the American power-projection story.
In the South China Sea theater of operations, there is also COMLOG WESTPAC. This is a relatively new combat-ready logistics center for the Seventh Fleet based in Singapore. It is expressly designed to “keep combatant ships and units throughout the 7th Fleet armed, fueled, fed and supported.”3 Meanwhile US marines are now being deployed “down under” in Australia at the far edges of the Asian defense perimeter as part of America's declared military “pivot” to Asia.
So what does all this global reach of the US military add up to from Beijing's perspective? Certainly a very credible threat of a highly effective American blockade of the trading routes that comprise the lifeblood of the Chinese economy. Add to this the Pentagon's frequently expressed intention to blockade China in the event of trouble—much more about Pentagon strategies later—and you have a perfectly legitimate reason for China to build up its military, particularly its global naval force, for purely defensive purposes.
Of course, this sobering conclusion raises the question of why the United States would ever want to impose a crippling embargo to begin with on its largest trading partner. It is a question that has all of Asia, along with the Pentagon and the White House, increasingly nervous; and it speaks directly to China's possible territorial ambitions—and possibly malign intentions.