[CMay]

I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments.

China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military runs on oil and for many kinds of products oil has no alternative. A lot of their population still uses ICE cars. You can put a percentage on it, like they are 60% less reliant on oil, but these numbers are useless if they still fundamentally rely on it in critically important ways. Which, they do.

Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack, which shows China that their oil imports from Russia are not guaranteed and their own infrastructure can be reached. Being at Venezuela and Iran's doorstep also shows that oil imports from them are not guaranteed.

As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports. While Iran and Russia are being scaled down, more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon. Iran is being boxed in militarily, politically, economically, and more. They can troll, but even their trolling options are being slowly reduced. Their long range missiles can only achieve those ranges by removing the warhead and adding extra fuel. They are incapable of defending the island that most of their income flows through.

Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan and he's been purging his military just like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland. They've been building out manmade islands and military bases in the sea to increase their claim and threaten anyone who would intervene.

There is also a very big difference between political or token recognition of Taiwan as part of China as a cost of doing business vs real belief. The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy which China will always be a poor example of. If the CCP falls, Taiwan might be able to serve as a new center of gravity, which was also a credible threat from Hong Kong. That is the flip side of the "One China" policy, where it's only good for them so long as the CCP survives. Even without that, travel and communications between them increases interest in a true democracy that gets compared every time the CCP fails at something. COVID, property investment, unemployment, you name it. Ukraine was a similar issue with Russia, partly because they see Russian language and culture as an encapsulation that their mechanisms of control need to dominate within.

Taiwan is in very close proximity, so even if there is a lot of leverage against China from all angles, if they put everything into it they would probably be able to do it at great cost. They don't have the capability matrix to sufficiently achieve a Venezuela. If they tried that right now, it would just start a new 100 years of humiliation if the clock didn't already start the day Xi Jinping got in.

[jmyeet]

> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months

China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China.

Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China.

> Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack

This is a delicate balance. Ukraine can only do so much against Russian energy infrastructure before the US and Europe, who supplies the military, reins it in because of the damage done to the global energy market. This included restricting the supply and use of long-range weapons that could be used to strike energy infrastructure deep in Russia.

Like, did you know that some countries (eg Hungary) are still buying oil and gas from Russia [1]?

> As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports

Iran can do more than harass. They're winning. There is no military path to victory for the US and Israel short of the wide-scale use of nuclear weapons.

> ... more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon

This is just wrong. No Western infrastructure can replace 20Mbpd of crude oil production and losing 20-25% of the world's LNG supply. None. You're talking about investment in the trillions of dollars over a decade or two, assuming you can even find raw resources to extract, whihc is far from certain.

> Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan

Sorry but no. China considers this its territorial waters. And yes I know some of these "islands" (some are just reefs, basically, that they build artificial islands on) are closer to Taiwan or the Phillipines. China considers Taiwan part of its territory so that's no issue for them. Most of the world agrees (ie only ~10 nations recognize Taiwan).

China doesn't want the US or its allies to militarize "islands" right off its coast. Can you blame them?

> The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy

This is just "they hate us for our freedom" type Ameribrainned propaganda. China does more for its people than the US does. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. The truth is that the Chinese government is quite popular with Chinese people. How do Chinese people talk about the US? One good recent example is the "kill line" [2].

Westoids project Western imperialism on China when China has no modern history of doing imperialism. "But Tibet" is the usual rejoinder. That was 1950. Other than that? There was a dispute with Vietnam over like 50 square miles in the late 1970s. And that's it. You want to compare that to the US history with regime change [3]?

Taiwan just isn't the threat to China Westerners make it out to be. We make it out as a threat because it justifies American imperialism. It's the result of propaganda. China believes that the Taiwan question will ultimately be resolved peacefully and there's absolutely no reason to resolve it militarily.

This is a difference of time frames. Every problem we have is immediate requiring a kneejerk reaction. China operates on five year plans but more than that, China plans far mor ein the future than that.

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/3/how-much-of-europes...

[2]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[CMay]

China is only still getting oil from Iran, because we allow it. China knows that. Venezuela and Iran partially tells China, the US does have influence over your oil shipments and you can't sanction proof your oil supply chain. Stopping China's oil shipments right now would just make oil prices go even higher, but we definitely could stop them.

As for Russia, yes there is still some European reliance on Russian oil/gas, but that isn't the only issue as there can also be concern over civilian casualties inside Russia with a complete collapse of oil infrastructure which could hurt some aspects of public support for Ukraine inside Russia and in the rest of the world.

Iran doesn't produce anywhere near 20 million barrels of oil per day, and only a tiny fraction of the 30% of LNG supply is disrupted, which will be coming back online within 3 years. You could argue that Iran might expand its attacks on all the infrastructure in the region to try to take more production offline, but their capacity to do that is shrinking every single day. Even if they did manage it, that would basically greenlight a multi-national ground invasion to end their regime for all time. So just like your arguments about the limitations Ukraine faces in taking out Russian infrastructure, even though Iran is a terrorist state and demonstrating how their terrorism operates, they are still fundamentally limited in what they can do without destroying themselves.

When it comes to China and Taiwan, you need to better appreciate that China has had a standing policy to take Taiwan by force if Taiwan sees itself as independent. Increasingly the Taiwanese population do see themselves as independent and they are arming themselves for defense.

China did not magically bring its population out of poverty, the US did that, by opening up to them and allowing them into the WTC (which they then abused). We thought it might liberalize their economy, which might liberalize their politics, which would pave the way for democratic reform. It didn't happen, but that was part of the plan. The other part of the plan was to increase the dependency of China on western supply chains, because this was part of the logic to stop world wars by making everyone interdependent on each other.

Communism is freaking awful, because it is never achieved and always seems to stagnate into a permanent state of dictatorship. It then sucks enough that it cannot maintain itself naturally, so it has to repress its population and heavily control information to simply prevent crumbling. The logic is not self-reinforcing. Therefore, it absolutely, critically is a threat to freedom around the world.

Technology advancement and resource access accelerates with global trade, so if one country goes rogue, that supply chain can be cut off reducing their incentive for war. China now sees that it continues to have many critical dependencies and its current potential is only achieved as part of a global trade network. Their sanction proofing will never be complete. The concern is that they may not care that they're at a disadvantage and do what they want anyway.

[eimrine]

Your opponent supplies links. You supply a bare words, maybe some bare anti-communist words.