Trump's Veiled Threat To End Trade With China

Our energy blindness may leave us yearning for Prometheus

• Trump tells rivals not to buy Iran's oil - on which China depends

• Blockade would bring mass production economy to an end

• Is that the objective, hidden by politicians' deceit: a Great Reset…

• Needlessly crashing the economy instead of being honest about energy costs?

• Australia re-elects the uniparty a week after Canada installs Mr Smooth-but-same

• We suspect we've been had, but how deep the deception…

• Do jealous elites want to chip and chill us back into slavery?

Western politicians fail to engage honestly with the rising cost of extracting oil, coal and gas. They prefer to sell Green dreams of abundance.

Previously:
Unspeakable: Story Of The Depopulation Agenda - New Series (Apr 27, 2025)
Depopulation's Toxic Dogma Is Centuries Old - Driven by money: part two (Apr 29, 2025)
Related:
Jokers In The Pact Threaten EU War Machine - Regrowth would make economic sense, if serious (Mar 09, 2025)
Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy - Dreams of electric everything defy reality; put the D in population (Sep 08, 2022)
It's All Over Bar The Tyranny - Musk-worship, space dust and innovative dead ends: society goes Pfiz (Jan 01, 2022)

(2,500 words or about 12 minutes of your company)

Prometheus Bound - Peter Paul Rubens, 1611-12

May 3, 2025

President Trump threatened to end all trade with China if the Chinese do not stop buying oil from Iran.

If he goes ahead, the result would be a self-imposed blockade in the U.S. against all Chinese goods.

He posted: “All purchases of Iranian oil or petrochemical products must end now. Any country or person who buys any amount of oil or petrochemicals from Iran will be subject to, immediately, secondary sanctions.”

China currently buys about 90 per cent of Iran's oil.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce has confirmed that this is now U.S. policy and that China in particular is being targeted.

On the surface it seems Trump is committed to war with Iran. Yet as with the tariffs, China emerges as the main target.

Go deeper still, and the world economy is the ultimate objective.

Will the mass production economy come to an end, and do powerful forces wish for its end?

A deliberate contraction of the economy — or what Canadian prime minister Mark Carney calls a "smoother transition to a lower-carbon economy" — would be consistent with sharply curtailing mass consumption.

2008 saw the greatest collapse in world trade since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite some recovery, trade has stayed on a downward trend.

The Covid response in 2020 saw another sharp decline in all product categories, though less precipitous than that of 2008.

Trade is not being hit by demand but by costs and shortages, in particular of coal to power industry, and diesel and jet fuel to power farming and transport.

Gail Tverberg, an American actuary interested in energy depletion, says declining availability of coal, and the inability of oil prices to rise high enough to incentivise extraction, mean that consumption has to give. [1]

She suggests that sanctions on Russia and Venezuela are an attempt to manage the cost of diesel and jet fuel (particularly important in world trade) while tariffs against China are intended to scale down long distance transport.

This need not be catastrophic. Under the maximum power principle the self-organising cogs of society would recalibrate: if industrial output is limited it might focus on making replacement parts for current machinery, and on farm equipment, she says. "The underlying physics of the system is what leads to the changes that take place."

It might not recalibrate in a direction that benefits the majority, however.

Witness the European Commission's effort to subsidise weapons manufacture over and above other industries. This is supposedly justified by the need to wage war with Russia. Yet at the same time the European Green Deal is committed to closing small farms and centralising food production.

In both cases there will likely be fewer goods from China, or goods made abroad with Chinese inputs. Commodity prices will fall, tending towards deflation. Governments bailing out banks and failing welfare and pension systems will result in money printing and tend towards hyperinflation. The result being stagflation.

We got a hint of the future electrical grid with the Iberian blackout. With intermittent solar and wind power, and increasing demands for electricity, rationing is inescapable. That means that government dreams of massive data centres running everything through artificial intelligence will compete with human need for energy for food, heat and travel. Governments may try to limit human energy use through programmable digital currencies (CBDC) but such cybernetic control would itself require a lot of energy.

In other words, the energy crunch — Net Zero aka the Great Reset aka Green New Deal — is not proceeding in the way you are told by politicians, press and television.

Politicians in particular have misrepresented the dilemma. If they'd been honest, they would say there are energy resources available but the cost of extraction and limits on pollution mean they'll cost a lot more more. You may not get the lifestyle you have come to expect. So you are going to have to change your consumption priorities.

Instead governments claimed they didn't need stable, calorific energy - instead they could have a subsidised energy system, enough to power coffee machines rather than blast furnaces - and it would be cleaner, too.

They turned to debt - a subsidised Green energy and subsidised consumption! A Potemkin economy.