Rewiring the World: Energy, Finance, and the U.S.–China Contest
Many Koreans around me describe Donald Trump as an impulsive decision-maker who has made a series of unwise choices: the war with Iran, the operation in Venezuela, and continued support for Ukraine. Much of the Korean media presents a similar picture. Viewed one headline at a time, these decisions look reckless, contradictory, or improvised.
That interpretation is too narrow and distorts what is happening.
My argument is the opposite. Trump has placed a full-spectrum contest with China—one fought mostly without direct gunfire between the two powers—at the center of American foreign and economic policy. From that perspective, his decisions involving Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and Ukraine are deliberate moves within a longer contest, not disconnected impulses.
The right unit of analysis is not the individual event but the strategic network it changes. After each American intervention, sanction, tariff, or agreement, where does the energy supply move? Which shipping route, pipeline, long-term contract, transit corridor, currency, or payment system becomes more important? Whose alternatives shrink, and whose leverage increases? Compared through these changes in dependence, several apparently unrelated American actions form a coherent pattern.
China is extraordinarily powerful in electricity generation, manufacturing, renewable energy, batteries, and increasingly electric transportation. Yet hydrocarbons remain a different problem. China is still the world’s largest crude-oil importer, importing a record 11.6 million barrels per day in 2025, and it remains heavily exposed to external oil and gas supply routes.
That matters because three countries repeatedly appearing in recent American foreign policy—Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—have also been important suppliers of energy to China.
Before the American intervention in Venezuela, China took more than half of Venezuelan crude exports in 2025. After Nicolás Maduro was removed in January 2026, the direction of those flows changed dramatically. By July, Venezuela was exporting roughly 1.16 million barrels per day, of which about 786,000 barrels per day were going to the United States.
What followed is equally interesting. Venezuela did not immediately undergo a complete dismantling of the old political system. Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, became interim president, while Washington moved rapidly to normalize oil production, exports, investment, and control over oil revenues.
The sequence points to another American objective: redirecting Venezuelan energy.
Iran reveals an even stronger connection.
China purchased more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil in 2025, averaging about 1.38 million barrels per day. Iranian crude alone represented roughly 13 percent of China’s seaborne oil imports.
The official American objectives in the Iran war have focused on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, ballistic missiles, naval forces, and regional proxies.
The energy dimension is equally visible. In February 2026, the United States authorized additional tariffs against countries purchasing Iranian goods and services. Similar economic pressure had already been applied to purchasers of Russian and Venezuelan oil.
India is an especially revealing case. Washington imposed additional tariffs because India was buying Russian oil, then removed them after India committed to stop those purchases and increase imports of American energy. South Korea and Japan have likewise expanded or committed to expand purchases of U.S. energy. South Korea’s Korea Gas Corporation, for example, signed long-term agreements covering roughly 3.3 million tonnes of U.S.-sourced LNG per year.
Seen individually, these are trade negotiations, sanctions, military operations, peace agreements, and energy contracts.
Seen as a network, they look different.
They shift marginal energy flows away from countries outside the American system and toward suppliers, markets, infrastructure, and financial arrangements in which the United States has greater leverage.
The same logic makes an obscure-looking agreement in the South Caucasus strategically important.
The U.S.-backed TRIPP corridor is intended to connect Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave through southern Armenia and ultimately toward Turkey. The infrastructure can include roads, railways, energy links, and communications. A U.S.-backed development company is structured to hold a 74 percent stake for an initial 49 years, with the possibility of extending the arrangement, while Armenia retains sovereignty, border control, customs, taxation, and security authority.
Geopolitically, it places long-lived U.S.-backed infrastructure in a region where Russia and Iran historically exercised substantial influence—and immediately along Iran’s northern strategic environment.
American power is increasingly exercised not only by controlling territory, but by influencing the networks through which strategic resources move.
What comes after energy?
Finance.
In 2025, the United States formally adopted a policy of promoting dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide while rejecting a U.S. central-bank digital currency. The GENIUS Act went further: the administration explicitly presented dollar stablecoins as a mechanism for reinforcing the dollar’s reserve-currency role and creating additional demand for U.S. Treasury securities.
This is monetary infrastructure policy, not merely cryptocurrency policy.
If AI agents increasingly negotiate, purchase, invest, rebalance portfolios, and settle transactions autonomously, financial activity could become more continuous, programmable, and machine-to-machine. In such a world, the dominant payment rail may matter almost as much as the dominant currency.
The United States is betting on private, dollar-denominated digital money distributed through relatively open financial networks. China has chosen a different path: the e-CNY and multi-CBDC infrastructure such as mBridge.
The competition between the United States and China is not ultimately about who owns more resources. It is about who designs the networks through which resources, payments, and transactions have to move.
Oil pipelines, shipping routes, LNG contracts, transit corridors, payment rails, stablecoins, and digital settlement systems belong to different policy domains. Strategically, they are the same thing: infrastructure for flows.
Geopolitical power often belongs to whoever can shape the flow without having to own everything that flows through it.