A report by geopolitical consulting firm Asia Group, examining the economic and strategic effects of the US-Israel strikes on Iran and the subsequent Strait of Hormuz crisis, concludes that China emerged as the sole clear winner in Asia from the commodity shock and geopolitical turbulence. The analysis, which examined China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asian emerging markets across energy, manufacturing, and agriculture sectors, found that Beijing’s combination of massive crude oil stockpiles — sufficient for 104 days of imports as of January 2026 — and its accelerating renewable energy buildout shielded the Chinese economy from the worst effects of the energy price spike that followed Iran’s near-closure of the Strait. China simultaneously used the crisis to cast the United States as a destabilising actor, accumulating soft power in the Global South while its clean technology exports surged: EV shipments rose 110% year-on-year in May and solar shipments were up 60% in April.
The received wisdom
The progressive and realist consensus on the Hormuz crisis is that it was an avoidable catastrophe with no winners — that the Trump administration’s decision to join Israel in strikes that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei on February 28 was a reckless gamble that imposed massive energy costs on the global economy, particularly on Asia’s import-dependent economies, for goals that could have been achieved through diplomacy. The humanitarian toll of the Iranian strikes and the regional destabilisation they produced are real. The progressive argument adds that China’s gains are less a testimony to Chinese strategic genius than to American strategic recklessness — that Washington essentially handed Beijing a gift it did not have to earn. On that reading, the lesson is that the United States should return to the patient, multilateral diplomacy of the JCPOA era rather than the coercive unilateralism of the current moment.
A different read
The progressive critique has merit up to a point, but it tends to underweight just how deliberately China prepared for exactly this contingency — and how many years of patient strategic planning that preparation required. The Asia Group’s data shows that China’s crude imports grew from 11.1 to 11.6 million barrels per day in 2025, and that over 80% of that increase went to strategic stockpiles rather than immediate consumption. Beijing built 104 days of import cover not by accident but by design — an explicit hedge against exactly the kind of Middle East disruption that Washington’s own intelligence community had been warning about for years. That is not opportunism. That is strategy.
The renewable energy dimension is equally deliberate. China installed 315 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2025 alone — more than 50% of the world’s total new solar construction — and already has 1.4 terawatts of operating renewable capacity online. Wind and solar now supply 22% of Chinese electricity, rising toward a 30% target. This is not green idealism; it is energy security policy pursued with the single-mindedness that Beijing applies to strategic priorities. When the Hormuz crisis spiked global energy prices, China’s exposure was structurally smaller than Japan’s or South Korea’s, both of which lack significant domestic energy production and hold far smaller strategic reserves.
The soft power dimension may be the most durable gain. The Asia Group report quotes: “The crisis allows Beijing to cast the United States as the destabilising actor whose Middle East entanglements impose costs on the world.” In the Global South — across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America — this narrative has real traction. Nations that had been managing a careful hedge between Washington and Beijing find their calculus shifting when the United States is demonstrably the author of a commodity shock that cut into their import bills and growth projections. America’s credibility as a security guarantor is not just a military question; it is an economic one. When your security guarantor’s military adventures raise your fuel costs by 30%, the value of the guarantee looks different.
There are genuine counterarguments to Beijing triumphalism. Analyst Drew Thompson at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School cautions that loss of US credibility does not automatically translate into Chinese gain — Beijing does not want to become the default security provider for the Middle East, a region that would consume Chinese diplomatic capital and military resources at enormous cost. Wen-Ti Sung at the Atlantic Council notes that the crisis may have given Beijing pause on Taiwan, demonstrating how difficult it is to project power through contested maritime corridors under adversarial conditions. China’s 80–90% dependence on the Strait for oil and LNG imports is a strategic vulnerability, not just a logistical fact; any scenario in which the United States or its partners threatened Hormuz access in the context of a Taiwan confrontation would put Beijing in exactly the position Washington found itself in: exposed, reactive, and running out of good options.
The Trump administration’s Iran policy should be evaluated not as wisdom or folly in isolation, but as one move in a multi-front strategic competition whose consequences will compound over years. If the price of eliminating an Iranian nuclear programme that was months from completion was a temporary commodity shock and a temporary improvement in China’s soft-power position, that trade-off may look different in 2030 than it looks today. But “may look different” is not a foreign policy. The United States needs to understand — soberly, without triumphalism — that every military commitment in the Middle East consumes strategic bandwidth that could be directed toward the Indo-Pacific competition that both parties’ defence reviews identify as the primary challenge of the coming decade.
What to watch
Watch China’s clean technology export trajectory in the second half of 2026 — if EV and solar growth rates hold, the structural shift in global energy markets that Beijing has been engineering will be locked in regardless of how the Hormuz situation resolves. Watch Beijing’s diplomatic positioning in the Iran-US talks currently underway in Doha: China has an interest in a durable ceasefire that reopens the Strait fully, but also an interest in ensuring that the United States bears the reputational cost of having caused the crisis. Watch India’s response — as a fellow major Asian energy importer that lacks China’s stockpile depth, New Delhi’s post-crisis energy strategy will determine whether this episode accelerates or decelerates India’s own push for energy independence through renewables.
— J