Cutting China off from Persian gulf oil

And encouraging use of American gas and oil, and increasing the cost of importing goods from China. Etc.

I'm sure someone gravitated towards that as a retconned excuse after it was decided anyway. By suggesting - which is true - that an import/export restriction in the Middle East is going to have an impact on the Chinese economy.

The question is what kind of an impact it is going to have. When what you can hope for is, say, to end up with a slowed down increase in the growth, at the cost of a comedical amount of increased military spending, the actual calculation doesn't seem to make sense. For example. If the idea is to make fuel prices in China increase, so they get annoyed, and you can slow down certain parts of the mass-producing industry - again, doesn't make economical sense. If the idea was to make sure Asia and Oceania starts trading more with Africa and Russia, while making Europe a better American "customer", then again.. you don't really know what you're talking about in terms of how the various parts of the industry works.

Because it doesn't make any sense. The only thing that anyone might get out of this in the US is increased cost of goods, and a still increasing military budget, along with what is inevitably going to end in a military conflict that will - at best - only result in reshaping the global political map completely. The US, as the undisputed global hegemon, would not want that even if China was a rising economical superpower.

So if you were looking at some 4d chess move explanation going on, you end up with what is - and to be entirely frank, this has also been said straight up by State Department people for years and years, from before ww2 to very recently - really the "maintenance mode" of the US as a dominant power: that they want to split up and reduce any possible military superpower to be able to have the power they themselves have.

If you're a normally militarily educated West-Point person, this will be something you are going to gravitate towards, even if your own economy is suffering, because you think that - for example - splitting Germany in two after ww2 was what stopped Soviet from expanding. You're going to believe that sponsoring and causing armed rebellions in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries like that, is going to be a good idea, because it will split a military powerhouse in half. The entire war in Ukraine, like all the other colour-revolutions, "hide" the exact same thinking. Greece, Turkey, various states north from here, it's exactly the same.

The conflict in former Yugoslavia was the same, too, many years later. Someone had it in their heads that either some former eastern european state that we don't know anything about is going to "go to the Russians", or else it's "going to go to us". And so starting an armed conflict, and going in with assets to keep this going - even if it costs absurd amounts of money - is going to be worth it in the long run.

Because: you want a crater on the map much more than you want a growing Russia (whatever that is supposed to look like), a stronger Europe (in any form - the USAians see an economical union and they think that it is going to start producing weapons), or a stronger China (they've been talking about self-sufficiency to create stability from foreign incursion and exploitation since hundreds and years before it became the May 4th movement - but an American will hear: we want to grow and conquer the planet), or even a stronger Japan (it has been ok for as long as they've been a military base - but when the most Americanized politicians they have produced in a 100 years start talking about producing weapons for self-defense, like they were before the most xenophobic idiocy took off, then it's time for some seppuku very quickly: the support dries up, and the splitting up of the "Japanese Empire", as one I talked to last year said it, unironically, comes up as a goal).

So when you see these ridiculous wars like this, be fully aware of that it is not to the benefit of anyone but the direct benefactors of military subsidies. And that they're doing this anyway, because enough people in the US administrations - even very soft-spoken and very reasonable people - just fear, like nothing else, that there will be another power in the world that can fuck around with other countries like the US is.

And no amount of misery incurred on Iran, Iraq, Africa, Asia, Europe, can compete with that. Because these people sit and believe, genuinely, that if the US didn't shoot the heads off the hydras like they are, then random powers are going to create religious dictatorships and trade themselves into empires to instate forced burkas and impossible languages on everyone in their "spehere of influence" right away.

I have talked to real people in the US, who should know better, but who genuinely believe that if Norway was not a member of Nato, then we would be speaking Russian.

That's how infinitely shallow they see the world, and how infinitely stupidly they respect military power. They find my knowledge of English as a third language out of five as a tribute from a good vassal, basically. Not as skill in understanding languages and being some kind of representative of yornder, forgotten state-craft. It's proof that America is number 1.

And that's really all that is going on here. A military power with a dysfunctional political leadership, exhausting itself literally because no one else wants another military superpower to destroy the US, either. We want some balance, maybe even revenge. But as long as - ironically - no one wants to take the US's place, the US can keep fucking around with people like they are.

And that's all there is to it.