Special to WorldTribune, April 23, 2026 Real World News
By Geostrategy-Direct, April 21, 2026
By Richard Fisher
As President Donald Trump approaches his May summit with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary General Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader is likely acutely aware that for his second term, Trump is targeting key maritime straits to gain strategic leverage over China.
Far from the dominant propaganda themes championed by CCP Politburo member Wang Huning that the United States is in a phase of historic terminal decline, Trump’s targeting of maritime choke points amounts to a largely non-kinetic but vigorous and strategic offensive against China.
Straits of Hormuz: Currently the most kinetic U.S. imposition of maritime control over a strait that has fundamental economic importance to China is Trump’s blockade of Iran in the Straits of Hormuz.
Trump’s naval and air blockade that started on April 8 is targeting Iran, which sends 90 percent of its oil to China, 1.4 million barrels per day, or 10 to 15 percent of China’s total oil imports; A 25 percent increase in oil prices could force a 0.5 decrease in China’s Gross Domestic Product — or real economic pressure for Xi Jinping.
On April 19-20, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Spruance fired on the engine room and then seized the tanker M/V Touska, a suspected participant in the “ghost fleet” of tankers transporting 250,000 barrels of Iranian oil to China — a demonstration of U.S. power in the Persian Gulf intended to pressure the remnants of the Iranian regime to accept U.S. demands, like a full end of its nuclear weapons program.
Then on April 21, President Trump suggested that the U.S. caught China giving something, perhaps weapons to Iran, telling CNBC:
“We caught a ship yesterday that had some things on it, which wasn’t very nice — a gift from China, perhaps, I don’t know…I thought I had an understanding with President Xi, but that’s alright. That’s the way the war goes right?”
Straits of Malacca: At the Pentagon on April 13, Indonesian Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced their “Major Defense Cooperation Partnership,”
According to a statement this partnership includes “codeveloping sophisticated asymmetric capabilities, pioneering next-generation defense technologies in the maritime, subsurface and autonomous systems domains, and cooperating on maintenance, repair and overhaul support to improve operational readiness,” and will also see an increase in joint Special Forces training.
This means that innovative U.S. companies like Anduril are likely to be welcomed by Indonesia to sell their Artificial Intelligence powered undersea sensor networks that in turn direct new long range autonomous undersea combat systems that can attack Chinese naval ships, submarines and civilian shipping.
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