Iran's five-week blockade of the Strait of Hormuz did more than rattle global energy markets. It handed Beijing a working template for how an authoritarian regime far weaker than China can use supply chain disruption to force the United States into concessions, Simon Shuster has argued in The Atlantic.

As "Hvylya" reports, the analysis draws a direct line between the Iran war and China's ambitions toward Taiwan. By cutting off roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply, Iran drove U.S. gas prices up nearly 40 percent and pressured Trump into a cease-fire - despite Tehran making no major concessions.

China's military would most likely start with a partial blockade of Taiwan, mirroring Iran's approach in the strait. But the resulting economic shock would be far worse. Taiwan's factories produce more than a third of the world's microchips. "Losing 37 percent of our production of computing power each year could well be more costly than the COVID pandemic and its economically disastrous lockdowns," wrote Chris Miller, a Tufts University historian, in his 2022 book Chip War. "It would take at least half a decade to rebuild the lost chipmaking capacity."

A late-March Pew Research Center poll showed gas prices as Americans' top concern about the Iran war, well above the chance of "large numbers of U.S. military casualties." Trump or a future president facing a Taiwan crisis would confront the same calculus: the cost to the U.S. economy and his standing in the polls.

Mark Cancian, a retired colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps, gamed out a potential U.S. response to a Chinese blockade in a report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He and his co-authors ran 26 war games, each starting with a blockade of Taiwan. The U.S. Navy would face catastrophic losses in any attempt to break through. "It would be a major battle," Cancian said. "You're potentially losing hundreds of ships."

The CSIS report concluded that any blockade would present the American president with a dilemma: "accept a Taiwanese capitulation on China's terms or become directly involved in the conflict." The combination of economic pain, military casualties, and political pressure appears to have made Trump blink in the war with Iran. China now has a model for how that can be done.

"Hvylya" previously reported on how each weapons system used against Iran reduces the stockpiles the U.S. would need for a Pacific confrontation.