President Donald Trump’s latest attack on Iran takes a big economic bite out of one of America’s chief rivals: China.
Over the span of two months, the Trump administration has removed the leaders of two countries that both shared China as their most important crude oil customer. Although China buys oil from nations all across the Middle East, Iran was second only to Saudi Arabia as its supplier last year, according to a POLITICO analysis of data provided by market research firm Kpler.
Almost all of Iran’s exported oil, and more than half of Venezuela’s, went last year to China, which remained one of the only purchasers of goods from the two heavily sanctioned nations. The two countries combined represented some 17 percent of China’s overall oil purchases — a meaningful share for the world’s largest importer of crude oil.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Saturday said it was “highly concerned” by the attacks on Iran and called for an end to the war. The squeeze on China’s energy supply also comes just weeks before Trump is slated to hold a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Any new challenges in obtaining oil from the Persian Gulf could drive China to expand its reliance on Russian energy supplies.
“If the conflict drags on for a couple of weeks, the most logical solution for Beijing is going to be to turn to more Russian crude,” said Andon Pavlov, Kpler’s oil and tanker research director.
According to Kpler, China has a significant amount of crude held in storage and had already begun ramping down its imports of Iranian oil in 2026, in exchange for more Russian oil, even prior to Saturday’s fighting.
Following the strikes, ships have begun to avoid the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran — a critical shipping lane for Gulf nations to export oil to Asia. China in 2025 received about half of its imported oil from the six Gulf countries that rely on the strait. Other large crude oil producers in the region — including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates — transport almost all their crude exports through the geographic bottleneck.
Trump did not mention Iranian oil in his address announcing the strikes Saturday, marking a contrast from his remarks after the raid against Nicolás Maduro, when he said that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and have U.S. companies “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Iran exported 520 million barrels of crude oil to China in 2025 — more than three times as much as Venezuela. Another 1.4 billion barrels came from the five other countries that rely on the Strait of Hormuz. In total, more than half of China’s crude oil imports come from countries that now face trade disruptions.
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