Eyck Freymann

Stop thinking about it as how we could hurt China in a way that hurt us too.

We need to think about what are the things that we would want to do in our own best interests in a crisis to secure our own economic interests that would just happen to hurt China as a byproduct.

You think they're good on oil?

In peacetime,

They consume, what is it, 13, 14 million barrels a day, of which around four are produced domestically.

If they became cost insensitive, which they would be in a crisis, they could probably squeeze that up a bit.

They also can import over land.

They import

a couple of million barrels a day over land, and if they had to, they could import more by land.

It wouldn't be comfortable, it wouldn't be cheap, but if they would have willingness to pay, they have plenty of foreign exchange.

They could also do as the Nazis did, which is turn coal into fuel oil.

Fischer-Tropsch has been done in the past.

The Nazis declared war on all their oil suppliers, and they still managed to fight through 1945 pretty effectively.

But there's more to this.

They declare, what is it, 1.3 billion barrels in their SPR.

They probably have something more like two.

And then they can make the civilian economy ration.

The PLA would use something like 500,000 barrels a day.

So if you run the math, and I just do the back of the envelope in the book, what matters is not that they would run out of oil eventually.

At some point, they would feel the squeeze.