Rory Johnston

Its only other market options are Asia or Europe, really, in terms of like a sizable sources of demand.

So it's not in its interest to see those economies kind of collapse while North America remains relatively insulated, given domestic supplies.

I think the only challenge with this theory is that if that was true, I would have expected China to say something about it.

And the fact is, is that so far we have seen, we've heard virtually nothing from Beijing or any of the regulatory authorities

that this is happening, why it's happening, or the scale of what we're talking about.

The other, I think, more nefarious option, and you were just talking about how I'm a humble barrel counter, I don't like to go grand strategy, but I think there is like the, put my tinfoil hat on for a second.

Why would China do this and not talk about it?

The other option, I still think this is less likely because it seems very nefarious, but...

We had the Trump administration visiting Beijing a couple months ago.

At the time, it seemed like nothing much came out of those meetings.

It seemed pretty lukewarm at best.

But I think there's a chance that you saw some kind of discussion between the Trump administration and Beijing over like, help us out with this, and we will do something for you in the future.

Now, what could that be?

One of the things that was happening at the time was with

all of the military equipment destroyed in the Middle East from the Iranian attacks, lots of advanced radar systems, anti-ship, anti-aircraft missiles, et cetera, et cetera, Washington began migrating all of its kit that had been in Asia back over to the Middle East.

So maybe this is part of this broader kind of Dunrow doctrine that Trump sees himself as pulling out of Asia.

And maybe someone somewhere made that point and said, like, if you help us, we'll keep this going.

That said, again, I don't think any of this perfectly fits.

And I think the easy answer is that it remains a mystery as to why China is doing this.

The only problem is that given that we still don't understand why China did this, or even to that degree, how exactly they managed to pull it off,