Taiwan crisis indicators suggest that the ongoing conflict in the Middle East provides a blueprint for maritime coercion that could trigger a Taiwan crisis.
Maritime Pressure and the Taiwan Crisis
The Hormuz crisis is showing Beijing how maritime pressure can weaken rivals, test deterrence, and exploit Taiwan’s acute energy dependence.
For most Asian economies, the Strait of Hormuz disruption is a nightmare scenario impacting nine major commodities. For China, it helps serve as a stress test of an economic and industrial model built to absorb shocks better than its neighbors.
An example is Beijing’s announcement that sulfuric acid exports would cease in May, putting even more pressure on various economies to source this critical industrial input. While China is not immune to the pressures on the global oil market, they have remained muted in their public discourse during the first two months of the conflict. But, for the first time since the conflict began, President Xi Jinping made a brief statement: “The Strait of Hormuz should remain open to normal navigation, which is in the common interest of regional countries and the international community.”
The Hormuz crisis reveals how Beijing may think about coercion closer to home, especially against Taiwan. If China concludes from this Hormuz crisis that maritime disruption can impose strategic pain without triggering full-scale war, then American deterrence is on the ropes, and Taiwan may be in greater danger than most realize.
Beijing’s Energy Fortress Strategy for a Taiwan crisis
On paper, China’s exposure to Hormuz looks bad. About 89 percent of crude transiting the strait is destined for Asia, with China receiving the most, with about 5.4 million barrels per day. However, Beijing has spent years methodically building buffers and stockpiles to weather any major crisis that might threaten its economy or military.
China’s combined state and commercial crude reserves could offset Hormuz imports for around seven months. Some analysts even estimate a total strategic reserve of up to two billion barrels. This was built by consistently accumulating surplus crude, averaging 1.13 million barrels per day throughout 2025, and increased to 1.24 million in January and February 2026.
This massive cushion, combined with a diversified import strategy, is why PetroChina could confidently note that only 10 percent of its supplies depended on the strait. The rest is sourced from domestic production, overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, and a global portfolio of long-term contracts.
That cushion was described this way, in a piece by Gabe Collins at Rice, “China’s reserves don’t solve the problem; they buy decision-bandwidth—and that bandwidth is now being spent.
” Beijing’s crisis response has been a typical state-led approach, not market-driven. Authorities instructed independent “teapot” refiners, which are about a quarter of China’s refining capacity, to maintain processing rates while restricting refined-fuel exports to protect the domestic supply.
In natural gas, Chinese state-owned enterprises demonstrated their market power, reselling a record 1.31 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the first months of 2026 as their ample inventories and soft domestic demand allowed them to profit from regional price increases.
This resilience extends beyond hydrocarbons. China still generates 62 percent of its electricity from domestic coal, but its real insulation comes from its dominance in the clean energy industries that benefit from a global energy shock.
China already accounts for nearly 80 percent of global electric vehicle (EV) battery as well as photovoltaic production, and over 90 percent of key materials for those technologies. This means any crisis that accelerates a global shift away from oil also paradoxically reinforces Beijing’s long-term industrial advantage.
Energy Vulnerability in a Taiwan Crisis
Taiwan’s position is precarious. Its energy profile is the inverse of China’s: highly fragile and utterly dependent on uninterrupted maritime trade and large imports.
In May of 2025, after shutting down its last nuclear power plant, Taiwan’s electricity grid became overwhelmingly reliant on imported fossil fuels, with natural gas and coal together accounting for 83 percent of power generation.
While the island maintains at least a 146-day oil stockpile, its acute vulnerability is with natural gas. In 2026, its LNG inventories will only provide an 11-day buffer.
Taiwan’s LNG supply is entirely maritime, sourced primarily from Australia (34 percent) and Qatar (33 percent). Any disruption to these sea lanes directly threatens the island’s entire economy and military capabilities. This major energy risk is likely why Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te announced plans in the middle of the Iran War to restart their nuclear power plants at Guosheng and Ma-anshan.
A 2025 wargame conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies described energy as the “weakest element” of Taiwanese resilience. Similarly, a 2025 Foundation for Defense of Democracies analysis contended that Beijing would not need to risk a full military blockade to throttle Taiwan’s economy.
Instead, it could opt for a “quarantine,” using a campaign of insurance pressure, gray-zone harassment of commercial shipping, and targeted cyberattacks against critical port and LNG terminal infrastructure. The goal would be to make maritime traffic too risky or too expensive to continue.
The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz gives Beijing a real-world demonstration of this playbook—and the difficulties of a major maritime power, like Washington, to prevent or counter it.
Strangling the Economy During a Taiwan Crisis
The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates how much leverage can be gained not by total blockade, but by making a shipping lane unreliable. Markets react to risk, not just to a formal military operation. Insurance rates spike, shipowners hesitate, and economic effects cascade long before a full-scale war begins.
The lesson for Beijing is not simply how to execute a blockade, because a blockade may not even be necessary. With some cheaply executed maritime pressure, such as drones, mines, and anti-ship missiles, these gray zone tactics can provide outsized leverage, especially against the US military, which has just exhausted its stockpile of precision-guided munitions and air defense interceptor missiles in the Iran War.
This reality demands that Taipei and Washington confront an existential challenge facing an isolated island only 80 miles from China. For Taiwan, resilience requires hardening its infrastructure and developing power generation that does not depend on as many imports, including exploring unconventional resupply options such as hardened undersea ports.
Countering this economic strangulation playbook requires more than just conventional military capabilities. It requires a new form of “industrial deterrence”: proactively working with insurers to create wartime risk pools, coordinating with global shipping firms to guarantee passage, and demonstrating the capability to escort and protect commercial traffic under sustained gray-zone tactics.
The Pentagon’s starting up the Economic Defense Unit in March 2026 is a welcome start to understanding and planning for economic competition, but it also means ensuring strategists and planners have internalized a “prelogistics” understanding of power.
This is because so many inputs to military readiness and economic might depend on chemicals and materials that are either concentrated in China (and other adversaries) or have to pass maritime chokepoints that are easy to disrupt.
Deterrence Strategy and the Taiwan Crisis
The Iran War does not make a Taiwan crisis inevitable. It gives Beijing insight into an interconnected world where it has already cornered the market on critical inputs. Beijing now sees energy and industrial pressure as central instruments of state power. Until Washington and its allies develop a credible counter, Taiwan is entering a new and far more dangerous phase of its existence.