New YorkVenezuela’s oil exports to China fell 92% after Maduro fell, analysts say.
China opposes the US-Bahraini Hormuz resolution for the same reason: Iran’s oil would similarly shift to US control.
Russia has echoed Beijing, making a double veto likely when the draft reaches the Security Council.
Sources: Responsible Statecraft
WHO HOLDS THE VETO
The UN Security Council has five permanent members — the US, UK, France, Russia, and China — each with an absolute veto. Any one of them can kill a resolution regardless of how the other fourteen members vote. The structure was fixed in 1945 and has never been amended.
THE DOUBLE VETO PATTERN
Since 2011, Russia and China have coordinated vetoes on roughly two dozen resolutions — Syria chemical weapons, Venezuela elections, Myanmar sanctions, Korea panel renewals. Acting together raises the political cost on Washington of bringing the draft at all; acting alone exposes the vetoing capital to bilateral retaliation.
THE VENEZUELA PRECEDENT
After 2019 US secondary sanctions tightened on PDVSA, Venezuelan crude was rerouted to China at deep discounts — often $15-20/bbl below Brent — using ship-to-ship transfers and rebranded cargoes labeled as Malaysian or Singaporean origin. The flows survived as long as Maduro did; regime change in 2026 unwound them within months as new licensing favored Western majors.
WHY IRAN IS THE NEXT VENEZUELA
Chinese teapot refineries in Shandong absorb roughly 90% of Iran's sanctioned crude exports, paid through opaque yuan-denominated channels and Hong Kong intermediaries. A US-backed Hormuz regime that monitored every tanker would do to Iranian-Chinese flows what regime change did to Venezuelan-Chinese flows: collapse them within a quarter.
WHAT A HORMUZ TOLL WOULD MEAN
A maritime tolling regime — even one framed as freedom-of-navigation enforcement — is functionally a chokepoint where every cargo gets identified, manifested, and either cleared or seized. The legal basis Washington would invoke is UNCLOS transit passage; the practical effect is that sanctioned flows become physically interceptable rather than just legally prohibited.
THE STRAIT ITSELF
The shipping lanes are 3 km wide each, hugging the Omani side; the deepwater channel passes within 12 nautical miles of Iran's coast. Any inspection regime mounted from Bahrain — where the US Fifth Fleet is headquartered — would operate within range of Iranian shore-based anti-ship missiles and IRGC fast-boat swarms.
THE RETENTION CHECK
China's veto is not about Hormuz navigation — it is about who controls the inspection list. A regime that decides which tankers pass is a regime that decides which buyers get crude, which is the substance of sanctions enforcement dressed in maritime-safety language.