China received more oil via the Strait of Hormuz than any other country. Nearly 40 percent of all oil that passed through the choke point headed to China. You would have thought the nation would be on its knees.

It is not.

Instead, it’s bailing out other nations. Australia is running desperately short of diesel and aviation fuel. China is coming to its rescue—presumably for a price.

It’s a powerful illustration of the short-term thinking of Western nations versus China’s careful preparation.

China holds an estimated 1.4 billion barrels in its strategic petroleum reserve and government-mandated commercial inventories. That’s more than double America’s and Japan’s, roughly in line with all European countries combined, and 10 times the size of India’s. It’s enough to last China at least three months, probably longer.

Japan and South Korea have less stored, but also use less than China—meaning their reserves could last them more than six months.

It’s not just reserves. All of these countries depend on fossil fuels to keep their economies going. And they’ve all worked very hard to minimize that weakness.

China has oil and gas pipelines linking it with Central Asia. No maritime catastrophe can interrupt these overland routes.

It has also found its own domestic fuel supply. Its shale gas reserves are harder to access than America’s, but they are twice the size. China has been increasing its shale gas production by 20 percent each year. It’s set to overtake Iran and become the world’s third-largest gas producer this year. It has even managed to find oil.

China has also worked to make its economy less reliant on oil. It has almost completely removed oil from its electricity generation and embraced renewables. From 2019 to 2024, electricity generated from solar power increased by 275 percent; wind by 146 percent.

But this is not about the Chinese becoming eco-warriors. Over the same time period, the amount of electricity China generated from coal rose by 32 percent. It’s a much smaller percentage, but China accounts for about half the world’s coal-fired electricity. In absolute terms this was a huge increase. The increase alone is more than all the coal used by the United States and Europe combined.

It doesn’t matter where the energy comes from—wind, solar, coal or nuclear—if it’s not oil, it removes a clear vulnerability for the nation.

It’s the same with China’s push for electric vehicles. China is the world’s largest electric vehicle market. With government help, Chinese-made electric cars are rapidly taking over Europe.

The main driver (pun intended) isn’t saving the planet. A petrol car can run only on petrol. But China has more options to source its electricity.

For planes and freight trucks, electrification is harder, but China is working on an alternative: coal-to-liquid fuels.

Germany, starved of oil during World War ii, pioneered a process to essentially make oil out of coal. It’s expensive, and polluting, and China leads the world in coal-to-liquid fuel and chemical production. In fact, China’s coal liquefaction industry alone consumes more coal than the entire United States.

When the Iran war started, many forecast it would be a disaster for China. Some even speculated China, not Iran, was the main intended target. Two months later, it has certainly been costly for China, but it’s not a crisis.

China could have been meeting its energy needs much more cheaply for years—but it made many calculated choices aimed at prioritizing reliance over short-term cost.

“Energy security … really keeps Chinese leaders up at night,” said Jane Nakano of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Contrast that to Australia. It began the Iran war with its highest fuel reserves in 15 years. Yet this unusually high level lasted only about one month. It has closed most of its domestic oil refineries, so it depends on foreign nations not only for the oil, but also for the entire process of turning it into usable fuels. When the fuel shortage started to bite, overseas refineries prioritized their own countries’ needs. Fuel prices quickly shot up to some of their highest levels on record and would have risen much further without steep cuts to fuel taxes.

In late March, the government ordered emergency fuel shipments from the U.S. Last week, Australia’s foreign minister visited China to ask it to sell more jet fuel.

China was prepared for trade war. Australia wasn’t.

For years, the late Herbert W. Armstrong warned the world—including China—that trade wars would soon begin. Just a bit of history and common sense would have warned Australia to be more prepared.

China clearly doesn’t take our world of relative peace, stability and prosperity for granted. It has spent years planning for the worst-case scenario.

Mr. Armstrong warned that this worst-case scenario would soon be here—based on Bible prophecy.

In 1968, he wrote that the beginning of World War iii would be “economic in nature. We have shown how God prophesied a virtual trade war will get underway against the United States and Britain.”

Three years later, Mr. Armstrong wrote:

Either we start raising high tariff barriers against other countries, starting a trade war which in time will trigger the nuclear war that will destroy us—or American workers are going to have to meet the competition of the workers in other countries by lowering living standards. Obviously American workers are not going to choose to do the latter. And if they don’t—well, the handwriting is on our national wall.

That’s a dramatic warning, and one most will simply not take seriously. It’s much easier to assume the good times will continue.

But China is clearly taking this possibility seriously.

Bible prophecy gets even more specific. It warns that, fed up with the U.S., China and Europe will join forces to launch a trade war against it. Such a conflict would inevitably cause China some pain too. But it has long planned for that.

Trade wars are not a remote possibility to China’s leadership, and they should not be to you.

God will allow Europe, Russia and China to bring America down through trade war, even to the point that the nation can be conquered. To understand why, read Herbert W. Armstrong’s free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.