🇨🇳 Tycoons, Chokepoints, and Private Jets
What the media is not telling us, eyes that see, ears that hear.
Praying Mantis is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate my insights and prayers, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
"Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."
— Sun Tzu
Before Air Force One lifted off for Beijing, Trump happened on a media report saying Jensen Huang had been left off the passenger list. He picked up the phone and told Huang he had two hours. Huang chartered a private jet, flew to Anchorage, Alaska, and boarded Air Force One during a refueling stop.
When Trump deplaned in Beijing, Huang walked off the plane directly behind Trump and Elon Musk, in full view of the Chinese welcoming delegation, the cameras, and Xi Jinping’s entire intelligence apparatus.
That was not a scheduling correction. That was the opening statement.
Who is Jensen Huang?
Huang is the CEO of Nvidia, currently the most valuable company on earth. The chips his company designs power virtually every serious artificial intelligence system in the world. DeepSeek runs on them. ChatGPT runs on them. China’s entire AI military ambition runs on them. He is, in the most literal sense, the man who controls the fuel for the 21st century arms race.
China cannot build its AI future without access to American-designed chips. Despite years of investment, China’s domestic semiconductor industry remains generations behind Nvidia. DeepSeek, China’s AI champion, just announced a $45 billion fundraise led by China’s state-backed semiconductor fund. Xi knows that compute is the new oil. He knows that whoever wins the AI race wins the century. And he knows he cannot win it without American silicon.
Compounding the pressure, bipartisan legislation called the Chip Security Act is currently moving through Congress. The mechanism is straightforward: every advanced AI chip exported from the United States would be required to ping a security server verifying its geographic location. A chip registered in Singapore but detected operating in Shanghai bricks itself. It becomes an expensive paperweight.
The man who would ultimately implement that kill switch just walked off Air Force One in the heart of Beijing.
The Three Chokepoints
The mainstream coverage of the Beijing summit focused on soybean purchases, Boeing orders and trade balance figures. That is the press release, have you heard any different? The reality is that Trump walked into that meeting holding three simultaneous points of leverage that no American president has ever held at the same time.
The first is energy. Operation Epic Fury is not an improvisation. The Iran campaign dismantled China’s primary architecture for controlling the Strait of Hormuz — the single most important energy chokepoint on the planet. For two decades China poured billions into Iran, buying upwards of 80 to 90 percent of its oil output, which gave Beijing de facto influence over Hormuz through its Iranian proxy. That architecture has been dismantled. The U.S. Navy now effectively controls the strait through which 40 to 50 percent of China’s oil imports flow. Xi did not walk into that summit from a position of energy security.
The second is supply. Trump has not merely removed China’s Iranian oil option. He has positioned American oil as the premium alternative. Alaskan North Slope crude is now a premium product precisely because it is conflict-free, sanction-free and arrives without the psychological weight of a naval blockade. The empty supertankers that turned around in the Indian Ocean and headed to the Gulf Coast were not an accident of market forces, they were the visual confirmation of a supply shift that was years in the making.
Link to Fox Clip
The third is computing power. Jensen Huang on Air Force One was not a sales trip but a demonstration. In one elegant gesture, without a press release or a policy speech, Trump communicated the entire American position: we control the energy you need, we control the oil you need, and we control the silicon your AI ambitions depend on. All three. Simultaneously.
What would Xi see?
The mainstream narrative describes Xi as confident and patient, offering few major concessions while managing the relationship toward long-term great-power stability. That framing is accurate as far as it goes but it describes the surface of the meeting rather than its underlying architecture.
Xi was not sitting across from a transactional dealmaker looking for a face-saving compromise. He was sitting across from a president who had spent the previous ten weeks systematically closing every exit: Iran neutralized, Venezuela under American influence, the Panama Canal reclaimed, the Strait of Hormuz blockaded … the world’s AI compute standing visibly at the president’s shoulder.
Reported outcomes from the summit include China agreeing to purchase Alaskan oil, China committing to pressure Iran on compliance with American demands, and discussions of Chinese investment of up to a trillion dollars in American factories and industry while opening Chinese markets to American business. These figures are still being verified and the full terms have not been publicly disclosed. But the direction of movement tells its own story.
The Press Release and the Reality
Every summit produces a press release. The press release from Beijing will be written in the language of mutual respect, shared interests and managed competition. It will reference soybeans and aircraft orders and carefully worded language about Taiwan.
The reality is that Trump did not fly to Beijing to negotiate. He went to Beijing to present terms to a counterpart who had spent the previous ten weeks watching his energy security dismantled, his AI supply chain threatened and his Iranian proxy eliminated. The summit was not the event. It was the closing argument of a case that has been building since January.
I covered the opening argument in Crude Awakening, the financial architecture in When Tehran Rages, London Banks. The synchronized pressure campaign in Economic Armageddon and the new strategic map in The New Map. This essay is where those threads converge.
No previous American president has walked into Beijing holding energy leverage, oil supply leverage and AI compute leverage simultaneously. The hand Trump was holding when he sat down across from Xi Jinping was not assembled in the weeks before the summit. It was assembled over years, executed over months, and presented in Beijing with Jensen Huang standing visible proof of the third dimension right behind him on the tarmac.
I submit, that is not dealmaking, it is dominance.
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." — attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt
Heavenly Father,
We pray for wisdom in the exercise of the leverage this nation now holds. Leverage used wisely produces lasting peace and shared prosperity. Leverage used carelessly produces resentment and the seeds of future conflict. Grant those making these decisions the wisdom to know the difference and the character to choose accordingly.
We pray for the Chinese people, who did not choose their government’s dependencies any more than the Iranian people chose their regime’s provocations. May their leaders produce outcomes benefitting ordinary citizens rather than simply transferring advantages from one ruling class to another.
And we pray with gratitude for our leadership who, despite everything, still has the capacity to plan this far ahead, execute this precisely, and sit down at the table holding cards that nobody else can match.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Always open to new perspectives, here is one that was recommended to me and shaped this essay:
Another excellent essay because it provides 1) information and insights that MSM and even alternative media fails to see and report, 2) insight into the exceptionally high quality of POTUS' thought and strategy, 3) because it "orders" my thouughts about this upside down world and provides promising encouragement. Bless you!
Please include praying for Americans along with the Chinese and Iranian people, We, too, in many ways are dependent on the government. Pray for people to be really free with faith in God and become rugged, determined Americans to live by His word.