President Donald Trump has long promised American “energy dominance.” His White House has also spent months describing the war against Iran as an “overwhelming, devastating success.”
Seven months into that success, Washington is asking China to help stabilize the fuel market the war helped disrupt.
During President Xi Jinping’s state visit last week, Trump appealed to the leader of one of America’s principal economic and geopolitical rivals to put more fuel onto the global market.
President Trump urged President Xi to increase production of refined petroleum products to stabilize global supply.
In other words, at least for the moment, America’s much advertised “energy dominance” requires a little help from Beijing.
Crisis Washington Helped Create
Trump’s request comes amid a fuel crunch that has been building for months.
The U.S. and Israeli war against Iran disrupted energy flows from the Persian Gulf and effectively closed much of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil corridors. At the same time, Ukraine, with continued U.S. support, struck Russian refineries with drones, reducing another major source of diesel exports.
The result has been a severe global shortage of refined fuel.
Diesel prices have reached record levels. Middle Eastern and Russian diesel exports have fallen sharply, while refineries elsewhere have little spare capacity to compensate. U.S. refineries are operating at their highest rate in eight years, yet domestic diesel inventories remain roughly 15 percent below the five-year seasonal average.
That shortage now reaches far beyond the battlefield.
By mid-September, American diesel prices had risen above $6 a gallon — up more than 60 percent from about $3.70 a year earlier.
Trucking, farming, construction, and other diesel-dependent industries are absorbing higher costs, which then filter through supply chains and consumer prices.
Washington is therefore searching for additional barrels of finished fuel.
That search leads directly to China.
China Holds the Valve
China is one of the few countries with enough refining capacity, oil inventories, and government control over exports to materially affect the market.
Beijing, the world’s largest oil importer, responded to the Iran war by halting refined fuel exports in March. The goal was to protect domestic supplies as disruptions to Middle Eastern crude flows raised fears of shortages at home.
Those controls have since eased.
Chinese exports of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and marine fuel reached 6.01 million metric tons in August, up 12.7 percent from a year earlier, according to customs data reported by Reuters. Diesel exports jumped 42.1 percent, to 1.33 million tons. Jet-fuel exports reached a record 2.55 million tons.
China entered the crisis with a vast oil cushion. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the country added an average of 1.1 million barrels of crude per day to strategic inventories during 2025. Those stocks had approached 1.4 billion barrels by December, and remained around 1.49 billion barrels in the second quarter of 2026.
Just as importantly, Beijing can influence how much refined fuel leaves the country. State-controlled giants such as PetroChina and Sinopec operate within a system of export quotas and administrative controls.
That gives Xi considerable leverage over the supply Trump now wants increased.
The commercial incentives point in the same direction. International diesel margins have surged, while Sinopec researchers expect Chinese gasoline consumption to fall 8.7 percent this year and diesel demand to decline 11.4 percent.
Therefore, Beijing has both the capacity and an economic reason to export more fuel. But it has little reason to do so on Washington’s terms.
Hawks Want More From Beijing
Some Republicans want Xi to do more than increase fuel supply.
Ahead of the summit, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, a Florida Republican and prominent supporter of Israel, argued that Trump should also pressure Beijing over Iran.
In Mast’s telling, China — not the administration that launched the war — bears much of the blame for Americans’ pain at the pump.
Mast said China “probably is the number one actor that is working to raise those prices,” with its support of both Iran and Russia’s wars.
He suggested that the president ask Beijing to change course:
“If President Trump can secure that China will stop arming Iran, who is trying to destabilize this key oil route through the globe, then the president will have done something very important for affordability, especially in terms of global crude prices, which equal prices at the pump here in the United States of America,” Mast said.
That leaves aside one inconvenient fact: The Strait of Hormuz became a crisis zone only after the U.S. and Israel launched the war, triggering a predictable Iranian retaliation and the disruption of shipping through the waterway, a sequence hawks such as Mast rarely emphasize.
There is also a more practical question.
Why would Beijing simply abandon an important strategic partner? China and Iran have deep energy and commercial ties, while Beijing has resisted U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran. Reuters reported allegations that China supplied Iran with air defense systems, which Beijing denied.
Therefore, any meaningful Chinese restraint would come with a price.
Ahead of the summit, Xi was expected to press Trump to halt U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, while Beijing could offer cooperation on Middle East issues in return.
That makes Mast’s prescription less straightforward than it sounds. Washington is not merely asking China to stop helping Iran. It is asking Beijing to sacrifice leverage over an ally in exchange for concessions somewhere else.
The Price of the Deal
Trump has spent decades trading on The Art of the Deal and cultivating his image as a master negotiator.
The current energy crisis offers an awkward test of that brand.
The war has dragged on, fuel supplies have tightened, and diesel prices have surged. Now Washington is turning to the communist regime it routinely casts as a strategic adversary for part of the solution.
That gives Xi leverage as both a major fuel supplier and a partner with influence over Iran. Whatever deal follows, Beijing now holds more cards than it did before the war.
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