Mike Adams argues the U.S. Navy's failure against Iran and Houthis signals a collapse of American maritime dominance, rendering traditional carriers obsolete against asymmetric threats like drones and hypersonic missiles. This shift forces nations like China to escort oil tankers, potentially triggering a "Mad Max ocean" where merchant vessels arm themselves for survival amid rising piracy and Indonesian tolls in the Strait of Malacca. Ultimately, this erosion of U.S. credibility accelerates a multipolar world where energy is priced in yuan, compelling a strategic pivot from kinetic warfare to domestic economic revitalization and peaceful trade. [Automatically generated summary]
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China's Strait Malacca Strategy00:14:45
All right, welcome.
This is Mike Adams here with an analysis of China and, well, in the context of the current war, U.S. war with Iran, and what China is doing and why and what it is likely to do coming up.
Now, as background, I just completed an interview with Eric Young, who is a Chinese citizen living in Hong Kong.
And he's a great guy, by the way.
I love his posts on X. Heard him in other interviews.
He's an advocate of gold and silver.
He's also a very successful business person, retired now, but with a history of a lot of success in manufacturing.
And he travels routinely to cities in China, in mainland China.
So he's back and forth between Hong Kong and I guess maybe Beijing and some other cities.
And also, his family, he has relatives from Taiwan, where I lived for a couple of years.
And of course, I'm very fond of Taiwan and the Taiwan people and the Chinese people in general because I've grown to respect how innovative and productive and disciplined they are.
And so I want to have a quick discussion here about where I think China is going, especially in the context of this war.
Now, I asked Eric Young, and you'll be able to hear that interview at brightvideos.com, I asked him what he thought China would do.
If the U.S. begins interdicting ships, tankers in particular, that are headed for China.
Because China does need to import some amount of its oil, even though it domestically produces, I think Eric said, about 30% of the oil that it needs.
It produces it domestically, has its own refineries, et cetera.
But it still needs to import oil, although China has very large oil storage in place, and China also has a very diverse list of countries from which it imports oil.
But China doesn't want to see tankers interdicted and pirated by the U.S. Navy on the high seas.
China needs to defend its routes and its trade agreements with other countries like Iran.
In fact, I don't know which official said this.
Maybe it was a Chinese foreign minister.
But somebody said recently, some official said that the U.S. should not interfere with China's trade agreements with Iran.
And that seems reasonable.
But, you know, Trump is not being reasonable.
He's like, no, we're going to screw with your ships.
So, what Eric told me is that in his view, although, you know, neither he nor I are, we're not military people, so this is just our best guess, or his best guess.
He said he thinks that China will probably end up having naval escorts for the tankers.
And then I asked him a follow up question about, well, could that cause escalation with the U.S. Navy?
And he thought, no, he thought that that would probably just send a message to the U.S. Navy that this is hands off.
Like, don't mess with these tankers because we are escorting them.
And yeah, probably he's right.
I hope he's right about that.
And that makes a lot of sense if you're the U.S. Navy.
When your toilets don't even work, you know, and your ships catch on fire spontaneously, you probably don't want to provoke a war with China, especially when I think it was Pete Hegseth himself before he was a Secretary of War.
Was it Pete or was it Rubio?
One of our officials said that China could sink all of our aircraft carriers in, what was it, 30 minutes, you know, because of the hypersonic missiles and ballistic missiles, etc.
Not that China's looking to do that, but.
They could, you know?
So you probably don't want to pick a fight with the largest navy in the world, which China is the largest navy by number of ships.
Not necessarily the most capable ships.
I think U.S. aircraft carriers are more advanced aircraft carriers, but China has a larger number of ships, right?
And not really any aircraft carriers that are battle ready.
But they don't need those.
And.
You know, the war with Iran has kind of proven that the whole aircraft carrier concept is obsolete at this point.
The future of warfare is going to be more like drone carriers, drone carrier ships, and missiles and long-range missiles that can hit, you know, any ship anywhere on the planet.
That's clearly where things are going.
And Iran has proven that the U.S. Navy doesn't have the ability to even get very close to Iran.
That's why the Navy has to back off hundreds of kilometers away.
From the southern coastline of Iran.
That's why the Navy is not in the Strait of Hormuz, because it wouldn't survive being in the Strait of Hormuz.
So China's got a big Navy, China's got a lot of ships, China has a lot of technology, and if they start escorting their tankers, then probably the U.S. will choose to harass somebody else.
And isn't that interesting about what that means for the world?
Because if our world becomes a place where Well, let me back up.
See, for decades, the U.S. Navy sort of secured all the trade routes on the planet.
You know, the Navy was kind of the global police force on the water, you know, the deep blue police.
And they would sail around the world and, you know, intimidate anybody that got out of line.
And the Navy would make sure that the Panama Canal was working and the Suez Canal was working and the Strait of Malacca.
Is working, and of course, the Strait of Hormuz, because the entire U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters right there in the Persian Gulf.
So that was the way it worked for a long time.
The issue, though, is that the U.S. began to really abuse that power, especially under Trump.
The U.S. went from the world's police officers to sort of the world's terrorists, I guess, the world's bullies.
Like, we're going to bomb you if you don't do what we say.
And then we're just going to bomb you anyway because we want to end your civilization.
That's an actual quote from Trump.
So the U.S. Navy is not out there to enforce some kind of freedom of navigation, as they often say, or fair rules for trade and safe passage for everyone.
Those days are over.
And now it's collapsing to an entirely different environment where if you're a country like China or Russia or whoever, and you want ships to be able to have safe passage, or think about the UK too, right?
They need to import gas from the Persian Gulf.
You're going to have to send some of your naval vessels to escort those ships.
And if you go through the Strait of Hormuz, probably you're going to get some rockets fired your way by the Houthis also.
If you're the UK, this changes everything.
And I forgot to even mention that, according to news reports, Indonesia has announced that they're going to impose fees on ships that are traveling through the Strait of Malacca.
So, Indonesia, and by the way, if you don't know where the Strait of Malacca is, look at a map, folks.
You're going to need to know this stuff.
You need to know where all the straits are and all the canals and everything.
Because it's routes and resources, it's geography that determines much of history, especially right now.
So look it up, find the Strait of Malacca, and you'll see that it's adjacent to Indonesia, which has the dominating power over the Strait of Malacca.
Well, Indonesia was looking at Iran and seeing that Iran's going to charge a toll through the Strait of Hormuz as a form of war reparations because they took so much damage from the U.S. bombing that Indonesia is like, well, we're going to charge a toll.
Now, can they do that?
I suppose if they can credibly threaten those who don't pay the toll, which probably isn't very difficult, as we've learned from Iran, is like all you have to do is launch a couple of drones out there, set a couple of ships on fire, and you're like, hey, everybody's going to pay the toll now.
The thing about this trade of Malacca is you can go around it with a lot lower cost than, let's say, sailing around the southern tip of Africa.
Not being able to use the Suez Canal is a huge deal, whereas not being able to use the Strait of Malacca is not nearly as huge of a deal, but it's still a deal.
You know, it's probably worth.
A few hundred thousand dollars of savings.
I'm just guessing because a lot of these tankers, you know, the rates for these tankers could be a hundred thousand dollars a day or more.
Some of them now are like four hundred thousand dollars a day.
That's yeah, that's expensive.
And so, if you lose a day by having to go around the Strait of Malacca, you know, sailing south around the whole thing, then you know, if you lose a day, then you lose a few hundred thousand dollars.
So, maybe those ships would.
Or the ship owners or whoever, the transport companies would say, yeah, it's worth paying, I don't know, $50,000 to use the Strait of Malacca.
So we'll just pay the toll and save that money on the transit time.
Maybe that's going to happen.
I don't know.
But the U.S. Navy, its days of policing the whole world and all the sea routes and everything, that's done.
That's over, folks.
And also, by the way, the U.S. Navy, I don't remember what fleet it is.
But whatever fleet is sailing around Taiwan all the time and sailing through the Straits of Taiwan, it's very clear that that's not going to be enough to protect Taiwan against China if China ever wanted to do something like to forcefully move on Taiwan.
The U.S. Navy has no capability to defend Taiwan or Japan, for that matter, or South Korea, as is becoming apparent.
I'm not saying that China would.
Use military force to move on Taiwan.
Probably they're going to have a peaceful unification that's diplomatic and economic rather than kinetic.
But if there were a kinetic scenario, I think China would sink every naval vessel within hundreds of kilometers of China's eastern shoreline.
In fact, that's clear.
It's clear now that that's the case.
Now, the U.S. has submarines, obviously, and the U.S. has nukes, but is the U.S. going to?
Just leap to nukes, like, oh, you sank one of our ships, we're going to nuke your country.
Well, China has nukes too, you know, so that's not a very wise escalation from the United States if they wanted to do that.
But we're moving into a world where countries are going to have to escort their transport ships.
Yeah.
Now, here's what I'm wondering.
Wouldn't it make sense?
This is going to become like a Mad Max ocean scenario.
But wouldn't it make sense if you're a transport vessel, let's say if you've got containers on your ship, lots of containers, that you reserve the upper containers to be like drone launch containers so that the ships have a means of self defense?
And if you start getting harassed as a transport ship, harassed by anyone, By any naval force, you press a button, you open up the top of the 40 foot containers, and out fly 5,000 drones directed to the targets that are harassing you.
You set their ships on fire.
It seems to me like transport ships are going to have to start having self defense.
This is why I've been even surprised over the years when Somali pirates would use a motorboat and they would drive up alongside a tanker with AK 47s and fire a few shots and take over the tanker.
I'm like, Why don't you mount 50 caliber, you know, full auto machine guns on the corners of the tanker?
Apparently, that's not allowed by some maritime rules or something.
I'm not familiar with the rules.
I stay on land, okay?
I don't sail across oceans.
But there are some kind of rules like you're not supposed to be armed.
I bet you that starts to change.
Because why wouldn't you have 50 caliber guns?
Why wouldn't you have drone launch platforms to protect your ship?
You know?
If ships are going to get attacked, and I'm not talking about just from the U.S. Navy, as the potential of world war escalates, it could be, you know, who knows?
I mean, there are so many alliances that are potentially breaking, and there are, you know, so many different countries involved with different motivations and priorities.
Who knows who could be attacking?
But shouldn't transport ships have a means of self defense?
And drones make that possible.
So you just carry around, you know, a drone load right there on the top.
The top 40 foot container.
But then you might say, well, that would make it a target.
Then the navies would try to shoot the containers, thinking that those might be drones.
Well, so that's when you have other containers that have missiles in them.
This becomes a game of escalation, but the transport ships are going to have to start thinking about survival here.
And especially the tankers are going to have to think about survival.
So it's a bad day for the world when the U.S. starts committing piracy and boarding ships out in the middle of the Arabian Sea or the Indian Ocean or wherever.
You're just like hunting down ships or even in the Atlantic, ships coming out of Venezuela before the U.S. would just, you know, seize the ships and steal the oil.
The End of the Petrodollar00:04:32
Trump was bragging about it.
We're going to take the oil.
What are you, a pirate?
You know, Arr, Arr, Arr.
You're just a pirate.
You should dress up as a pirate for Halloween.
You're just out there stealing oil and taking ships.
That's not going to work for the world.
You're going to create risk and you're going to heighten transportation costs and you're going to create distrust in the sea lanes where every ship coming close to every other ship is going to be thinking, Do I press the button?
Do I launch the missiles?
Do I launch the drones?
How about torpedoes?
You're going to have tankers that will have like ocean drones, like low cost.
Mini torpedoes, you know, things like that.
That's where this is going.
It's a Mad Max ocean world.
And that's not going to be good for anybody.
It's going to raise transportation costs and risk for everybody.
So, this is all Trump's fault at this point.
It really is for weaponizing the Navy to start pirating ships.
Has led to this whole conversation, this entire scenario.
So, the U.S., though, is clearly losing its ability to project power.
In fact, since February 28th, everything has changed.
In the minds of the leaders of nations like Russia and China and Iran, everybody's thinking, wow, so Iran kept the entire U.S. Navy at bay.
And Iran is not even the largest, most capable military force in the world, right?
But Iran alone kept the U.S. at bay.
What does that mean?
It means the U.S. can no longer.
Incredibly threaten everybody into compliance.
The U.S. can't say, well, you know, do what we tell you to do or we're going to destroy your entire country.
Now, they can do it to small countries, but they tried to destroy the Houthis in Yemen.
That didn't work.
They spent what?
Was it like a week or two weeks bombing the snot out of Yemen?
And then the U.S. was losing too many aircraft.
The F 18 Hornets, they said, oh, they were falling off the edge of the aircraft carrier.
No, they weren't.
They're getting shot down.
The U.S. was losing too many aircraft and taking too many shots, and so they had to vacate the area.
And then, you know, two or three days later, the Houthis come out of their caves and their bunkers and are like, We're back, you punk, you know.
The launch of missiles again.
So you can bomb the snot out of Yemen or Iran, it doesn't defeat them.
And if you get too close, they're going to set your ships on fire.
You see?
They're going to set your ships on fire.
So this changes everything, folks, and that's why it's critical to understand this right now.
This changes everything about world trade, it changes everything about the cost of transportation, changes the dynamic of power in the world.
We are now clearly moving into a multipolar world.
The U.S. can no longer credibly function as the world's policeman.
It can no longer.
Credibly threaten to destroy a country that doesn't do what it's told.
And this is why the world is also moving away from the petrodollar.
Because if the U.S. can't enforce its will against everybody, then it can't force everybody to use the dollar.
And then the dollar is going to be dumped by more and more countries, you know, because it's weaponized and the sanctions and the inflation, devaluation of the dollar, etc.
Why would you hold dollars?
Why would you use dollars?
You know, no wonder Russia said all the energy we sell to Europe from now on is going to be priced in.
Chinese yuan, it's not going to be dollars.
It's not going to be euros even.
It's going to be China's currency.
And think about it out of Iran, when Iran says you have to pay a toll for your ship to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, what do you pay that toll in?
Well, Chinese yuan also, or maybe Bitcoin or gold or something, but not dollars.
Nobody wants dollars anymore.
I mean, nobody outside the influence of Western, you know, The main Five Eyes countries.
Nobody else wants to use dollars.
They're trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
Future of Drone Warfare00:03:40
And what Trump has actually managed to achieve here is a global demonstration of the weakness of the U.S. Navy, which nobody would have believed it six months ago.
Now, they're astonished.
The jaws are dropped on the floor.
Oh my God!
The Navy is that weak?
Their toilets don't even work?
Yeah, the Navy's that weak.
So perhaps Trump will triple down on this and he'll go in for one last mad dash of kinetic violence to try to murder some more school children or something and try to prove how powerful we are, some kind of big manly dick measuring contest with the military bombs or something.
It's going to go badly.
He's probably going to get a lot of soldiers killed, but more importantly, he's going to show that the U.S. Navy is weaker than everybody thought.
That's going to change the whole dynamic from here forward.
The whole dynamic.
In other words, what every country is realizing right now is that in order to defeat the U.S. Navy, you don't need a Navy.
In fact, it's better if you don't have one.
What do you need?
You need some speed boats with mines.
You need some underwater drones.
You need some flying drones.
You need some shore based missiles.
And that's it.
That's all you need.
You don't need an Air Force.
Trump's always bragging about we destroyed their Air Force.
What Air Force?
Like, Museum F4s that you shot up?
Who cares?
We destroyed their navy.
What navy?
They didn't have a navy.
They had like shoreline patrol boats.
It's like the Coast Guard of Iran.
You destroyed the Coast Guard.
Who cares?
You didn't destroy their ability to legitimately threaten the US Navy.
That's what has changed now.
So you can bet China's watching this.
In fact, I was asking Eric about this very point.
He thinks that Chinese military leaders are right now really recalibrating.
Their war plans, or I should say defense plans, but they're focused on like drone carriers at this point.
Not aircraft carriers, drone carriers.
And what about underwater drone carriers?
Like the submarine concept.
I've seen this, you know, at least rendered in 3D.
I've seen like submarines, not even very big, mostly unmanned, and then they can surface, open up, and boom, out pop like a thousand drones.
That seems really effective these days.
That's very effective.
Much more effective than having an aircraft carrier.
Especially when you can launch like 500 drones and then go close the top and go back underwater and disappear in 10 minutes.
You know what I'm saying?
And then whatever drones survive, you surface somewhere else after the mission an hour later or whatever battery life they have, and they can land back on the submarine so you don't lose them all.
Or you can just have them be disposable.
They can all be kamikaze drones or whatever.
Who cares?
You know, you could just stock the whole submarine full of like 5,000 drones.
You know, they don't have to be very big to do a lot of damage or to gather intel.
You know, this is the future of warfare.
It's not about aircraft carriers, it's about drones and rockets and missiles and also underwater drones as well, which kind of like think about like cruise missiles in the water.
But slower, you know.
That's the future of warfare.
America in a Multipolar World00:05:23
It's been clear in Ukraine, it's clear with Iran, and China's pivoting quickly.
The U.S. is just doubling down on, like, let's build more of the same old, obsolete stuff that Iran just proved doesn't work.
What are we going to do?
Let's build another aircraft carrier.
Sir, shouldn't we fix the toilets first?
Hell no.
They can crap overboard.
Build another aircraft carrier.
$20 billion this time.
It'll make everybody happy.
They'll launder the money into our campaign funds.
And we can claim it's all for national defense.
You're building obsolete stuff from the 1980s.
It's not going to win wars in the 2030s and 2040s, is my point.
So, everything changes from here forward.
Wow.
Trump didn't just lose the war with Iran.
He lost the credibility of the U.S. Navy.
That's what Trump did.
And everybody is noticing.
So.
I hope, as an American, I love my country.
I hate the current regime that's running it because I think they're all morons.
But I hope and pray that perhaps this will force the U.S. to reconsider its posture and to pursue a posture of peaceful trade.
I've said before, I want America to trade with Iran, trade with Russia, trade with China, trade with, even trade with North Korea.
You know, heck, we trade with Saudi Arabia all these years.
And look at all the human rights abuses of that regime.
You know, we should trade with countries instead of bombing them and threatening them and, you know, committing genocide against them.
If we trade with countries, then we have to step back from this bully position of claiming that we could, you know, we're going to blow you up.
We're going to end your civilization if you don't do what we say.
Forget that.
It's not going to work.
We need to step back.
We need to recalibrate and say, we are one nation among many.
The world has room for more than one nation.
And other nations have stuff that we could buy and trade.
They have things that we need, like rare earths out of China, or low cost energy out of Russia, or aluminum mining out of Russia, or how about enriched nuclear fuel?
Because we get most of that from Russia to this day.
But we need stuff from India, we need stuff from Turkey, we need stuff from Brazil, on and on and on.
Why can't we just trade and stop being the assholes of the sea?
Which.
Sounds like a weird canned meat product, like spam or something.
But no, we shouldn't be the assholes of the sea, is all I'm saying.
We should just trade, just trade with everybody.
Sorry about that.
I get a little carried away sometimes.
Just trade with people.
Stop bombing everybody.
That's not how you win friends.
And this is really not how you secure America's future either.
You can't make America great again by just bombing the snot out of everybody else in the world.
You actually have to, at some point, work on abundance, which comes from trade.
And you have to reinvigorate your domestic economy, your education system, your own.
Industry, the know how skills of your youth, etc.
And I don't see much focus on that, really.
It's just a focus on let's bomb everybody into compliance.
Compliance with what?
Compliance to keep using the dollar so we can print more money and go into more debt while our country falls apart because our education system has collapsed, our roads and bridges are collapsing.
It's like living in a third world country in America more and more.
That's not a long term plan of success.
Things have got to change.
The Trump approach is a failure.
Trump needs to go.
We need a whole new approach.
Eventually, it'll happen.
We need a whole new approach to get along with the world and to stop pretending that we are the rulers of the world.
We're not.
We're not the chosen ones to rule the world.
We're just, you know, all of God's children are chosen ones, technically speaking.
Everybody has the same right to exist.
But we need to learn to recognize other nations' rights, which we currently do not.
as a nation.
So that's my take on the situation.
In the meantime, guess what?
The dollar is going to continue to lose value.
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Vitamin D3 Plus K2 Supplement00:03:45
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It's necessary because the dollar will continue to lose value.
There's no question about that, at least as long as, well, it doesn't matter who's president, does it?
You know, they're all going to print.
They're going to print and print until the end.
They are.
Of course they are.
That's the only.
There's no option.
They're just going to keep printing until it's over.
So, there you go.
Thanks for listening.
You can catch more of my videos at brightvideos.com and you can catch my articles at naturalnews.com.
Take care.
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