Trump’s Mideast oil mess is bringing China and Russia even closer together
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Nord Stream 2 carried 55 billion cubic meters per year when it was operating. Power of Siberia 2, at 50 billion cubic meters, is built to similar scale. The comparison is not reassuring to anyone, including China’s planners, who understand that a second large Russian pipeline would increase import concentration even as it reduces seaborne vulnerability. This is the paradox embedded in the corridor logic: The project that insulates itself from one chokepoint exposes itself to another.
An extended energy shock around the Strait of Hormuz, of the kind that analysts are tracking in 2026, makes overland pipelines look like strategic wisdom. A geopolitical rupture or rivalry with Russia would make the same pipeline look like a trap. China’s negotiators have read this history. Their unusual patience in signing on, their expansion of LNG capacity in parallel, their insistence on pricing terms that Russia finds inadequate, all reflect the recognition that the pipeline’s value as an unbuilt corridor may exceed its value as a built one. China wants optionality as well as leverage.
More energy, more chips
The binding constraint on China’s most advanced semiconductor fabrication is not electricity or nitrogen or hydrogen but extreme ultraviolet lithography and the specialized manufacturing equipment and intellectual property that surrounds it, as well as the export controls that the United States has used since 2022 to restrict Chinese access to the frontier tooling. A stable gas supply does not yield an EUV machine. The pipeline’s effects are on the ecology of scaling, not on the cutting edge, where the competition is most intense and the gap remains most visible.
What the pipeline can do is lower the infrastructure risk premium that makes certain chipmaking clusters too fragile to sustain. Imagine a provincial government courting a 28-nanometer foundry, a packaging campus, and several industrial-gas suppliers. The limiting questions in that negotiation are often quiet ones: Can the local grid guarantee continuous power? Can industrial gases be delivered without interruption? Can the region meet environmental compliance requirements without shutting down plants during winter pollution campaigns? A new trunkline does not answer these questions but shifts the feasible responses. It allows planners to make commitments that would otherwise require hedges, and hedges in industrial policy tend to become failures.
The plan to advance “preliminary work” on the Central Line is a political commitment embedded in security thinking, industrial strategy, and the institutional planning routines of a state that treats external dependence as a vulnerability to be managed by building redundancy and domestic capacity simultaneously. Chips increase the value of energy security. Energy security increases the feasibility of chip scaling. The state that grasps this feedback loop before its competitors will have done something more durable than winning a trade dispute. It will have changed the conditions under which the next dispute is conducted. Such change may take decades to become visible, and “preliminary work” is how it begins.
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