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Topic: Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Oil and Gas Blog Brand: Energy World Region: Americas, Asia, and Middle East Tags: China, Cryptocurrency, Data Centers, Electricity, Iran, Iran War, and United States America’s Triple Play on Oil, Digital Dollars, and Kilowatts March 20, 2026 By: Stella Kim
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America’s strikes on Iranian oil exports are a sharp setback for China’s electricity infrastructure—helping the United States to outpace it in future AI development.
On February 28, American and Israeli warplanes launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran. The escalation intensified on March 13 with a strike on Kharg Island, the oil terminal handling 90 percent of Iran’s hydrocarbon exports, disrupting vital export infrastructure. The world watched missile contrails arc over the Persian sky. But the true coordinates of the strike were economic, not geographic—and they pointed squarely at China.
The data is clear. In 2025, Chinese refiners averaged 1.38 million barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian oil, 13.4 percent of its total seaborne imports (10.27 million bpd), making Iran its third-largest supplier behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. Conversely, China absorbed over 80 percent of Iran’s tracked total exports—much of it imported through Tehran’s “shadow fleet” and discounted barrels routed through Malaysia and Indonesia, bypassing international sanctions. Iranian light crude traded at $8 to $10 per barrel below ICE Brent on a delivered basis in China, allowing China’s independent “teapot” refineries in Shandong province, accounting for roughly a quarter of national refining capacity, to remain marginally solvent. This has made Iran totally dependent on China as an export destination—a dependency cemented by the 2021 25-year, $400 billion China-Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
In a single military campaign, the United States has placed a chokehold on the jugular of the world’s second-largest economy. The Strait of Hormuz handles 21 percent of global seaborne oil trade and one-fifth of its LNG flows, channeling some 35 to 40 percent of China’s seaborne crude imports from Gulf producers. Beijing’s shadow tanker fleet and 430,000 bpd strategic stockpiling through 2025 give it a 104-day buffer at onshore reserves, but prolonged disruption risks independent refinery shutdowns and industrial slowdowns on a time scale that buffers cannot match.
Washington’s strategic logic is plainly evident to observers. By engineering a structural cost-infliction on China’s energy supply, the United States acquires a high-value bargaining chip across the Sino-American rivalry. This spans trade negotiations and Taiwan deterrence to semiconductor export controls and the reconfiguration of the dollar-denominated financial order. The Iran operation is not a regional security measure. It is a macroeconomic weapon.
Petrodollar Erosion Meets Digital Reinvention
To understand the full architecture of American strategy, one must look beyond kinetic operations to the monetary engineering occurring simultaneously in Washington.
The dollar’s dominance remains formidable, but structurally stressed. SWIFT data show the dollar at 46.94 percent of international payments in August 2025, though its share of allocated reserves fell to 56.9 percent (Q3 2025 IMF), near 25-year lows, while the US Dollar Index (DXY) declined approximately 7 percent for the year.
Against this backdrop, the US Treasury executed a two-phase liquidity strategy.
In Phase One, former Secretary Janet Yellen flooded markets with T-bills priced above the Fed’s ON RRP rate (Overnight Reverse Repurchase Agreement). Funds shifted from RRP (peaking at $2.55 trillion in Dec 2022) to T-bills, refilling TGA (Treasury General Account) and recycling liquidity without the need for overt quantitative easing. By late 2025, the RRP hit $17 billion.
Phase Two belongs to Secretary Scott Bessent. The GENIUS Act, passed in June 2025 and signed on July 18, 2025, mandates 1:1 reserves in dollars/T-bills for stablecoins. Tether/Circle held ~$120 billion in T-bills mid-2025. Standard Chartered sees $2 trillion stablecoins by 2028 and Citi $3.7 trillion by 2030. The reverse-repo facility has been retired. The global crypto market has been conscripted as its replacement.
The transmission mechanism replicates Yellen’s playbook with a private-sector actor. The issuing of stablecoins feeds T-bill purchases, which replenish the Treasury General Account, fund government expenditure, and cycle back into bank reserves and broader economic circulation. Dollar hegemony 2.0 does not live in a central-bank vault, but in a “smart contract.”
Kilowatts Will Be America’s Next Reserve Asset
America’s grand strategy extends to the physical foundation of the next economic era: electricity itself. Goldman Sachs projects AI workloads driving a 165 percent increase in global data center power demand from ~55 gigawatts (GW) today to ~122 GW capacity by the end of the decade. AI’s share of the total use will rise from 14 percent to 27 percent—making electricity, not chips, the binding constraint of the future, as Elon Musk warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2026.
In this context, it is easy to see several seemingly-unrelated strands of grand strategy come together. The Iran operation, the GENIUS Act, and the $270 billion in deals signed at the US-Saudi Investment Forum—including xAI’s 500MW Riyadh data center with Humain—have little in common at first glance, but together crystallize a coherent tripartite grand strategy between Washington, Riyadh, and AI hyperscalers.
The strategy advances in three stages. In the near term, severing Iran’s discounted oil supply imposes serious economic pain on China. In the medium term, the GENIUS Act enlists the global crypto market as a captive buyer of US sovereign debt. In the long term, the US-Saudi AI-energy alliance, fusing petrodollar capital with semiconductor supremacy and nuclear-grade baseload power, positions America to define the kilowatt-hour standard of the coming machine economy.
Consider the historical analog. In the 1970s, Riyadh recycled oil revenues into US Treasuries, completing the petrodollar circuit and underwriting American fiscal dominance for a generation. In the 2030s, SMR-powered data centres will recycle AI revenue into energy-stable reserves, a circuitry of electrons rather than barrels. Saudi Arabia’s pivot, investing hundreds of billions into AI-linked data infrastructure and partnering with American hyperscalers, is not betrayal of the old order, but a conversion to the new one. The petrodollar is quickly becoming the electrodollar.
Barrels, Bytes, and Kilowatts: The Currencies of the Future
Far more than a mere military campaign, the Iran operation is the kinetic expression of a financial and technological transformation underway simultaneously across three registers. The oil dollar being weaponized against China, the digital dollar being institutionalized through the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin architecture, and the kilowatt dollar being constructed through the US-Saudi AI-energy nexus.
He who controlled the flow of oil dominated the 20th century. He who controlled the T-bill dominated the early 21st. But the sovereign of the mid-21st century will be the nation that controls the electron at reliably, scalably, and at the lowest marginal cost. America is betting, with considerable strategic coherence, that it can hold all three positions simultaneously. Its genius lies in sequencing—extracting seigniorage from fiat into tokenised credit, locking in Gulf energy partners through an AI-energy alliance, and establishing the kilowatt as the collateral of the next monetary order, before any rival can stabilise an alternative.
About the Author: Stella Kim
Stella (SuHee) Kim is an investment and nuclear strategy expert with over a decade of experience bridging global finance and deep-tech, with a particular focus on small modular reactors (SMRs). She is the CEO of Pandia Bridge, a Singapore-based advisory firm that connects global investors and leading Korean conglomerates with top SMR developers, including NuScale Power, to facilitate cross-border investments and strategic partnerships. Her work centers on the intersection of energy security, technology innovation, and strategic finance on a global scale. She holds a BA from Ajou University in South Korea and participated in a study abroad program at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden.
The post America’s Triple Play on Oil, Digital Dollars, and Kilowatts appeared first on The National Interest.
Источник: nationalinterest.org