There is a peculiar arrogance embedded in the way Washington thinks about its allies and dependents. It is the arrogance of the loan shark who believes his borrowers have nowhere else to go. It is the arrogance of the landlord who raises the rent past breaking point and is genuinely surprised when the tenant leaves. It is, in the specific case of Donald Trump, the arrogance of a man who launched a war that destroyed the energy security of a dozen nations without apparently asking a single question about what those nations might do next.
The answer, it turns out, is: quite a lot.
Washington’s strategic calculus, to the extent that word applies to a decision that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said had no viable strategy, appears to have assumed that every country caught in the blast radius of the Iran war would absorb the pain, remain loyal, and wait for America to fix the problem it created. This assumption was wrong about Japan. It was wrong about India. It was wrong about China, South Korea, Indonesia, Germany, Turkey, and every other nation whose energy security Washington casually incinerated on February 28, 2026, in service of Benjamin Netanyahu’s regional ambitions and Donald Trump’s donor obligations.
Let us go through them, one by one.
Japan: The Alliance That Just Got Repriced
Washington’s standard response to Japan’s energy crisis is that Japan “has no exit”, no Russian energy because of sanctions, no Iranian energy because of the war, no alternative because of Article 9 dependence and $1.23 trillion in Treasury exposure that functions as a hostage. This argument is wrong on every count, and it just became significantly more expensive to maintain.
Japan has multiple energy exits that require no US permission. Russia is Japan’s geographic neighbor and a willing seller. JXTG and INPEX already hold operational stakes in Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2. Japan refused to fully exit those projects even under intense American pressure in 2022, it understood, correctly, that Russia was an irreplaceable proximate energy partner. The idea that Japan “cannot” buy Russian energy is a political constraint Washington imposed, not a physical or commercial reality. That constraint just cost Japan 70% of its oil supply. Australia, Southeast Asian producers, and Central Asian gas via pipeline connectivity through China are all viable alternatives. Iran explicitly offered Japan free passage of its tankers through the Strait, publicly, on March 21. The bill for loyalty has arrived, and it is denominated in barrels.
On military dependence: Japan under Takaichi has been executing the most aggressive defense buildup since 1945. The Article 9 constitutional reinterpretation is largely complete. Japan is not the pacifist dependent of 1985, and it knows it. The alliance asymmetry that Washington has exploited for seven decades is narrowing precisely as Washington’s reliability as a security guarantor reaches its lowest point in the postwar era.
On the Treasury “hostage” argument: Japan does not need to dump $1.23 trillion in Treasuries in a single afternoon to change the terms of the relationship. It can reduce rollover. It can redirect new reserve accumulation into gold, euros, yuan, or commodity-backed assets. It can allow natural attrition to shrink its dollar exposure over 18 to 24 months, none of which triggers the mutual destruction scenario Washington’s strategists cite as the reason Japan will stay quiet. Japan has been doing exactly this with its gold reserves already. Every major non-Western central bank is executing the same gradual rotation.
The honest description of Japan’s situation is this: it has options, they are politically costly inside the current alliance framework, and the United States just dramatically raised the cost of maintaining that framework while simultaneously demonstrating its unreliability. That is not a hostage situation. That is an alliance whose terms just became visibly one-sided in the most consequential way possible.
South Korea: Helium, Chips, and the Semiconductor Time Bomb
South Korea sources 60 to 70% of its crude through Hormuz. It has approximately seven months of strategic reserves. It is a treaty ally of the United States, host to 28,500 American troops, and one of the most important manufacturing economies in the world. It was given no advance warning of the Iran strikes, no energy security consultation, and no emergency supply arrangement. It was told, in effect, to figure it out.
But the oil exposure, severe as it is, is not the most alarming dimension of South Korea’s crisis. That distinction belongs to helium.
South Korea imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025. Helium is not a luxury industrial gas. It is the non-substitutable thermal management and contamination-control agent that makes semiconductor fabrication physically possible, used to purge other gases from wafer systems and to cool fabrication environments to the tolerances required for advanced chip production. There is no replacement for it in this application. When supply tightens, defect rates rise, cost per good die increases, and output falls. Samsung and SK Hynix (which together produce approximately two-thirds of the world’s memory chips, including the HBM chips that power every major AI data center on earth) have helium stockpiles that their own executives say last approximately six months.
When QatarEnergy declared force majeure on March 4, the financial press focused on oil and LNG pricing. Almost no one noticed that the world’s primary helium supplier had simultaneously gone offline. South Korea’s ruling party lawmaker Kim Young-bae, after meeting with Samsung and other industry leaders, issued a public warning: “Officials have indicated that the production of semiconductors might be compromised if we are unable to procure certain essential materials from the Middle East.” Samsung and SK Hynix shares fell sharply the same week.
The cascade from a South Korean chip production slowdown in H2 2026 runs directly into every industry on earth that depends on memory chips: AI data centers, automotive, consumer electronics, defense systems, medical devices, and telecommunications infrastructure. The United States, which launched the CHIPS Act to secure domestic semiconductor supply chains, has now disrupted the primary fabrication material supply for its most important allied chip producers. The United States launched a war in the Middle East and simultaneously undermined the semiconductor supply chain it spent $52 billion trying to build. The irony is so complete it borders on self-parody.
South Korea also sources bromine from Israel, used in wafer-etching processes, meaning both of its critical semiconductor feedstock suppliers are now enmeshed in the same war zone Washington created without consulting Seoul.
Does Trump think South Korea has no options? South Korea is conducting emergency helium procurement outreach to US and Russian suppliers simultaneously, the latter of which Washington will find deeply uncomfortable to explain.
India: Twenty-Five Days and a Hall Pass
India did not have the luxury of months to decide. It had 25 days of oil reserves when the Strait closed. Twenty-five days. That is not a strategic buffer. That is a countdown.
Washington’s response was a 30-day waiver allowing India to continue buying Russian oil, a temporary bureaucratic permission slip issued by the government that caused the emergency, for a country that should never have needed permission to buy energy from its own established suppliers in the first place. The condescension embedded in that gesture is its own answer to the question this article asks. Does Trump think nobody has options? He apparently thinks India needs a hall pass.
India has more options than Washington is comfortable acknowledging. It has been Russia’s largest oil customer since 2022. Indian refiners (Reliance Industries, Bharat Petroleum) routinely settle Russian crude purchases in UAE dirhams, bypassing the dollar entirely. India is a founding BRICS member, a participant in the de-dollarization infrastructure being built transaction by transaction, and a nation that watched the United States destroy its primary Gulf energy supply corridor without consultation. Shashi Tharoor, one of India’s most respected international voices, said plainly that a prolonged Iran war will “limit India’s energy import options”, but the options Washington is limiting are the ones India was using at Washington’s insistence.
The 30-day waiver is not generosity. It is an admission that Washington cannot actually enforce its own sanctions against Russian energy on a country of 1.4 billion people whose cooperation it needs for every strategic objective it has in Asia. India knows this. It is accelerating its Russian energy relationship, deepening its BRICS financial connectivity, and watching Washington demonstrate, for the second time in four years, that alliance with America means absorbing catastrophic costs while Washington pursues objectives that serve someone else’s interests.
Does Trump think India has no options? India is currently repricing its strategic alignment in real time.
China: The Designated Beneficiary
China is the only major economy for which the question “does it have options?” is almost insulting in its premise. China spent the last decade building options specifically because it understood that Washington would eventually do something like this.
China imports approximately 50% of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz. That is the short-term vulnerability. The long-term picture is different in every dimension. China has the world’s largest renewable energy buildout, over 90% of new global power generation capacity in 2024 came from renewables, and China accounted for the majority of it. It has Power of Siberia delivering Russian gas through a pipeline that requires no tanker, no Strait, and no US permission. It has Belt and Road energy infrastructure across Central Asia. It has the world’s largest EV fleet, eliminating oil demand at the margin faster than any other country. It has mBridge processing $55.5 billion in dollar-free settlements. It has CIPS connecting 119 countries.
China’s response to the Iran war has been studied, deliberate, and strategically coherent, which is to say, the precise opposite of Washington’s. Beijing called for an immediate ceasefire, positioned itself as a neutral peace broker, quietly accelerated its Russian energy intake, and watched the United States hand it the geopolitical argument it has been making for a decade: that American unipolarity is not a system of rules but a system of arbitrary violence in service of American interests.
War on the Rocks assessed that China has been “insulating” its energy security against exactly this scenario for years. China does not need to do anything dramatic. It simply needs to continue doing what it was already doing, and let Washington’s actions make the argument for yuan internationalization, BRICS financial infrastructure, and multipolar energy markets better than any Chinese diplomat ever could.
Does Trump think China has no options? China designed its last decade around having options. This war is the exam it was studying for.
Indonesia: The Sulfur Trap and the Nickel Pincer
Indonesia’s exposure to the Iran war is one the Western press has almost entirely ignored, which makes it worth examining in detail. Indonesia imports 75% of its sulfur from the Gulf for nickel HPAL processing, the high-pressure acid leach technology used to produce battery-grade nickel for the global EV supply chain. Sulfur accounted for as much as 41% of the cost of Mixed Hydroxide Precipitate, a key nickel intermediate, as of January 2026. Without Gulf sulfur, Indonesia’s nickel processing industry faces a feedstock crisis that has nothing to do with nickel supply and everything to do with the chemical inputs Washington’s war just disrupted.
But the sulfur crisis is only one blade of a pincer closing on global nickel markets. The other blade is reconstruction demand. Iran’s post-war infrastructure rebuild (pipelines, refineries, desalination plants, port facilities, hardened military infrastructure) will require substantial quantities of high-grade nickel steel. Qatar’s two destroyed LNG trains, which S&P Global projects will not return to operation until 2029-2030, involve enormous volumes of specialized cryogenic pipeline and pressure vessel steel with high nickel content. Reconstruction of Gulf energy infrastructure at the scale now required represents a sustained demand spike for specialty nickel steel that will run for years.
The result is a textbook commodity pincer: nickel supply constrained by the sulfur-HPAL feedstock crisis on the supply side, nickel demand spiking from Gulf reconstruction requirements on the demand side. This intersection is almost entirely absent from mainstream commodity analysis, and it represents one of the most structurally compelling long positions in the current environment.
Indonesia’s response has been to announce plans to raise domestic coal output, accelerating a pivot toward energy self-sufficiency that explicitly reduces its exposure to Gulf supply chains. Indonesia is also a member of ASEAN, which adopted a formal five-year plan at the May 2025 Kuala Lumpur summit to reduce dollar dependence and maximize local currency settlement across the bloc.
Does Trump think Indonesia has no options? Indonesia is building them with every ton of coal it pulls from its own ground.
Germany: Defenestrated Twice, Still Standing at Attention
Germany deserves its own epitaph. Michael Hudson’s description of Germany’s pre-war economic model captures the precise mechanism of its destruction: buy cheap Russian energy, manufacture excellent industrial goods, subcontract labor to Poland, sell expensive products to China. It was a model of elegant efficiency built on two energy relationships, one with Russia to the east, one with the Gulf to the south.
The United States destroyed the first one. The Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged in September 2022. Washington encouraged and enabled the sanctions architecture that severed Germany from its cheapest energy supplier. German industry never fully recovered. Energy costs doubled. The chemical and steel industries that Germany built over a century began their slow-motion retreat.
Now the second one is gone. The Iran war has disrupted Germany’s access to Gulf LNG, the expensive replacement for the Russian gas Washington told Germany it no longer needed. Germany has now lost both of its primary energy supply relationships in four years, both times at Washington’s instigation, both times without adequate compensation or alternative arrangement.
Chancellor Merz has responded by announcing 500 billion euros in defense spending. He has not called Putin. The model Hudson identified as Germany’s competitive genius is being replaced by a model of buying expensive American LNG and manufacturing weapons. This is not a German choice. It is the predictable outcome of being a US vassal in a period when Washington has confused its allies’ vulnerability with their loyalty.
Germany has options it is not yet willing to exercise. A phone call to Moscow. A resumption of energy negotiations. The political cost of those options is high, but it declines with every month of $120 oil and every billion of defense spending that substitutes for industrial investment.
Turkey: The Pivoting Hinge
Turkey occupies a position in this crisis that Washington has persistently failed to comprehend. NATO’s second-largest military, a Bosphorus-controlling maritime power, a country that shares borders with both Iran and Russia, and a state that has been running its own independent foreign policy since 2016 while collecting US alliance benefits, Turkey is watching the Iran war with the cold strategic calculation of a country that has options on every side of the board.
Turkey sources substantial crude volumes through Hormuz. It has been building its Russian energy relationship since TurkStream came online, making it a gas transit hub that collects rents regardless of which direction European politics blow. It has maintained commercial and diplomatic relationships with Iran throughout four decades of US sanctions. Erdogan has called for ceasefire and positioned Turkey as a potential mediator, which is simultaneously a humanitarian gesture and a strategic advertisement of Turkey’s indispensability.
Does Trump think Turkey has no options? Turkey is the option. It is the country that can facilitate a ceasefire, reopen energy flows, and collect the geopolitical dividend of being the adult in the room, all while remaining nominally inside NATO. Erdogan has played this hand before. He is playing it again.
Russia: The Sanctioned Nation That Won
Russia is not a victim of this war. Russia is its principal economic beneficiary, and the “Russia is sanctioned” framing that Washington deploys to explain why no one will do business with Moscow deserves to be buried permanently.
Russia is sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. That is a significant coalition. It is also a coalition that collectively represents a shrinking share of global GDP, a minority of the world’s population, and precisely none of the world’s largest energy-importing nations in the Global South.
Russia is not sanctioned by China, bilateral trade hit a record $244.8 billion in 2024, nearly all in yuan and rubles. Russia is not sanctioned by India, now Moscow’s largest oil customer. Russia is not sanctioned by Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Kazakhstan. The Kremlin confirmed this week that the Iran war has “fuelled significant demand for Russian energy” at premium pricing, given that Russia is now the marginal supplier to every Asian economy scrambling to replace Gulf crude.
The sanctions are a Western performance for a Western audience. The audience that matters, the $120 oil buyers in Asia, stopped watching years ago. Does Trump think Russia has no options? Russia is exercising them on every trading desk in Mumbai, Beijing, and Jakarta.
The Pentagon’s Own Confession
There is one detail in this catastrophe that has received insufficient attention. The day before the Iran strikes (February 27, 2026) the Pentagon sent an emergency solicitation to mining companies asking for help boosting domestic US supplies of 13 critical minerals used to make semiconductors and weapons systems, including nickel, graphite, germanium, tungsten, and nine others. Proposals were due by March 20.
Read that again. The day before the US military launched a war that would disrupt global supply chains for critical minerals, the US military was sending emergency requests to mining companies because it did not have adequate domestic supplies of the minerals it would need to fight the war or protect the semiconductor supply chains the war would disrupt.
“This is the moment we’ve been anticipating,” said the executive chairman of Guardian Metal Resources upon receiving the solicitation. He was right that the moment had arrived. He was wrong to imply anyone in Washington had anticipated it.
The Through-Line
Every country in this catalogue has options. Some have more than others. Some are exercising them already. Some are doing the political calculus of when the cost of loyalty exceeds the cost of exit. But none of them are trapped. None of them are hostages. None of them are without alternatives.
The only actor in this entire story that behaved as if options did not exist was the United States. Washington launched a war with no viable strategy, against an adversary offering concessions in Geneva, without consulting the allies most exposed to the consequences, and without any apparent consideration of what those allies might do when they discovered that American protection was not just unreliable but actively destructive to their interests.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said there was no strategy. Mearsheimer said it was unwinnable. Davis said Iran merely needed to survive. Macgregor said the inventory would last two weeks. The Omani foreign minister was announcing Iranian concessions on live television the night before the bombs fell.
They bombed it anyway.
Strategic empathy, the capacity to model what your adversaries and allies will do in response to your actions, is the foundational requirement of statecraft. It is the thing that separates a foreign policy from a tantrum. Trump’s Iran decision had none of it. He launched the war apparently confident that the American empire’s institutional inertia (the treaties, the bases, the dollar, the carrier groups) would absorb whatever came next.
South Korea is calling Russian helium suppliers. India is expanding Russian crude pipelines. Japan is reconsidering Sakhalin. Indonesia is pivoting to domestic coal. Germany is one bad quarter away from calling Moscow. China is watching, building, and waiting. Turkey is offering to mediate, for a price. Russia is counting its windfall profits.
The exits were always there. They just needed a reason to use them.
Trump gave them one.
Scott Ortkiese is Principal of Throughline Synthesis Group. He writes atthroughlinesynthesis.com and on LinkedIn and Substack. This article incorporates analysis from Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis (Ret.), Col. Douglas Macgregor (Ret.), former diplomat Alastair Crooke, economist Michael Hudson, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, and reporting from Reuters, CNBC, the Korea Economic Daily, Fusion Worldwide, and War on the Rocks.
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