If you had just met someone and, after only ten minutes, said that you didn't like them, I would call you immature, and yet we do it so often with books. We start to read "Moby Dick" or "Heart of Darkness" or "Don Quixote", and ten pages into it, we decide it's too hard, it's boring, we don't like it. Your job is to push on and stay with the author's words and see what you can learn.
Which is what I just did with the book "The House of Wisdom", which is stuffed so full with fascinating facts and footnotes that the going can get a little bit tough. Whenever I needed a bit of a break, I looked at vesselfinder.com to see if the Chinese-owned tanker RICH STARRY was still stuck inside the Strait of Hormuz. The US Navy had stopped it from leaving the Persian Gulf which could well bring China into the conflict.
You see, while I doubt that neither the Americans nor the Irians are in the mood of breaking this ceasefire after their armed conflict had exhausted them and had reached a stage of ever-decreasing returns, this blockade by the Americans will really hurt China. The US knows it can’t compete against China in manufacturing, high-end tech, and its controls over the supply chains for numerous critical minerals. China's only economic Achilles heel, its only vulnerability, is its access to oil and gas. Oil is America's last weapon in maintaining its global dominance.
What will China do to free the RICH STARRY and any other Chinese ship caught in the American blockade? Keep looking at vesselfinder.com.
