Western militaries are discovering that their “arsenal of democracy” is built on Chinese parts. A decade ago, when army officers were told to “build drone capability” for their battalions with small pots of regimental money, nobody hesitated: you went online and bought cheap, robust quadcopters from Chinese manufacturers. They were good, plentiful and absurdly cheap compared with Western equivalents. It felt like smart improvisation, not a strategic vulnerability.

Fast forward to late 2025 and that improvisation now looks like a structural dependence. Western defence establishments have belatedly realised that a huge share of the unmanned systems they rely on, or the components inside them, trace back to China. In a short, high-intensity war, that dependency is merely uncomfortable. In a long war against China itself, it could be catastrophic.

Asia’s LNG pullback in October extended a year-long pattern led by China, even as Europe kept vacuuming up cargoes to shore up winter supply. Ship tracking tallies put Asian receipts near 22.8 million tonnes, fractionally above September in headline terms but lower on a per-day basis and well below last October, while China, still the world’s largest buyer, took roughly 5.6 million tonnes, down sharply year on year.

The softness isn’t about access so much as price arithmetic. With North Asia spot assessments hovering a little above $11 per mmBtu and holding north of $10 since spring 2024, discretionary spot purchases have lost out in China to cheaper long-term LNG and lower-cost pipeline gas from Russia and Central Asia. India shows the same price sensitivity, with October intake slipping from a year earlier despite a slight month-on-month uptick.

As the northern hemisphere approaches winter, the US and European oil sectors are looking to increased exports from Chinese refineries to alleviate tight global supplies of diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel. China, historically a major oil importer and the largest energy consumer, has in recent…