Six months after the United States launched military operations against Iran, oil prices have settled around $100 a barrel — painful, but far from the doubling that analysts once feared. The quiet force behind this restraint is China, whose vast strategic reserves and deliberate withdrawal from global crude markets have absorbed a shock the rest of the world might otherwise have felt far more acutely. It is a strange kind of interdependence: a nation building its own buffers against American pressure has, in doing so, buffered the American economy as well. As Trump prepares to meet Xi in Washi