On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated surprise operation against Iran. In twelve hours, nearly 900 strikes hit nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan, IRGC command infrastructure, air defences, and the compound of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei was killed in the opening wave. Iranian state media confirmed his death in the early hours of 1 March.
Iran responded with over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones, claiming strikes on 27 US military positions across nine countries. The IRGC declared that the Strait of Hormuz was closed — “not one litre of oil” would pass. Tanker traffic fell to near zero. More than 150 ships anchored outside the strait rather than risk transit. Maersk, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd suspended all sailings. Brent crude crossed $103 a barrel. The International Energy Agency, authorising the release of 400 million stockpiled barrels in the largest such action in its history, described the disruption as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” Analysts warned of $120 to $150 a barrel if the conflict continued. As of 14 March, Day 14 of the war, no ceasefire is in place.
This escalation did not emerge from nowhere. In the preceding two years, the same system had already been under strain. In late 2023, Houthi missile and drone attacks on Red Sea shipping — framed as solidarity with Gaza — forced major container lines to reroute thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope. Insurance premiums quadrupled. Food costs edged upward across markets already battered by inflation. The United States and United Kingdom launched air strikes on Houthi positions inside Yemen.
Meanwhile, Gaza was under a military siege of staggering brutality. Hospitals ran out of fuel for generators. Food and water were systematically restricted. A population of two million people was being destroyed in conditions that humanitarian organisations described as deliberate starvation.
The juxtaposition was worth sitting with then, and it is still more stark now. The world has mobilised militarily and economically over oil supply lines with extraordinary speed and force. The same world proved unable — or unwilling — to halt a siege killing civilians in their tens of thousands. Insurance markets moved with precision. The United Nations Security Council was deadlocked. The contrast is not incidental. It is diagnostic.
These events are not coincidences. They are the anatomy of a system.
A Civilisation Built on Oil
The scale of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels is frequently underestimated, even by people who understand climate change. The problem is not simply that most cars and power stations run on oil and gas. The problem is structural: fossil fuels are embedded in nearly every layer of modern production.
The Haber-Bosch process, which synthesises ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen using natural gas as both a feedstock and energy source, is responsible for producing the nitrogen fertilisers that feed roughly half the world’s population. Remove cheap natural gas, and global food production collapses. The connection between fossil fuels and food security is not mediated — it is direct.
Plastics, derived from petroleum and natural gas, saturate modern life in ways most people do not register: food packaging that prevents spoilage and extends shelf life, medical equipment from syringes to IV bags, construction materials, insulation, piping, electronics. Aviation, deep-sea shipping, and heavy freight — the sectors that move people and goods across continents — have no ready substitutes for liquid fuels at the scale currently required. Pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles, adhesives, and thousands of industrial chemicals trace their origins to oil and gas.
This dependency was not ordained by nature. It was built. Through decades of deliberate investment, subsidy, and infrastructure development, the world was shaped to require fossil fuels at every level of its functioning. When alternative energy technologies emerged, they faced institutional and financial resistance from the industries that had been built around the existing system. The combustion engine did not win because it was the best possible technology. It won because it was the one that suited the interests of the companies and states that financed the twentieth century’s industrial expansion.
That shaping was political. Dependency is power.
The Architecture of Petro-Power
After the Second World War, the United States emerged as the dominant global power with a problem: how to sustain that dominance over time. The Marshall Plan offered European allies economic reconstruction in exchange for integration into a US-led order. The Bretton Woods institutions — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the framework for dollar-denominated international trade — gave Washington structural leverage over the global economy.
But the most important arrangement was quieter and more durable. In 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi King Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. The deal struck was not a formal treaty but an enduring strategic understanding: the United States would guarantee the security of the House of Saud in exchange for preferential access to Saudi oil and for the pricing of oil in US dollars.
This arrangement, consolidated and formalised in the aftermath of the 1973 oil shock, created the petrodollar system. Under it, oil is priced and traded globally in US dollars. Any country that needs oil — which is to say, any country with an industrial economy — must first acquire US dollars to buy it. This means permanent, structurally embedded global demand for US currency. It is one of the mechanisms by which the United States has maintained economic dominance even as its share of global manufacturing has declined. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is inseparable from the fact that oil, the world’s most traded commodity, is denominated in it.
The military infrastructure required to sustain this arrangement is enormous. The US Fifth Fleet is permanently based in Bahrain, tasked with securing the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply transits daily. The United States maintains military bases across Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. It has fought multiple large-scale wars — in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and through proxies across the region — partly, in all cases, with the stability of the energy-exporting Gulf states as a strategic objective.
In 1980, following the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter made this explicit in what became known as the Carter Doctrine. He declared: “Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
The doctrine has governed US Middle East policy ever since, regardless of which administration is in office. Control of Persian Gulf oil is defined as a US national interest. That interest is enforced militarily. Everyone dependent on oil is, ultimately, dependent on the stability of arrangements the United States has designated as its own.
Israel as Imperial Asset
No feature of US foreign policy generates more confusion among liberal audiences than the unconditional nature of US support for Israel. The support is genuinely unconditional in a way that transcends normal diplomatic calculation: arms transfers continue regardless of Israeli government conduct; vetoes at the UN Security Council have been exercised dozens of times to block resolutions critical of Israeli military action; diplomatic protection has been extended consistently across administrations of both parties and through multiple decades of escalating violence.
The confusion arises from framing the relationship as primarily ideological or domestic-political. Those factors are real. But they are not sufficient to explain a pattern this consistent, this durable, and this costly in terms of US global standing.
The more structurally explanatory account is strategic. Israel is the most militarily capable US ally in a region that is central to global energy security. That capability was demonstrated and valued from the 1960s onward, when Israel served as a counterweight to Arab nationalist movements that threatened Western control of oil-producing states. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt sought to nationalise the Suez Canal and pursued pan-Arab unity projects that would have concentrated political power over regional oil in Arab hands rather than in those of Western-aligned monarchies. Ba’athist Iraq and Syria represented similar threats to the hierarchies Washington depended on. The Palestine Liberation Organisation posed not only a security problem but a political one: a successful Palestinian national project would have destabilised Jordan and complicated the security arrangements in the entire Levant.
In each case, Israel functioned as a reliable instrument of regional stability as the United States defined stability: the preservation of order congenial to Western energy interests and the suppression of movements that threatened those interests. The relationship was not hidden. It was documented in US National Security Council papers and State Department cables and was explicitly discussed in Israeli strategic planning during the same period.
This analysis does not claim that Israeli policy is directed by Washington or that there is a straightforward command relationship. The two states have their own interests, which sometimes diverge. What the structural account claims is that the pattern of US support — its consistency, its unconditional character, its survival through extraordinary moral costs to US credibility — is most coherently explained by Israel’s role as a militarily powerful, politically reliable, strategically positioned asset in the region the United States has designated as vital.
The assault on Gaza that began in October 2023 and continued through 2025 and 2026 is the most devastating expression of what this arrangement permits. The United States possessed, and possesses, the leverage to constrain Israeli military action. It has not exercised that leverage. The explanation that fits the evidence is not that Washington has been unable to act, but that the calculus has consistently favoured protecting the strategic relationship over responding to the scale of the humanitarian disaster. The logic is geopolitical, not humanitarian.
The argument here is structural, not conspiratorial. No secret cabal is required. What is required is the simple recognition that states act in what they perceive as their interests, that those interests are shaped by existing structures, and that the existing structure of the Middle East has been built around fossil fuel access for three-quarters of a century.
The Fragility of the System They Built
The Houthi disruption revealed something that planners of the global fossil fuel order prefer not to advertise: the system is brittle. The war on Iran has confirmed it at a scale that makes the Red Sea disruption look like a dress rehearsal.
A non-state armed movement in one of the world’s poorest countries, equipped with drones and anti-ship missiles purchased or manufactured at relatively modest cost, managed to disrupt 15% of global trade. The diversion of container shipping around the Cape of Good Hope — adding 5,000 to 8,000 nautical miles to journey times — translated directly into higher costs across global supply chains with a speed and scale that illustrated the extent to which modern economic life runs on just-in-time logistics and thin margins.
This brittleness is not accidental. It is intrinsic to how fossil fuel supply chains are structured. Oil and gas must be physically transported at massive scale across the globe. They move through a small number of critical chokepoints: the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows a significant fraction of global oil and gas exports; the Suez Canal, which shortens the journey between Asian production centres and European markets; the Strait of Malacca, through which much of the oil destined for East Asia transits; the Bab-el-Mandeb, where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean and where the Houthi attacks were concentrated.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March 2026 is the most serious activation of this vulnerability in the history of the modern oil system. Roughly a fifth of global oil supply transits the strait daily, along with approximately one-third of global fertiliser trade. With tanker traffic at near zero and the world’s largest shipping lines refusing transit, the disruption runs directly through food security as well as energy security. The IEA’s release of emergency reserves — unprecedented in its scale — has not arrested the price rise. No stockpile can substitute for an ongoing chokepoint closure of indefinite duration.
Control, disruption, or threat to any of these chokepoints can impose enormous costs across the entire global economy. And because fossil fuels cannot be easily stored in large quantities, supply interruptions create immediate and nonlinear price spikes. The volatility is structural. It is inseparable from the physical geography of a system built on moving large volumes of combustible material from where it is extracted to where it is burned.
Renewable energy systems do not share this vulnerability. Sunlight falls on the country that uses it. Wind blows over the turbines that capture it. The energy is generated where it is consumed, or close to it. There are no Straits of Hormuz for solar power. There is no Suez Canal that a drone strike can close to interrupt the supply of wind. The geopolitical chokepoints that make fossil fuel supply chains so susceptible to disruption — and so expensive to protect — simply do not exist in the same way for distributed renewable systems.
The costs of disruption in the Red Sea were not borne equally. The costs of the Hormuz closure will be distributed even more unequally. Shipping insurance and freight costs pass through to importers, and importers pass them to consumers. In wealthy countries with diversified supply chains and social safety nets, the effects are felt as an increment to the cost of living. In lower-income countries in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America — countries with thin currency reserves, high import dependence for food and fuel, and limited fiscal space — the same disruption means rising food prices, fuel shortages, and pressure on foreign exchange reserves. Countries that had no part in creating any of this, no vote in the decisions that produced the strikes on Iran, absorb real and severe costs.
This is not an exception to the way the fossil fuel system works. It is how the system works.
The Asymmetry of Imperial Violence
There is a pattern in how the costs and benefits of the global fossil fuel order are distributed, and it is worth naming directly.
The United States — the principal architect and primary beneficiary of petrodollar arrangements, the state that has spent trillions maintaining the military infrastructure that keeps Gulf oil flowing — experiences the geopolitical disruptions it generates at a remove. The Fifth Fleet is in Bahrain, not Baltimore. In the first two weeks of the Iran war, eleven US soldiers were killed and Iranian casualties exceeded 1,400 dead and 18,000 wounded — a ratio that will widen further as the conflict continues. The air strikes on Yemen killed Yemeni people. The siege of Gaza was conducted by Israeli forces using weapons manufactured in the United States. The strikes on Iran are killing Iranians. The pattern does not change.
The economic costs of disruption are externalised through global market mechanisms to consumers in countries that have no formal relationship with any of these conflicts. The populations of the Sahel, of South Asia, of small island nations — people who have contributed minimally to the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis, who played no role in the construction of the petrodollar system, who have no voice in US foreign policy decisions — absorb fuel price shocks and food inflation generated by conflicts thousands of miles away and driven by interests that are not theirs.
More than 800 million people globally lack access to electricity. Billions more rely on expensive, imported fossil fuels for cooking, heating, and transport, making them immediately vulnerable to the price volatility the current system generates. Energy poverty is not a natural condition. It is, in part, a product of a global energy system designed to generate profits for the companies that extract and distribute fossil fuels and geopolitical leverage for the states that control their transit.
The ability to externalise costs while retaining benefits is not a by-product of empire. It is the definition of empire. What makes a power structure imperial is precisely the asymmetry: the centre extracts the gains and exports the costs to the periphery. The fossil fuel system and the imperial system are not two separate problems that happen to overlap. They are the same structure, visible from different angles.
This asymmetry also manifests in the climate crisis itself. The countries that industrialised earliest and emitted the most are the ones with the resources to build sea walls, relocate populations, and adapt infrastructure. The countries that industrialised least, which are predominantly in the Global South, face the most severe climate impacts with the fewest resources to respond. The extraction zones — the regions whose land and labour have been mined for the raw materials of the global economy — are, in many cases, the same regions facing the most acute climate disruption. The two systems of harm reinforce each other.
Energy Sovereignty as Liberation
The critique of green capitalism has been developed in some depth elsewhere on this site, and the argument need not be rehearsed in full here. The short version is this: replacing fossil fuel extraction with mineral extraction for batteries and solar panels, while leaving ownership, control, and the distribution of benefits unchanged, is not a transition — it is a rebranding. The problem is not the source of the energy. The problem is the structure of power.
What the analysis of petro-imperialism adds to that argument is a clearer picture of what is at stake in the alternative.
Energy sovereignty — the ability of communities and nations to control their own energy production and distribution — is not merely an environmental goal. It is a political one. A country that generates its electricity from domestic renewable sources is not dependent on dollar-denominated global oil markets. It is not vulnerable to the price spikes that follow from conflicts in the Middle East or shipping disruptions in the Red Sea. It cannot be sanctioned into energy poverty by great powers managing the global fuel supply. Its economy is not structurally subordinated to the financial arrangements that keep petrodollar recycling working.
Distributed renewable energy systems — solar panels, wind turbines, community battery storage — do not require global supply chains of the kind that make fossil fuel economies so susceptible to geopolitical disruption. They do require raw materials, and those materials carry their own extractive politics, as the analysis of cobalt and lithium makes clear. But the operational geography of renewable energy is fundamentally different from that of fossil fuels. Once built, a solar installation generates energy from a local resource. It does not require a shipping route.
This is why energy sovereignty faces structural opposition from the powers that benefit from fossil fuel dependency. A world that has transitioned to distributed renewable energy is a world in which the petrodollar system loses its foundation. It is a world in which the strategic rationale for US military presence in the Gulf — the protection of energy supply lines — diminishes. It is a world in which small and middle-income countries have more economic autonomy, because their energy costs are no longer set by global commodity markets and the geopolitical arrangements that govern them.
None of this makes the transition automatic or sufficient. Solar panels built with minerals extracted under colonial conditions are not liberation. Public ownership matters. Democratic control of energy infrastructure matters. The question of who builds, owns, and benefits from energy systems is political, not technical.
Energy cooperatives across Europe and South America offer models for how distributed energy production can be governed in ways that return benefits to communities rather than shareholders. Public utilities with democratic accountability can build energy infrastructure for public benefit rather than profit. Degrowth frameworks — which insist that the goal is not to replace fossil fuel consumption with renewable consumption at the same scale, but to reduce the throughput of the economy overall — offer a political horizon that goes beyond the technical substitution of one energy source for another.
The renewable energy transition, if it is to be more than a reshuffling of extractive arrangements, must be organised around the principle that energy is a commons — a resource whose benefits should be shared and whose governance should be democratic.
The Stakes
Consider where we are on Day 14 of the war on Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is above $100 a barrel and rising. One-third of global fertiliser trade cannot move. Hundreds of ships sit at anchor. Iran’s population absorbs casualties at a rate many times that of the forces striking it. Governments in the Global South — carrying no responsibility for any decision that produced this conflict — are watching fuel and food costs spike with no fiscal capacity to absorb the blow.
These images are not disconnected. The siege of Gaza was sustained by US diplomatic and military support rooted in decades of strategic calculation about Israel’s role in maintaining a regional order built around fossil fuel access. The Houthi attacks were a response to that siege. The war on Iran is, in part, a consequence of the same chain: of the logic that the Persian Gulf must remain under US-managed security arrangements at any cost, that regional powers which threaten those arrangements must be suppressed, and that the bill for doing so is paid not by Washington but by the world. The price spikes that follow are absorbed by consumers in countries that played no part in creating any of this.
The world built on oil is a world that can be destabilised by whoever controls oil — and a world in which the attempt to maintain that control can itself become the source of the destabilisation. That is not a geopolitical accident. It is the architecture of empire — built deliberately, maintained militarily, and now, visibly, beginning to consume itself at enormous human cost.
Real climate action is inseparable from anti-imperialism. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a structural claim. The fossil fuel system and the imperial system are the same system, and the communities bearing the highest costs of both are, to a very significant degree, the same communities: those whose land was colonised for extraction, whose labour built the infrastructure of the global economy, and who now absorb the shocks generated by conflicts they did not start over resources they do not control.
You cannot dismantle one without confronting the other. A just transition means energy sovereignty, democratic control of infrastructure, and reparative finance from the countries that built the fossil fuel economy to the countries that paid its costs. It means naming the system — petro-empire — for what it is, and organising against it with the seriousness that the name demands.