In Bangkok, when the rains break after weeks of heat, the traffic slows in a way that’s almost tender. Motorbike riders slip plastic bags over their phones. Street vendors drag tarps over charcoal braziers. The entire choreography of the city adjusts to a change in the sky that nobody controls and everybody must accommodate.
In Houston, in Lagos, in Hamburg, there’s another kind of weather front now rolling through daily life. It does not smell of wet dust on hot concrete. It smells of diesel. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, or near enough, and a world that built its habits on the presumption of cheap, constant movement finds itself suddenly reintroduced to consequence. Tankers idle. Futures markets convulse. Governments rehearse the same grave phrases they used the last time a narrow stretch of water reminded us how brittle our civilisation is.
We talk about “the war in Iran” or “the crisis in the Middle East” as though such phrases were self‑explanatory, as though naming the geography exhausted the meaning. But if you stand for an afternoon at a suburban petrol station outside Phoenix, or in a supermarket queue in Athens, or in a minibus park on the edge of Nairobi, you will see that what’s really under strain is not a region. It is an operating system.
The war is not disrupting an otherwise sane order; it is making visible the insanity we normalised. So the question is not whether this is bad. Of course it’s bad. The more important question is what, precisely, is being revealed.
If you want to understand the structure of dependency in the contemporary world, you could do worse than start with a MAGA voter in rural Ohio.
He leaves home before dawn in a pickup that drinks like a camel. The jobsite is 50 miles away. There’s no bus. There’s no train. The old factory town he lives in hollowed out years ago; the work he can find is scattered along an exurban fringe that was never designed to be lived in without cheap fuel. On some days his truck is a tool. On days like these it’s a leash.
He will tell you that he values freedom. He’s not wrong. But look at his ledger. A spike in oil prices induced by a decision hundreds of kilometres away, in a sea he has never seen, now takes direct aim at the thin margin between his wages and his costs. The road he drives on is a pipeline by another name. The pipeline is a treaty. The treaty is a weapons system and a set of unspoken understandings between states. His freedom, in practice, runs through all of these.
The same blue‑collar workers who propelled Donald Trump to power are the ones now being quietly bled at the pump. This is the anatomy of the problem. The global petrofuel regime has its pressure points, and they are not distributed randomly. Straits and chokeholds in the world ocean have their counterparts in household budgets.
An analogous story could be told of a young woman in Karachi who takes two buses and a rickshaw to work, or a delivery rider weaving through Jakarta traffic on a Chinese‑made scooter, or an Uber driver in Johannesburg who rents his car by the day. Every additional rupee, rupiah, or rand that disappears into the tank is not only a number in an inflation report. It’s a rearrangement of possibility: less medicine, fewer school supplies, more hours of work to stand still.
We’re accustomed to treating such experiences as evidence of misfortune or mismanagement. In fact they are diagnostic. The closure of Hormuz is not a freak event in an otherwise rational system. It is an x‑ray. The radiograph shows several things at once.
First, that we have built an energy metabolism for our species that depends on a handful of maritime capillaries. Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el‑Mandeb, Suez. Block or threaten any of them and the pulse quickens. Around twenty percent of globally traded oil normally squeezes through Hormuz. No credible planner designing a resilient organism would centralise this much metabolic flow through a few exposed arteries. Yet we did.
Second, that the social infrastructure in many countries — the layout of cities, the siting of schools, the expectation of commuting distances, the very architecture of aspiration — has been articulated around an assumption: liquid hydrocarbons will be cheap, and the security architecture that keeps them flowing will hold. This assumption underwrote the expansion of American suburbia just as surely as it underwrote the construction of ring roads around African and Asian megacities.
Third, that the financial system has learned to convert the volatility of this arrangement into profit. When a choke point tightens, prices rise, and the same firms that argued yesterday for the wisdom of markets today claim helplessness as margins expand. The suffering of commuters and households appears on balance sheets as an “upside”.
Seen from this angle, there is nothing accidental about the fact that an electrician from Pennsylvania, a nurse from Manchester, and a matatu driver from Nairobi can all tell you, without consulting the Financial Times, when tanker traffic in the Gulf has been disrupted. Their lives are wired to that narrow passage in ways far more intimate than most of their political conversations allow. The customary vocabulary for this is “economic blowback”, as though war were a stone thrown into a pond and inflation merely the ripples. That language is misleading.
What’s happening now — in the United States, in Europe, across the so‑called Global South — is not the passive transmission of an external shock through an otherwise neutral medium. It is the activation of latent asymmetries that were already present in the structure.
Start with the United States. On paper it looks well‑placed: a major producer of both oil and gas, now a significant exporter of liquefied natural gas, less dependent on imported crude than at any time in recent decades. And yet the price that appears on the digital display at an Ohio gas station still tracks futures markets resonating to events in the Gulf. The country’s apparent “energy independence” turns out to be a rhetorical artefact. The pricing is global even when the stuff is local.
At one end of the American system, the shock presents as opportunity. Shale operators in Texas and North Dakota ramp up production, or at least their forward guidance. LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast secure new long‑term contracts with anxious European utilities. Trading desks in New York quietly profit from volatility. The dollar, still the main currency in which these commodities are denominated, strengthens as global investors seek refuge, tightening the noose around any nation that owes in dollars but earns in another currency.
At the other end, it presents as a familiar squeeze. Fuel costs rise. Airlines and logistics firms pass on the increase. Food becomes more expensive, not only because of transport but because modern industrial agriculture is itself a way of burning fossil fuels slowly in the form of fertiliser and mechanisation. For millions of Americans living paycheque to paycheque, the abstract debate about “headline inflation” expresses itself as a decision between cutting back on protein or falling behind on rent.
There is a similar duality at work in Europe, but the pattern of the veins is different.
For years European elites congratulated themselves on having built a more enlightened model: higher fuel taxes, more efficient cars, better public transport, a political culture that nods toward climate change even when it ducks substantive action. Beneath that self‑image lay a simple fact: European industry, particularly German, had made itself heavily reliant on imported gas, primarily from Russia, to power a manufacturing system that anchored the eurozone.
The rupture of that relationship did not result in a sober reassessment of the underlying model so much as a frantic search for alternative suppliers. Floating LNG terminals appeared almost overnight along the North Sea coast. Contracts were signed with Qatar, the United States, and others. The geography of dependence shifted; its logic remained intact.
Now, when Hormuz constricts and gas prices jump, the consequences refract through an already stressed European grid. Electricity prices in Spain, Germany, and Greece are not just numbers on a chart. They are expressions of deeper asymmetries.
Spain, with relatively high levels of renewables and a reformed market, can sometimes access relatively cheaper power. Germany, having chosen to phase out nuclear while still leaning on gas as a balancing fuel for its renewables, finds its industrial heartland exposed. Greece, more dependent on imported energy and plagued by a history of oligarchic control of key utilities, sees prices spike to levels that would be politically unthinkable in Berlin but are somehow tolerated in Athens.
The underlying European story is not only about energy. It’s about the architecture of the Union itself. Northern and core countries, able to borrow cheaply and with greater fiscal room, can cushion their populations with subsidies and caps. Peripheral and highly indebted states cannot. Liberalisation of energy markets in some places meant genuine competition; in others, it meant replacing public monopolies with private cartels whose interests are tightly braided with those of political parties and media groups. When a commodity shock hits this kind of landscape, it does not “cause inequality”. It reveals where inequality has been structurally installed.
Further south and east, the same wave breaks in still more unforgiving ways. Take a mid‑sized African importer of fuel and food — a country like Senegal or Kenya, though the pattern is replicated across much of the continent, in parts of South Asia, in segments of Latin America. The government’s foreign‑exchange reserves are limited. The national currency is weak. External debt, much of it denominated in dollars or euros, has grown over a decade of cheap money and eager lenders.
As oil and gas prices leap, the cost of importing fuel soars. Food import bills rise in tandem; if you rely on wheat from Russia or Ukraine, or on rice from exporters facing their own climate shocks, the pressure compounds. The stronger dollar means that each unit of foreign currency buys less, even as it takes more of your own currency to service existing debts.
For the urban poor, the change appears first at the street‑food stall and the minibus terminus. Chapati gets thinner. Fish of a certain size becomes a treat, not a staple. Fares rise. People walk further. For governments, it appears in bleak spreadsheets: widening trade deficits, accelerating inflation, dwindling reserves, nervous calls with the International Monetary Fund. In such places, the war in Iran is not foreign policy. It’s the unwelcome third partner in a throuple already formed by climate volatility and financial fragility.
The images that circulate globally — burning tankers, maps with red arrows, talking heads in Western capitals — tell only a fraction of the story. The rest plays out in the daily improvisations of people who must reconcile themselves to the fact that a conflict thousands of kilometres away, in which they have no say, has nonetheless reached uninvited into their kitchens and their lungs.
It is tempting, in the face of this, to reach for the solace of villains. Oil companies recording obscene profits while preaching market inevitability. Gulf monarchies bankrolling their next prestige project. Traders, bankers, politicians whose hands never touch a steering wheel but who can move, with a few keystrokes, more oil than a thousand tankers could carry. They are not figments; they exist, and their behaviour is often rapacious. But to focus only on them risks mistaking the symptom for the condition.
The deeper pattern is that we have designed a civilisation in which the basic functions of life — eating, keeping warm or cool, moving through space — are mediated through an energy system whose most salient properties are concentration and fragility. Concentration of production in a few reservoirs and regimes. Concentration of transport through a handful of maritime corridors. Concentration of control in corporate and political oligarchies. Fragility at every point where those concentrations meet.
The closure of Hormuz does not create this pattern. It brings it into focus, like dye injected for a scan.
At this point in any analysis, readers often ask, with a degree of exasperation: where, then, is the opportunity? What is the “silver cloud”?
The honest response is that there is no silver cloud if by that we mean a compensatory good that balances out the bad. There’s only a shift in the space of what can now be seen and, perhaps, done. Crisis removes the camouflage from arrangements that were previously too normal to notice. It punctures illusions.
One such illusion — perhaps the central illusion of late industrial society — is that a fossil‑fuelled normalcy is cheap, stable, and natural. Cheap, because for decades the sticker price at the pump did not include the cost of securing sea lanes, nor the long‑term damage of greenhouse gases, nor the communities uprooted by pipelines and refineries. Stable, because the massive, military‑policed flows of hydrocarbons rarely failed in ways that directly affected Western consumers. Natural, because a generation grew up believing that to live is to drive; that to be modern is to fly; that development is measured in highways paved and tonne‑kilometres moved. Hormuz, under stress, makes visible the contingency of this arrangement. It reminds us that what passes for everyday life in Phoenix or Paris or Pune is suspended over a complex lattice of agreements, threats, and geological facts.
A second illusion, closely linked, is that our political categories map onto this reality in any useful way. Left and right parties argue over tax rates and cultural grievances while sharing an underlying acceptance of car‑centric planning and perpetual growth. Nationalists in Washington or Warsaw or New Delhi speak of sovereignty while presiding over societies whose material reproduction depends on supply chains and shipping routes they don’t, in any meaningful sense, control.
When the Strait closes, when ships are diverted around much longer routes, when insurance costs rise and prices follow, the hollowness of these slogans is laid bare. No government can command oil to flow through a blocked channel. No cultural war can be won against a barrel of Brent trading at a price that makes hauling food to supermarket shelves unprofitable.
If there is a silver lining, it lies in this disillusionment. A fantasy that survives untested can persist indefinitely. One that is forced into contact with experience either fractures or hardens into something more dangerous.
The friction between fantasy and fact is especially evident in the political ecosystems of the United States and the European Union.
Return to the Ohio commuter for a moment. He has been told, directly and indirectly, that his way of life is under attack not by an energy system built to extract maximum rent from his dependence, but by coastal environmentalists, effete urbanites, migrants, and a vaguely defined “globalist elite”. He has been encouraged to see his oversized truck not as a design choice made by manufacturers to evade emissions standards and sell more steel, but as an emblem of masculinity and independence. He has been assured that fossil fuels are a birthright, and that any politician who questions this is plotting against him.
Now his fuel costs jump because a shipping lane is constrained. The candidate who shouts loudest about drilling more in Alaska or in the Gulf offers him an emotional salve, but not a temporal one. New wells drilled today do not fill his tank this month, and in any case the price he pays is set on exchanges far downstream of those wells. Meanwhile, the same companies he trusts to defend his freedom defensively inform investors that, in light of geopolitical uncertainties and capital discipline, they will not expand supply as fast as they might have in the past. Scarcity has become good for business.
At some point, if the pattern repeats often enough, a question may crystallise that is at once economic and existential: whose side is this so‑called freedom machine actually on? The political space opened by that question is volatile. It can tilt toward paranoia and scapegoating, or toward a more lucid appraisal of structural dependency. It depends on who speaks into it, and what stories they tell.
There is an analogous crack opening in Europe, though it runs along different fault lines.
A Greek household receiving a power bill several times their rent; a German factory manager calculating the cost of keeping a furnace running; a Spanish farmer watching irrigation pumps idle. Each experiences the energy shock through institutions that are anything but neutral. Some will blame “Brussels” and the abstraction of the European project. Others will point to local monopolies and the cosy ties between energy firms and governments. Still others will blame refugees, climate activists, or some other proximate outsider.
Beneath these competing narratives lies a more straightforward reality: the European Union has created a single market in which capital and goods move with relative ease, but where the tools for collective energy policy, fiscal support, and social protection remain disjointed and politically contested. Germany can subsidise its own industries at a scale Greece cannot dream of. Spain can renegotiate tariff structures that entrench the advantage of some generators over others; Poland can resist emissions policies that would threaten its coal sectors. The Union contains multitudes; its energy system reflects that.
Every time an external shock hits — the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now the Hormuz closure — the same pattern replays: emergency coordination, uneven national responses, rhetorical solidarity, rising resentment.
The silver lining here, if that metaphor can still serve, is that the gap between the narrative of a cohesive, forward‑looking Europe and the lived experience of asymmetric vulnerability becomes harder to ignore. As with the American MAGA voter, the risk is not that people see too much, but that they see only the portion that confirms their prior enemies.
Outside these Atlantic and near‑Atlantic theatre pieces, in the vast archipelagos of the so‑called Global South, the stakes are sharper.
For a street vendor in Lagos, a fisher in Cebu, a garment worker in Dhaka, the phrase “energy transition” often arrives as a kind of foreign incantation — invoked at climate conferences, traded in diplomatic communiqués, rarely backed by capital flows commensurate with the scale of the adjustment they are being asked to make. When fuel prices spike because of events in the Gulf, there is little buffer. The same informal networks that kept people alive during the pandemic strain to absorb another blow.
And yet, in these very places, another set of possibilities is stirring. Not because of noble intentions, but because of arithmetic.
When diesel is cheap, extending the life of an old generator or a minibus fleet powered by internal combustion seems rational. When diesel is expensive and likely to remain subject to geopolitical blackmail, the case for decentralised solar, for microgrids, for electrified transport strengthened by local manufacturing, shifts from moral aspiration to prudence.
For governments in these countries, whose foreign exchange haemorrhages every time fossil prices spike, the logic of reducing import dependence tracks closely with the logic of decarbonisation. Their problem is less one of vision than of financing and technology transfer. A world order that continues to treat intellectual‑property protections for battery chemistries as sacrosanct while entire societies teeter on the brink of default reveals its priorities with painful clarity.
The Hormuz crisis, by intensifying balance‑of‑payments pressures, may accelerate this reassessment. It may also push some states into the arms of lenders who demand austerity in exchange for relief. The same event can harden the existing order and incubate alternatives simultaneously. Which germ takes root depends on choices still unwritten.
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We are used to treating systems as if they were machines. They have levers. They accept inputs. They produce outputs. They respond, in this metaphor, to control. The behaviour of the fossil‑fuel world order under stress is better understood ecologically. It has trophic layers and feedback loops; it has keystone actors and invasive species; it has niches where power concentrates and margins where the cost of maintaining the whole is offloaded. When a predator disappears or a new toxin enters the food chain, effects ripple in ways that mechanical metaphors cannot cleanly predict.
When Hormuz falters, the effect is not a simple “supply shock” propagating along a single chain. It is more like a drought along a major river that feeds multiple tributaries. Some communities have wells. Others have none. Some upstream interests hoard or divert what remains. Downstream, as fields crack, people migrate or fight or innovate or die. The closure, then, is not only an event. It is a probe. It forces us to ask what sort of organism we have collectively built, and whether we recognise ourselves in it.
Every era has its mirrors. The pandemic gave us one set: masks on faces, supply chains fraying, the visibility of care work. The war in Ukraine gave us another: the swift mobilisation of sympathy for some refugees and not others; the exposure of Europe’s energy entanglements. This crisis in the Gulf offers yet another, and it is more unsettling still, because it points less to an external enemy than to a set of choices we have normalised.
We chose to design cities in which walking is an afterthought and buses are for those who failed. We chose to treat the atmosphere as a dumping ground. We chose to entrust the governance of the global energy metabolism to firms legally bound to maximise profit, and to states whose legitimacy often rests on their ability to distribute petrodollars, not wisdom. We chose to imagine that the resulting arrangement could be stabilised by aircraft carriers and trade agreements, and to call that peace.
None of these choices was made collectively in any meaningful sense. They emerged from particular historical trajectories and power struggles. But we live in their aftermath, and we are reacquainted with them each time a strait narrows, a price jumps, a household tightens its belt another notch. The question now is not whether we can return to normal. Normal was the problem.
The question is whether we are willing to see, in the daily indignities of rising bills and constrained mobility, an invitation to a more fundamental reckoning: about what we mean by security, by prosperity, by freedom; about what kinds of dependency we are prepared to accept; about whose pain we are prepared to ignore so that the lights stay on.
There will be those who insist that the only rational response is to double down: more drilling, more militarisation of sea lanes, more securitisation of supply chains, more sacrifice zones. They will speak the familiar language of realism, competitiveness, and growth. Their proposals will have the advantage of recognisability. They ask us only to endure a little more of what we already know.
There will also be others — some in villages, some in barrios, some in city councils and workshops and classrooms — who sense, perhaps inarticulately, that an organism which repeatedly exposes its own vital organs to such needless risk is not healthy. They will not have ready‑made blueprints for another way of organising energy, movement, and life. They will have questions, experiments, partial victories, and frequent setbacks.
The Hormuz crisis does not predetermine which of these currents will prevail. It merely sharpens the contrast between them.
In Bangkok, after the rain, puddles linger in the cracked asphalt. Children jump them on their way home from school. Drivers curse the new potholes that will rattle suspensions and slow commutes. City engineers make small, local decisions — to patch, to widen, to ignore — that, in aggregate, will determine whose neighbourhood floods worse next year.
On a different scale, we are standing in such a puddle now, watching the reflection of tankers, flares, and dollar signs shimmer on its surface. The temptation is to look away, to blame the weather, to demand faster cars. The more difficult, and perhaps necessary, act is to keep looking until we can no longer pretend that what we see is an anomaly, rather than the pattern itself.
What we do then remains an open question. It is the only kind worth asking.