PETER BRUCE | With  WW3 in prospect, don’t tell me not to worry about petrol 

For the most part, in the days before world wars have broken out most of the world has been going about its business. On June 27 1914, the day before Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie Chotek, few people in the world would have imagined what was to follow.

A month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. A few weeks later Germany declared war on Russia, France and Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Russia, and France and Britain declared war on Austria-Hungary, which in turn declared war on Belgium. And the US declared its neutrality. And then Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire. America entered the war after the Germans sank a US cargo ship on its way to France in 1916.

World War 1 changed everything. The British and French carved up the Middle East, giving birth to what would become Israel. Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia in 1917 to lead the revolution there, and in March 1918 at a military base in Kansas a flu bug first struck and spread around the world to kill more than 20-million people in the Spanish Flu pandemic.

Wars move fast, so excuse me if I’m sceptical about calls not to worry about fuel supplies. Iran, attacked with incredible savagery from the air by the US and Israel, has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which most Arabian crude passes. Oil prices have gone through the roof and there is simply no knowing when or if they will ever stabilise at the levels they were a month ago.

It’s no good listening to the Americans. With President Donald Trump personally running the war, the world’s biggest economic and military power is in the hands of a madman and his inner child. He said he would knock over Iran in a few days but could never even settle on what he wanted to achieve. The Israelis appear to have written his brief, and now that he has an expeditionary Marine force on the way he’ll want to use them on the ground in Iran.

It’ll only get worse and even if he pulls out now he can’t force the Israelis to do the same, and he certainly can’t leave Iran in ruins. By all means enjoy the deaths of Iranian leaders who two months ago were butchering their own protesting citizens, but they will extract a heavy price for what has been done to them. The Gulf nations, new and powerful centres of global finance, may themselves have been fatally wounded by Trump’s stupid war and the skilful way Iran has drawn them into the hostilities.

You cannot rule out the possibility, probability even, of this spiralling out of control. Iran has the upper hand and has been able, through choking the supply of Gulf oil and attacking its neighbours, to rapidly globalise a war Trump thought he could effortlessly contain. Trump’s “peace talks” are a figment of his imagination. Just north of Iran, Russia and Ukraine have been at war for as long as World War 1 lasted. In the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are on opposite sides of the civil war in Sudan.

It’ll only get worse and even if he pulls out now he can’t force the Israelis to do the same, and he certainly can’t leave Iran in ruins. By all means enjoy the deaths of Iranian leaders who two months ago were butchering their own protesting citizens, but they will extract a heavy price for what has been done to them.

So yes, I worry about petrol prices and supply. The South African government should be explaining, clearly, what its plans are to guarantee supply, how it plans to fix our broken refineries and what the state of reserves is, or if we have any at all.

Assume the worst for a moment: the war widens. Where would South Africa stand? In the attack on Iran the US and Israel are clearly the instigators. But the Iranian constitution identifies both as mortal enemies anyway. In a wider war the Suez Canal would become unreliable and the route around the Cape would be heavily used.

We are nonaligned, the government says. Do we then entertain civilian and naval ships from all sides in our ports? Do our big munitions factories supply all-comers for the calibres we make? What happens to Brics? India has sworn a deep friendship with Israel. And where do we get our future fuel from?

Given what the war, even if it stopped tomorrow, will be doing to the global price of liquefied natural gas (LNG), are we really going to go ahead and build infrastructure to land, distribute and convert LNG into electricity and heat, as the government is planning, for an energy source over which we have zero price control?

Do we have plans for this? Are we in any way prepared for another economic shock?

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.