For 20 years three American presidents said no. George W Bush said no. Barack Obama said no. Even the first Trump administration said no. Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to strike Iran sat in Washington’s inbox like an invoice nobody wanted to open — because everyone who had read the file understood what it would cost. Then, on February 28 this year, the bombs started falling on Tehran.
By every conventional measure this war is a catastrophe. Iran is the size of Western Europe, its mountain ranges turning any ground campaign into an attritional death march. The International Energy Agency has already called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Washington has alienated Nato, antagonised China and unsettled every Gulf state hosting its bases. Tactically reckless. Economically deranged.
Iran is not simply losing this war — it is charging for it. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps escorts now collect up to $2m per vessel passing through the Strait of Hormuz, payable in Chinese yuan or cryptocurrency, for safe passage; CNN projects toll revenues above $800m a month, rivalling Egypt’s Suez Canal.
Russia is cashing in too: Trump’s 30-day sanctions waiver drove Moscow’s daily revenues to €510m, 14% above prewar levels. In every Gulf capital the same question is forming: does hosting an American base make you safer or just a target?
What if the chaos was always the plan?
The narrowest width of the Strait of Hormuz — through which 21-million barrels of oil flowed daily before the war, about 20% of global supply — is 34km. Qatar ships 77-million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) annually. A third of global fertiliser exports follow the same route. About 30% of the world’s helium — critical for chip fabrication and artificial intelligence (AI) — passes through it too.
When Iran closed the strait, JPMorgan projected shut-ins of 12-million barrels per day by late March, scaling to 16-million if Iran targeted Kharg Island, which handles 90% of Tehran’s own crude exports. Brent crossed $100 a barrel by March 9; Goldman Sachs flagged $150 as a plausible ceiling. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz compared the fallout to Covid-19, a pandemic that erased $12-trillion from the global economy.
Energy is only the first domino. Phosphates, ammonia and urea moving through the Strait are fertiliser inputs, so the disruption bleeds into food production. Qatar declared force majeure on LNG after Iranian drone strikes. Desalination plants across the Gulf are now in an active war zone. The Iran war is finishing a sentence the Ukraine conflict started. Which raises the question nobody in the mainstream seems willing to sit with: who, precisely, benefits from all of this?
The fortress and the technate
Strip away the Gulf states being bombed into paralysis, and the world’s major remaining oil reserves belong to Venezuela, Canada, the US and Russia. Trump took Venezuela in January, spent months threatening Canada, and picked a fight over Greenland.
None of this looks random on a resource map. If Middle Eastern oil is structurally destroyed, every oil-importing bloc must pivot toward whoever is still pumping — North America and Russia. Both are water-abundant; Europe and much of Asia are not. The world is being sorted into those that hold what everyone needs and those that need it.
Russia’s posture mirrors this from the east. Aleksandr Dugin’s 1996 Foundations of Geopolitics argued that Western liberalism would collapse under its own weight, leaving Moscow to anchor a new world order — the Third Rome. Ukraine gave Russia a third of global grain carbohydrates plus energy corridors into Europe and Africa. Putin built a fortress and stocked it. Trump read the same playbook. Two powers. Both are resource-rich. Both structurally positioned as suppliers to a world that is about to run very short.
China in the corner, dollar on the ropes
China imports about 75% of its oil needs, with nearly 90% of Iranian crude going directly to Beijing. With the strait closed, Beijing faces a crunch it cannot resolve — transport fuel demand is inelastic. The pressure lands on an economy already carrying a property implosion, deflation and youth unemployment above 20%.
There is a compounding irony. China, Japan and South Korea hold the largest share of US Treasuries outside the Federal Reserve. Energy-driven fiscal distress could force liquidation of those holdings — spiking yields and corroding the dollar architecture America’s $36-trillion debt depends on. The instrument of dedollarisation may not be the yuan. It may be a closed strait.
Meanwhile, the dedollarisation project — digital yuan, bilateral barter, and Brics payment rails — collapses the moment available oil is priced by Washington or Moscow. The multipolar world that seemed inevitable 18 months ago has been paused by 34km of water. That pause may yet become permanent.
China, Japan and South Korea hold the largest share of US Treasuries outside the Federal Reserve. Energy-driven fiscal distress could force liquidation of those holdings — spiking yields and corroding the dollar architecture America’s $36-trillion debt depends on.
None of this requires Donald Trump to be a classical strategist. It requires only that the outcome — North American dominance, a squeezed China, and Russia locked in as a supplier — serves those around him well enough that tactical absurdity becomes strategically irrelevant. US economist Carmen Reinhart warned early: higher inflation and lower growth everywhere. She was right. But it is not symmetrical. Some places have the oil.
Trump may yet lose his war in Iran. The military arithmetic has not improved, the ground invasion remains a fantasy, and the clock is running. But the strategic geometry of what he has set in motion is something else entirely. Idiots do not accidentally redraw the global energy map, isolate China, stall dedollarisation and consolidate hemispheric resource control in one term.
Maybe the chaos was always the plan. Either way, the world is reorganising itself around someone else’s agenda — and by the time the answer is clear, the question will no longer matter.
• Mafinyani is risk advisory & financial modelling partner at DiSeFu, a specialised financial technology and risk advisory firm operating in the Sub-Saharan region.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.