After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind. The Iranians, of course, responded by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that promptly removed about 11% to 13% of all petroleum from the world market, day after day, week after week, setting off a cascade of steeply rising prices for diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas.

Donald Trump’s brilliant idea of joining the blockade of that Strait should be considered the equivalent of coming to the aid of a strangulation victim by pressing a pillow over his or her face. The shortages hit first in Asia (particularly reliant on fuel flows from the Strait of Hormuz) and Africa and then in Europe. The German air carrier Lufthansa only recently cut 20,000 summer flights for fear of fuel shortages (and it will undoubtedly prove all too typical). Nor will the U.S., despite having its own supplies of oil, escape such negative developments. While there have been oil price crunches before, as in the 1970s and 1980s, this one is different. It’s a watershed moment globally, heralding the Ragnarök — the Norse “twilight of the gods” — of petroleum.

Forced to Run on One Engine

While American drivers have been complaining this spring about high prices at the pump, in the Netherlands and Denmark consumers are already paying the stunning equivalent of around $10 a gallon. In Asia, where reliance on petroleum that travels through the Strait of Hormuz is enormous, the situation is far worse, since there are already distinct shortages of fuel of a staggering and still growing kind. Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., recently declared a national energy emergency, as his country had only a little over a month’s worth of petroleum left. Hundreds of gas stations, nearly 3% of the country’s total, announced temporary closures, resulting in long lines at those that remained open.

South Korea, which unwisely dragged its feet when it came to turning to green energy, is now scrambling to find just three months’ supply of petroleum from non-Hormuz sources, but the world’s 10th-largest economy faces a potential economic cataclysm. The government has already restricted parking for commuters. The rise in gasoline costs has led many consumers to simply stay home if they can, spurring a buying spree of novels and video games. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, a human rights lawyer, implicitly blamed Israel’s blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law for the calamity, engaging in a days-long internet flame war with Tel Aviv in early April.

Heavily dependent on fossil gas for its electricity plants, Bangladesh has already suffered widespread outages, harming factories and schools — and, of course, even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen soon, the pain throughout Asia is likely to be long-lasting.

Oil price crises are hardly new. Because of a boycott of Europe and the United States by Arab oil producers during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the rising power of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel, the price of petroleum actually quadrupled between 1970 and 1980. That energy crisis produced economic malaise in the United States, where the economy became afflicted with “stagflation” — both stagnation and inflation, two phenomena not usually found together.

So much capital flowed to the oil states of the Persian Gulf then, particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran, that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger schemed to avoid deflation in the U.S. by pressuring those countries to buy enormous amounts of American military equipment. Over the decades, that oil-arms nexus would drive the United States toward ever more ruinous conflicts in the Gulf region, since arms manufacturers and oil companies, two of the more influential corporate sectors in American politics, had a motive for lobbying repeatedly to get Washington to intervene there. And of course, their behind-the-scenes pressure to continue the country’s forever wars in that region would be bolstered by the Israel Lobby.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-1979, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf War of 1990-1991, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were all further shocks to the energy system. The major industrialized countries responded to such challenges by increasing their fuel efficiency, while switching to nuclear power, coal, and natural gas for ever more of their electricity and heating. In the U.S., in part because of government regulation, the average passenger car went from a fuel efficiency of 13.5 miles per gallon in 1975 to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985, while global per capita use of petroleum declined after the 1970s oil shock and has never recovered.

The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis

The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis of 2026 has the potential to permanently reduce petroleum demand far more radically. The deadlock in the Strait of Hormuz has all the hallmarks of a chronic ailment. After all, Israel and Iran have struck each other four times now — in April and then October 2024, in the 12-day war of June 2025 (when President Trump joined in), and again this spring. None of those four military actions successfully established Iranian deterrence, leaving Tehran eternally vulnerable to further Israeli and U.S. strikes.

And yet Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s determination to destroy Iran’s industrial base has also failed so far. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Israeli elite won’t try again once their country and the U.S. have built back up their depleted stores of interceptors and so become more confident that Tel Aviv will be able to withstand further Iranian ballistic missile and drone barrages. In addition, Iran’s new claim that, from here on in, it will have the right to charge tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, though it may have some support in international law, is unacceptable to the U.S., the Arab Gulf states, and Israel, and so forms an irritant likely to lead to further conflict.

In short, Israel and the United States have destabilized the Persian Gulf and global oil and natural gas supplies for the foreseeable future.

How different today’s crisis is from the Middle Eastern one set off by Washington’s Operation Desert Storm, aimed at expelling the Iraqi military from Kuwait in 1991. Since the strength of Baathist Iraq then lay in its armored forces, the U.S. and its allies could use their own armor and air power to bottle them up inside Iraq and deny that country’s military the ability to further destabilize the Persian Gulf region.

In contrast, since then Iran has put much of its military energy into ballistic missile and drone production, weapons that, no matter what the U.S. and Israel do, can........

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