Within days of the initial U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, the world was plunged into an energy crisis. Tehran’s near shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas transit each day, amounted to the largest disruption of global energy flows in history, according to the International Energy Agency. Within the first three weeks of the conflict, oil prices rose by 55 percent. Gasoline jumped by roughly a dollar a gallon, and heating oil and jet fuel soared even higher. Many countries began to ration fuel, shorten workweeks, and close factories. It quickly became clear that until the strait reopened, prices would continue to climb, boosting inflation and dampening growth.

This crisis may appear to be unprecedented, but its contours are familiar. In 1973, Arab members of OPEC embargoed oil exports to countries supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, causing a dramatic price spike that traumatized American consumers and contributed to high inflation and slow growth. The 1973 crisis also inspired efforts to avoid another shock. Governments took steps to reduce their reliance on imports, build strategic stocks, and pursue greater cooperation and market integration. Over time, policymakers grew more comfortable trusting their countries’ energy security to global markets.

And yet the world never escaped the reality of oil geopolitics. Analysts and officials had warned for decades that the Strait of Hormuz was vulnerable; its closure had been the crisis scenario that everyone most feared. Yet the relative ease and speed with which the entire global economy could be put in jeopardy seemed to come as something of a surprise. Even though Iran was badly outmatched militarily by the United States and Israel, it managed to exert effective control over shipping through the strait. That alone was enough to cause economic turmoil, and subsequent Iranian and Israeli strikes on other key energy installations in the region only exacerbated the crisis.

After seeing the vulnerability of global energy markets laid bare in this way, governments around the world have begun reassessing their exposure. In the 1970s, many concluded that cooperation and market integration could help protect them against the weaponization of energy. In today’s fragmented, conflict-prone world, many may draw the opposite conclusion. Over the past few years, governments have watched—and suffered the consequences—as Russia cut off most gas supplies to Europe following its invasion of Ukraine; as China restricted exports of the rare-earth elements used in clean energy, defense, and other technologies; and as the United States blocked Cuba’s and Venezuela’s energy trades. The latest shock in Iran will further deepen governments’ skepticism of globally traded energy supplies and inputs, whether hydrocarbons moving through maritime chokepoints or critical minerals moving through international supply chains.

As integration begins to look like a strategic liability rather than a source of resilience, governments will likely try to exert control over their energy systems and insulate their countries from global markets. But there is no cheap or easy path to self-sufficiency—and the world may soon be reminded that the pursuit of energy autarky is fraught with risk.

For a time, many countries hoped they could escape the turbulence of oil politics. After the crises of the 1970s, major importers moved to reduce oil demand and better prepare for disruption. They replaced oil with coal and nuclear power in electricity generation, built strategic reserves, improved the quality of energy data, removed price controls, and created the International Energy Agency in 1974 to coordinate responses to crises. These changes helped make oil markets more flexible, more transparent, and better able to absorb shocks as market-based pricing allowed physical flows to adjust in response to disruption.

In recent decades, policymakers in advanced economies have come to take energy security for granted. Energy price shocks were infrequent and brief, electricity demand was stagnant, clean energy sources offered opportunities for diversification, and the U.S. shale revolution brought a surge of new oil and natural gas onto the market. Perhaps most important, fears of discord and war disrupting supply receded as the geopolitical environment grew to favor cooperation and as economic integration deepened.

The United States in particular came to believe it could overcome its old energy vulnerabilities. Two decades ago, the country imported roughly 60 percent of its oil. President George W. Bush warned in 2006, as his predecessors had before him, that “America is addicted to oil,” and he urged the country to make its reliance on Middle Eastern supplies “a thing of the past.”

The world never escaped the reality of oil geopolitics.

Thanks to the shale revolution, the United States did lessen that reliance, going on to become the world’s largest oil producer and a major exporter. The country’s growing energy abundance was seen both at home and abroad as having sharply reduced its geopolitical exposure. Concern about oil prices, for instance, did not prevent the Obama administration from tightening restrictions on Iranian oil, because the administration could at least expect the rapid annual growth of U.S. production at the time to offset........

© Foreign Affairs