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The Oil Era Is Ending

Is the Iran war a death knell for America’s oil hegemony?

The ConocoPhillips Oil Refinery is seen in Wilmington, California on April 11, 2026.

“Future historians may well see the Iran war as the moment the US unwittingly ceded leadership to China” as the world’s pre-eminent superpower, writes Jonathan Watts in a reported essay in The Guardian published earlier this week. The piece came out on the heels of Donald Trump’s departure from Beijing after his summit with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Analysts in Washington have argued for decades over what to do about China’s rise as a global power, but the debate has focused on issues of economic strength and military might. Watts, who spent years in China as a correspondent for The Guardian and is now the paper’s global environment writer, instead emphasizes energy: the lifeforce that animates those economies and militaries. “One of the cornerstones of geostrategic thinking since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago, is that the country that controls energy supply controls the world,” he points out. “For most of the past century, that has centered on oil.”

But the era of oil is ending, Watts contends, as the global economy “shifts from molecules to electrons”—or from burning oil, gas, and coal to generating solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. The implications are profound, not least for the chances of limiting global temperature rise to a survivable level.

Watts presents his argument across a broad intellectual canvas, ranging from Britain’s opium wars against China in the 1850s to the gargantuan short-term riches that oil companies are gobbling as the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked to the plummeting costs of clean energy, all which illustrate that the fight to preserve a livable planet cannot be understood outside its social contexts. For journalists, the essay is a........

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