Europe is about to discover that strategic complacency has an expiry date — and the bill is being presented at the gate of every major airport on the continent.

Seven weeks after the US-Israel war on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol has warned that Europe has roughly six weeks of jet fuel remaining. Airports Council International Europe has written urgently to the European Commission warning of a “systemic jet fuel shortage” unless stable Hormuz traffic resumes by the end of April. Several European airports have quietly instructed airlines to prepare for no-fuel scenarios. Summer 2026 — 170 million international arrivals, €851 billion in tourism activity, 14 million jobs — now hangs on the outcome of a geopolitical crisis Brussels spent years insisting was containable.

It is not containable. It never was. And the failure is not principally a failure of forecasting. It is a failure of policy.

Consider the structural facts. Roughly 40 per cent of Europe’s jet fuel supply travels through the Strait of Hormuz. Around 75 per cent of the continent’s aviation fuel imports originate in the Middle East more broadly. Jet fuel prices have risen 130 per cent year-on-year to $1,710 per metric tonne. More than 5 per cent of flights on recent days have been cancelled — twice last year’s rate. And ACI Europe has now formally admitted that the EU possesses no bloc-wide system to track jet fuel production or stock availability in real time. Regulators, in the most literal sense, are flying blind.

These are not the metrics of an energy policy. They are the metrics of an abdication.

The contrast with Israel is instructive — and damning. Israel........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)