Once again the American empire has waded into the Middle East convinced it can redraw the map, only to find that this time the quagmire reaches all the way into its own gas tanks, grocery aisles, and credit markets. Somewhere between the Strait of Hormuz and the trading floors of New York, oil that had idled around 70 dollars a barrel suddenly spiked to nearly 120 before sliding back toward 90, like a seismograph undecided between tremor and quake. Energy desks called it “volatility.” Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer‑winning oil historian and vice‑chair of S&P Global, called it—carefully, on public television—a “nightmare scenario” in the making. The rest of us will have to survive whatever they choose to call it.
When the first U.S.–Israeli strikes hit Iran’s refineries and export terminals, traders discovered what planners have always known: the global economy has a throat, and it is about twenty‑one miles wide. You can call it the Strait of Hormuz, or you can call it the place where 20 percent of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas squeeze between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula before fanning out into the arteries of “normal life.” But Hormuz is only the visible pinch point on a longer, fragile spine: from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, where Iran’s fast boats, missiles, and mines can harass tankers, out into the Arabian Sea, and westward through the Red Sea and Bab al‑Mandab, where Iran‑aligned Houthis—and, if needed, other militias—have already shown they can turn that whole corridor into a killer of ships. Close any one segment for a week and you get a scare at the pump; close or credibly threaten several for a season, and you get history.
War at the Throat of the System
On PBS NewsHour, Geoff Bennett, an avatar of American reassurance, sat across from Yergin and tried to make the chaos sound manageable. Prices had surged overnight “to levels we haven’t seen since 2022,” he noted, before falling sharply by the end of the day; the national average price of gasoline, he added, had already climbed nearly fifty cents since the conflict began. What, he asked, was driving the swings?
What drove prices up, Yergin said, was simple: Hormuz was shutting down—“the biggest oil disruption the world has ever seen.” Not just because of the missiles and drones buzzing the strait, but because of the fear that “very extensive infrastructure on the Arab side of the Gulf” might be next. What drove prices back down was also simple: television demagogue‑in‑chief Donald Trump, flanked by neocon hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Fox‑studio‑groomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, signaling that the war could “soon be over.” Markets do not need coherence; they only need a story that can be traded.
Pressed on his Financial Times warning of a “nightmare scenario,” Yergin drew the contour in a few sentences. The real disaster, he said, would be not a brief scare but “an extended period of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz combined with extensive damage to the infrastructure”—the kind of shock that would send prices well beyond 120, “hit financial markets,” and, as in the 1970s, “push the world into recession.” Even without that full nightmare, he admitted, prices were already “a good deal higher” than before the military buildup, and the lines on the charts were no longer under anyone’s real control.
The empire’s answer has been to fight this asymmetrical war with an outdated playbook. Energy Secretary Chris Wright—another smooth emissary of normality—talked of a “large tanker” that had managed to thread the strait, and Trump mused aloud about providing naval escorts, as if the calendar had flipped back to the late 1980s tanker wars. But the Gulf has moved on. A cheap, laptop‑piloted suicide drone, built from commercial parts and costing on the order of a few tens of thousands of dollars, can now do what a squadron used to: write a red line through a shipowner’s balance sheet. The United States can escort a handful of tankers through Hormuz for the cameras; it cannot escort the actuarial tables of the insurance industry, or the quiet decision of a Greek magnate to sit tight until the sky stops buzzing.
Even in Yergin’s careful technocratese, the implication is brutal: the system is realizing that the blood flow it depends on runs through a choke point someone else can close, and that carrier battle groups are clumsy instruments against small, disposable machines that arrive in swarms.
When the Fertilizer Stops
The more revealing moment in that PBS exchange comes when Bennett asks where Americans might feel the pain beyond the pump. Yergin dutifully mentions transportation and heating, but then, almost as an aside, he notes that an unnervingly large share of the cost of food is really the cost of energy. The line passes without comment, like a minor statistic. It is actually the hinge that swings the Iran war from an oil story into a food story, and from there into a political one.
Modern agriculture runs on nitrogen and sulfur pulled out of gas and oil. Ammonia and urea, the nitrogen fertilizers that keep harvests from collapsing, are synthesized largely from natural gas; sulfur, another key nutrient and a backbone of phosphate fertilizers, is mostly a byproduct of fossil‑fuel extraction. A war that throttles LNG flows and sulfur shipments out of the Gulf is therefore not just an “energy markets” event; it is a delayed shock to the calories the world expects to eat in six, twelve, twenty‑four months.
There is no strategic fertilizer reserve for this. Around a third of the world’s traded fertilizer nutrients now sit downstream of this war: ammonia and urea from Gulf plants, sulfur stripped out of oil and gas and shipped through the same narrowing strait. With roughly a third of seaborne urea and about half of global sulfur exports effectively trapped behind the disruption, the gas transformed into plant food has been severed from its main shipping route. Russian and Chinese producers are already near the limits of what they can export, and overland workarounds to non‑Gulf ports move only a trickle compared with the millions of tonnes that normally pour through Hormuz.
Agronomists and commodity analysts are already warning that if those flows stay choked through planting season, even “modest” cuts in nitrogen use could mean millions of tonnes of grain that never materialize—a slower‑motion “food price shock” that may prove more destabilising than the crude‑price spike that preceded it. Analysts now talk, a little too calmly, about a coming “fertiliser shock.” With shipping through Hormuz disrupted or priced into the stratosphere, Gulf‑linked fertilizer plants dial back production, export schedules slip, procurement officers in Asia and Africa bid against each other for the remaining cargoes, and farmers from Punjab to the Brazilian cerrado quietly cut application rates. The first sign shows up as a spike in urea futures; the second as thinner harvests; the third as a sharp turn in the FAO’s global food price index that ministries in Cairo, Tunis, or Dhaka cannot ignore.
We have seen this film before. In 2008 and again in the early 2010s, synchronized surges in grain prices—driven by energy costs, export bans, and bad policy—helped trigger food riots and mass protests from Egypt and Tunisia to a belt of some thirty other countries across Africa and Asia. Today’s Iran war bakes in a similar arc: bomb refineries and LNG terminals in March, quietly strip fertilizer off the market, and then field anger in someone else’s capital six or eighteen months later—while insisting, with a straight face, that the connection is mysterious. By then, the blowback is already washing home: American farmers squeezed by doubled nitrogen prices and missed spring shipments, grocery inflation and SNAP cuts colliding in the aisles, and an empire discovering that the unrest it exports will not stop at its own borders.
Tehran Under Double‑Tap Democracy
From Tehran, the nightmare does not begin with a candlestick chart; it begins with a siren and ends with a double tap.
Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran and a regular commentator on Western media narratives, spoke to former CIA officer John Kiriakou from a city learning to hold its breath between strikes. The targets, he said, are not just radar stations or missile batteries but the skeleton and nervous system of urban life: apartment blocks, squares, hospitals, schools, stadiums, pharmaceutical factories, Red Crescent headquarters, police stations, national emergency‑service buildings. First comes the bomb that shatters the square; then, when neighbors and first responders claw at the rubble, comes the second wave, aimed at those who tried to help.
On day one alone, Marandi recounts, U.S.–Israeli strikes hit the Gandhi Hospital in Tehran—targeting its IVF clinic—and an elementary school filled with girls, killing around 168 students and twenty staff, followed hours later by a gymnasium where women were playing basketball and volleyball. Kiriakou, in a separate interview about the same war, is asked to respond to Trump’s televised claim that “the only side that targets civilians is Iran,” that the girls’ school must have been hit by errant Iranian munitions. As an American, Kiriakou says, he wants to believe it was a terrible mistake, “but my brain won’t allow me to believe that.” Given the record in Gaza and Lebanon, he concludes, either Washington or its ally chose that target, and chose it to traumatize Iranians into submission.
The bombs do their work; so does the resistance. Every night, Marandi says, even under bombardment, Iranians gather by the tens and hundreds of thousands in cities across the country: not in one Tiananmen‑style square that can be dispersed, but in dozens of separate assemblies. In Tehran alone, he describes crowds in “20 or so places,” each swelling into six figures, standing their ground while anti‑aircraft and anti‑missile batteries trace frantic arcs overhead. It is not a regime‑scripted tableau; it is a population that has internalized a particular Shia grammar of martyrdom and steadfastness, some of it drawn directly from the assassinated Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose biography Marandi sketches in detail.
Khamenei, he reminds viewers, was not the cartoon villain of Western coverage but a cleric from a poor family who spent time in the Shah’s prisons, fought at the front in the Iran–Iraq war even as president, lost the use of his right arm in an assassination attempt, and remained in his home and office through years of sanctions and threats. He was, Marandi emphasizes, “not afraid to die” and refused to leave Tehran even under bombardment, insisting he would not flee when ordinary Iranians had nowhere to go. Killing him, along with much of his family, has not decapitated the system; it has canonized him as a martyr and hardened the resolve of those who saw him as both religious and political leader.
The war, in other words, is teaching Iranians something about their enemies that no number of abstract lectures on imperialism could have driven home. Students who once dabbled in Western‑backed protests, he says, now contact him in tears asking how they can atone and help. A generation that had half‑believed satellite‑beamed fantasies about Western concern for human rights is watching, day and night, as that concern vaporizes against the concrete of their own neighborhoods—and with every double tap and denied hospital strike, the American empire trades away another slice of whatever moral authority it once claimed in the region.
Surviving Is Winning
If the everyday landscape of Tehran is one of double‑taps and defiance, the strategic horizon is simpler. For the United States and Israel, “victory” still means what it meant in Guatemala in 1954 or Tehran in 1953: a toppled government, a purged military, a new client executive smiling from the presidential balcony. For Iran, victory means breathing.
Kiriakou, who spent years inside the CIA’s counterterrorism bureaucracy before turning whistleblower on its torture program, puts it in a sentence. For Washington and Tel Aviv to win, he says, “they have to completely topple the Iranian government and remove all of their leaders,” likely killing “hundreds and hundreds of people,” then install “a pro‑American, pro‑Israeli government in its place.” That is “virtually impossible,” he adds. For Iran to win, by contrast, “all they have to do is survive.” If, at the end of this, there is still an Islamic Republic with functional command structures and enough rockets and drones to hurt its enemies, “Israel and the United States lose.”
Iran’s military and political leadership are behaving as though they understand this math. They know they are outgunned in high‑end hardware; hypersonic missiles aside, they cannot match U.S. or Israeli avionics and targeting systems. But they do not have to. Instead, they lean into what they do have: cheap, plentiful, reasonably accurate suicide drones and medium‑range missiles that can be guided into U.S. bases across the Gulf, oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, hotels and office towers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and, when needed, deeper targets in Israel itself.
As Kiriakou and other analysts note, a one‑way attack drone capable of reaching regional bases or even Israel can cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars—a Shahed‑class system is widely estimated at roughly 20,000 to 50,000 dollars per unit—while the interceptors that try to stop it run into the millions, and the aircraft, refineries, export terminals, or high‑rise skylines behind them are priced in the billions and collateralized in London and New York. In that landscape, every day the war continues and every successful hit on a “sensitive target”—from the U.S. Air Force base outside Doha to the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain—constitutes a kind of negative‑interest payment the system owes to its own overreach.
Marandi, citing “a significant political figure,” says Iranian planners intend to keep this up “until the midterms in the United States,” explicitly aiming to make the war an issue for voters and investors, not just for generals. The goal is not to destroy the U.S. militarily but to force it and its Gulf clients into a choice: accept real negotiation with an adversary you can no longer bully, or bleed out economically and politically in a conflict you cannot win—while watching, in real time, as investors start pricing U.S. assets as if Washington has stumbled into another forever war, and as the rest of the world quietly recalibrates its view of American power from invincible hegemon to flailing, overleveraged empire.
The Gulf’s Buyers’ Remorse
If survival is Iran’s bar for victory, survival is also becoming an awkward question for the Gulf monarchies that helped stage this war.
For three and a half decades, from the liberation of Kuwait onward, the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait outsourced their regime security to Washington. The logic was simple: host U.S. air wings, army brigades, and naval fleets; buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons; align foreign policy with Washington’s wars; and in return receive a security guarantee—explicit or not—against both external threats and internal upheaval.
The Iran war is exposing the cracks in that bargain. Kiriakou spent the weeks before the outbreak shuttling through Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City, listening to local elites ask whether the Americans would really attack. He told them yes, based on what he had been taught inside the Agency: if you want to understand U.S. intentions, “watch the movement of American naval vessels.” Carrier strike groups moved in; war followed.
What followed next, from the Gulf perspective, was worse. Iranian drones and missiles hit luxury hotels, shopping centers, apartment buildings, oil installations, airports, and U.S. bases. The world’s largest foreign air base, sprawling army facilities with fifty thousand U.S. ground troops, the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet—none of them could stop cheap, one‑way attack drones and salvos of ballistic missiles. A quarter century after Vladimir Putin expressed shock that the Pentagon had no surface‑to‑air missiles defending it on 9/11, Kiriakou notes dryly, “we don’t have surface‑to‑air missiles to protect much of anything that we have.”
For rulers whose citizenry makes up ten or fifteen percent of the population, perched atop vast pools of migrant labor and stateless underclasses, that is not an academic point. Marandi is blunt: these are “family dictatorships” with no deep historical roots or ideological glue; stretch the war out and they may simply not survive. Already, he says, some are phoning Moscow to ask for help, only to be reminded by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that they never condemned U.S.–Israeli attacks on Iran and are “the main reason of this war happening.”
Caught between a patron that cannot protect them and a neighbor that can hurt them, the Gulf monarchies will do what they have always done: hedge. That will mean deeper security and energy ties with China and Russia, which are already positioning themselves as mediators and alternative arms suppliers, quiet constraints on U.S. basing rights and operations, and, over time, some form of accommodation with Tehran that trades public hostility for private understandings. The image of the Gulf as a stable, U.S.‑policed “energy supermarket” is gone; in its place is a region where the shelves themselves are recognized as leverage.
Empire at Home: Debt, Decay, and Denial
While Hormuz chokes and Tehran burns, the imperial core continues its strange double life.
On the one hand, the United States is still, on paper, the only country that can fight a war like this. Its defense budget has swollen to roughly a trillion dollars a year, larger than that of the next set of major powers combined. It sustains carrier battle groups on every ocean, maintains hundreds of bases, and can rain precision munitions on almost any point on the globe.
On the other hand, as Kiriakou points out, it has “third world level” airports, crumbling roads and bridges, and hospitals that feel permanently on the verge of collapse. Interest payments on the national debt are projected to hit about a trillion dollars a year by 2026—more than the country will spend on either defense or Medicaid—and to roughly double again by the mid‑2030s, becoming the single largest line item in the federal budget. Donald Trump, who once daydreamed about cutting the Pentagon budget in half, now talks—under the influence of advisers like Rubio and Hegseth and donors like Miriam Adelson—about increasing it by another half‑trillion dollars.
The same White House that insists it can fight and win a war with Iran in weeks also blocks, or “chills,” a joint bulletin from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and National Counterterrorism Center warning of an elevated domestic terror threat linked to that very war. Media reports describe an administration demanding that any product “concerning Iran” be cleared personally, with the practical effect that local law enforcement and the public are kept in the dark about heightened risks to U.S. government facilities, Jewish and Iranian‑American institutions, and critical infrastructure. Better to control the narrative than to confront the consequences.
Layer on top the slow erosion of dollar hegemony. Iran’s entry into an expanded BRICS bloc—which is on track to account for nearly 40 percent of global GDP on a purchasing‑power basis by the end of the decade—and that group’s halting explorations of a shared currency and non‑dollar settlement systems will not dethrone the greenback tomorrow. But they are part of the same drift the Iran war is accelerating: large commodity producers and populous states asking whether it is wise to keep clearing their trade through a currency whose issuer has a habit of weaponizing its privileges. If the conflict pushes more oil, gas, and fertilizer deals into yuan, rupees, or some future BRICS unit, Washington will have achieved the rare feat of undermining its own monetary power with the same tools—sanctions, asset seizures, military threats—it once used to enforce it.
Cultural Weather: Graded Humanity
Culturally, the Iran war does not just normalize the unthinkable; it clarifies the operating system behind it: a world in which some deaths are treated as events and others as acceptable background noise. For two years, Gaza supplied the template. Western media framed an openly exterminatory campaign as “self‑defense,” gave vastly more emotional and narrative space to Israeli victims than to Palestinian ones, and treated Palestinian casualty figures as inherently suspect even when later confirmed by Israeli officials and independent researchers. The lesson, for anyone watching from the global South, was not subtle: there is a moral caste system, and Gazans are on the bottom.
For anyone who has been paying attention, none of this cruelty is entirely new. A generation ago, Madeleine Albright could tell “60 Minutes” that the reported deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under U.S. sanctions were “worth it,” and the remark was treated as a minor scandal rather than a confession. For decades the United States armed and financed death squads from Central America to Southeast Asia, backed dictatorships that filled mass graves, and applied one standard of legality to enemies and another to clients. What Gaza and now Tehran change is not the underlying moral code but its exposure: the same hierarchy of lives is being enforced with a level of ferocity, duration, and live‑streamed documentation that strips away every pretense of “rules‑based” restraint. The barbarity has not suddenly appeared; it has dropped its mask.
The mask does not just slip in dusty archives or leaked memos; it slips live, in high definition. On Fox News, Senator Lindsey Graham recently described Washington’s billion‑dollars‑a‑day bombardment of Iran as “the best money ever spent,” a “really good investment,” because when Tehran’s regime falls “we are going to make a ton of money.” He then laid out the business case: Venezuela and Iran, whose elected leaders Washington has kidnapped or is now trying to overthrow, “have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re going to have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves. This is China’s nightmare. This is a good investment.” It is Albright’s “worth it” updated for a new century: an open admission that the deaths of children in classrooms and people in apartment blocks are an acceptable price for securing a bigger cut of the world’s fuel.
Tehran extends the Gaza logic from a besieged enclave to a capital city. The same arsenals that chewed Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and apartment towers into dust now turn stadiums, universities, and power plants in a metropolis of ten million into legitimate targets, and much of the Western press falls back on the same reflex: emphasize “Iranian aggression,” minimize the civilian dead, recycle official talking points about “precision” even when the rubble on screen says otherwise. What used to be a seminar debate about a “rules‑based order” has become a live demonstration that, for favored states, the rules are optional; for disfavored populations, even the word “genocide” is treated as a breach of etiquette rather than a description.
This produces two very different psychic climates. In much of the global South, Gaza and now Tehran confirm a long‑standing suspicion that universal values were always a veneer for a hierarchy of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims; the death of a Ukrainian civilian is a violation of civilization, the death of a Palestinian or Iranian civilian is a regrettable data point on a graphic. Among audiences in the metropole, the effect is more corrosive than clarifying: each new atrocity is framed, litigated, and memed until it becomes a genre of content, something to scroll past rather than a crime to stop. What looks, from the outside, like moral bankruptcy looks, from the inside, like fatigue.
Kiriakou’s Los Angeles vignette is not a curiosity but a case study. A few hundred monarchists and their fellow‑travelers, waving Shah‑era and Israeli flags, are asked on camera about the bombing of a girls’ school and reply that “it’s okay,” a sad but acceptable cost of doing business. That is empire’s moral education distilled: people you will never meet, in places you will never visit, can be sacrificed for abstractions like “our credibility” or “regime change.” Marandi, in Tehran, describes a different crowd entirely: ordinary Iranians, who have already absorbed years of sanctions and are now under bombardment, gathering in public spaces under fire to insist, by their sheer presence, that they are not expendable. Those two scenes are not just a split‑screen of this war; they are a portrait of a civilization that has learned to live with its own atrocities, and of those who are forced to live under them.
The System Writes Its Own Obituary
None of this guarantees apocalypse. The likeliest outcome is not a clean, theatrical end to the American empire but something slower and more squalid: a long, grinding partial closure of Hormuz; a jagged plateau of higher energy and fertilizer prices; a series of recessions and food‑price spikes that topple governments far from the Gulf; a further hollowing out of Western infrastructure and public trust; a gradual hedging away from the dollar; an even more militarized and secretive policy apparatus in Washington and its allies.
In that sense, Yergin’s “nightmare scenario” is too narrow. The real nightmare is not that one regional war briefly “pushes the world into recession.” It is that the war reveals, in accelerated form, what was already true: key subsystems—energy, food, finance, information—have been wired together so tightly, and left so brittle, that any serious shock anywhere now ripples everywhere. A drone operator over the Strait of Hormuz can close a lane of traffic and, a few weeks later, a taxi driver in Cairo finds his fuel bill up by thirty percent and passes the cost on to passengers who were already skipping meals.
The Iran war is not an aberration in that system; it is its expression. It is what you get when a political and economic order built on fossil extraction, covert coups, and selective law decides, yet again, that the answer to every limit is more force. It assumes you can bomb refineries and depots and still have a stable energy market; that you can choke a strait and still have affordable food; that you can loot or freeze other people’s reserves and still have a trusted reserve currency; that you can shred another country’s social fabric and still have a safe, docile homeland; that you can do all of this and still be treated as a referee, not a player.
When it is “over”—when some paper deal is signed, when tankers inch back through Hormuz under heavier escort, when indices and anchors declare that “markets have calmed”—none of the underlying debts will have been paid. The fertilizer that did not ship will still be missing from the soil and from future harvests. The bridges that did not get repaired because the money went to missiles will still sag over their rivers. The trust that drained out of politics and media will not be magically refilled.
You can call that a nightmare scenario if you like. It is also just how this system keeps its books: paying interest on past follies with new ones, rolling over the principal into whatever periphery still has something left to strip. Tehran’s black rain, the empty grocery aisle in a country that thought it was far from Hormuz, the senator on television calling a billion dollars a day in bombing “the best money ever spent” because it buys control over someone else’s oil—these are not side‑effects. They are the weather report of a civilization that turned its choke points into weapons, and is only now discovering that they cut both ways.
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Collapse of Industrial Civilization 