Within seventy-two hours of Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli strike on Iran, Tehran had retaliated across the entire Persian Gulf. Drones and missiles hit targets in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. QatarEnergy shut down parts of its LNG production, a country responsible for roughly a fifth of global liquefied natural gas production. Tanker operators halted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude surged past levels not seen in over a year, with analysts warning of $100 (€86) per barrel if the disruption persists. On social media, the usual commentators are talking about doom and gloom. But before we surrender to panic, it is worth asking a question that very few people seem to be posing: What, precisely, is the strategic purpose of all this?
The oil price movements, dramatic as they are, remain by historical comparison far from existential. Prices had already been hovering around $70 (€60)) to $80 (€69) per barrel for years, with the markets having long priced in significant geopolitical risk since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even at a hundred dollars, we are nowhere near the shocks of the nineteen-seventies. Painful, certainly. Catastrophic, no. The difference matters, because it tells us something important about how Washington is calculating.
When Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth speak of regime change in Iran, they do not mean what the phrase meant in 2003. They are not interested in democracy promotion, nation building, or installing a Jeffersonian republic in Tehran. What they mean — and what the Venezuela playbook has already demonstrated — is finding someone at the top of the existing regime who will bend to Washington’s interests. The goal is not to transform the Iranian state but to redirect it. This is the logic of the Donroe doctrine distilled to its essence: Not liberation but leverage.
The crucial difference between 2003 and 2026 is energy. When the United States invaded Iraq, it was still heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil. The shale and fracking revolution has since made America one of the world’s largest producers of oil and natural gas — production is up by over 600,000 barrels per day, with natural gas at an all-time high. The United States does not need Iranian or Venezuelan oil for its own consumption. What it needs is to control who else gets it.
This is the point that most analysts miss. As my friend Michael Every has argued on multiple occasions, we have moved from a world that resembled a game of Monopoly — where governments sat on the side lines while markets ran on autopilot — to a world that resembles a game of Risk. In the 1990s, geopolitics was largely irrelevant; politics was downstream of economics. Today the relationship has reversed. Economics is downstream of geopolitics, and the great powers are playing for control of supply chains, not quarterly earnings. The United States cannot match China’s dominance in manufacturing and rare earth processing. Beijing controls both the extraction and, critically, the refining of the materials on which the modern economy depends. Washington has no countervailing leverage — except in one sector: Energy.
This is why Venezuela and Iran sit so high on the American priority list. Chinese refiners had relied heavily on discounted Iranian crude; with those flows now effectively frozen and Venezuelan supply constrained by renewed sanctions and naval activity, Beijing must rethink its energy sourcing at precisely the moment it is trying to stabilise growth ahead of this week’s Two Sessions. Once the United States controls these countries, directly or through compliant regimes, it can deny oil flows to China or offer them at a price — a price denominated not in dollars but in rare earths, semiconductors, and market access. The point is not to keep the oil for America. The point is to say: If you need oil, we can provide it, and if we need rare earths, you will provide them. It is leverage, pure and simple.
The collateral consequences are already cascading. Hapag-Lloyd has slapped a $1,500 (€1.290) war risk surcharge on every container bound for the Gulf; CMA CGM has followed with its own emergency charges and rerouted ships around Africa. European gas prices face the prospect of doubling from already elevated levels — a particular cruelty for the EU, which leaned heavily on Qatari LNG to replace Russian pipeline gas after 2022. Meanwhile, Moscow watches with quiet satisfaction as higher oil prices improve Russia’s fiscal position, and Ukraine’s strike on the Novorossiysk terminal adds yet another variable to an energy market already stretched to breaking point. Every actor on the board is moving simultaneously, and every move creates new vulnerabilities for someone else.
If the Iranian people should overthrow their regime and a genuine alternative political system should emerge, Washington would not oppose it. But no one in the current administration is losing sleep over whether Iranians get to vote freely. We live now in the world of national interests, in the world of a renewed great game in which oil, rare earths, and supply chains have replaced colonies, coaling stations, and railway concessions as the currency of power. Every move from Epic Fury, Venezuela, the tariffs, the defence spending ultimatums to Europe is a piece on the same board. Those who still analyse American foreign policy through the lens of freedom agendas and democratic crusades are reading yesterday’s playbook. The game has changed. The question for Europe — now staring at the loss of a fifth of its LNG supply with no fallback — is whether it has even noticed.
Twisting history to dishonour history’s victims and democracy’s principles