Blockade v blockade fallout may be not just a world energy crisis

What a lively Sunday April 13 proved to be. We had the landslide defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán; the predictable failure of 24 – some reports say 21, but who’s counting? – hours’ worth of talks in Islamabad between America and Iran; Donald Trump’s announcement in response of a blockade by the US Navy of the Strait of Hormuz; and, to cap it all, a late night verbal attack by Trump on Pope Leo, for the apparently shocking papal sin of favoring peace over war.

While Hungary’s result may be welcomed as a sign that democracy in that troublesome EU member state remains alive and kicking, and while Trump’s attack on Pope Leo can be interpreted as a sign that the Catholic Church is doing the right thing, it is much harder to judge the state of the confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran. Indeed, it is hard, though not impossible, to feel optimistic about the prospects, in military, political or economic terms.

In theory, Trump’s choice of mounting a counter-blockade to challenge Iran’s own claims to control Hormuz, the strait through which in normal times one-fifth of the global oil supply is carried on tankers, could be a bold bid to call Iran’s bluff and to force the Iranian leadership to reconsider the tough stance their negotiators took in Islamabad. If the main leverage Iran believes it has against America is its control over the strait, then challenging that control could make sense.

Certainly, compared with the other military options that may have been presented to Trump during recent weeks, most of which will have involved some sort of invasion by American ground troops of Iranian islands or its coastline, the blockade looks less hazardous.

However, it introduces three new possibilities: that in response Iran might attempt to sink an American warship; that by intercepting all tankers coming from Iranian ports, the United States could find itself in a direct confrontation with Chinese vessels; and that the crisis in supply of oil and some other critical commodities could be worsened and prolonged.

If the American blockade is fully enforced, it would have the potential advantage of reducing the income Iran is earning by allowing its oil to be exported to countries that it favors, which mainly means China. This would make Iran’s already weak economic situation even worse. The trouble is that Iran is not without friends: Both China and Russia have already been providing weapons and financial support, and could do more.

Unless Iran believes, following the talks in Islamabad with Vice-President JD Vance, that the chances of an agreement are better than both sides’ official statements have indicated, it must be quite likely that the Iranian regime will want to display its strength and resilience by retaliating, before perhaps talking again.

This makes new missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states an obvious near-term option, one that Iran has already threatened. But there must also be a chance that Iran will respond to the blockade by making direct attacks on American warships, in the hope of proving that only Iran can determine whether passage through the strait is safe.

It is, of course, possible that this is exactly what Trump wants: he may want to dare the Iranians to attack the ships to have a pretext to implement the massive bombing campaign against Iran that he was threatening before the two-week ceasefire was agreed. It was that threat of destroying a whole civilization that prompted the criticism by Pope Leo XIV that seems to have riled Trump so much.

It is nonetheless hard to believe that Trump really wants to carry out that threat in anything like the genocidal terms in which he made it. But it is plausible that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu may be arguing that the war must be resumed and that Trump may be listening. Certainly, the ceasefire has always looked fragile: it would not take much to set off another round of destruction, following which the best that could be hoped for would be another fragile ceasefire. The American blockade, which counts in international law as an act of war, is itself a violation of the ceasefire, as Iran will have noted.

If the blockade is enforced and lasts more than a short time, there is a further reality that Trump needs to take account of: If the US Navy does intercept oil tankers that have been permitted by Iran to leave the Gulf, most of them will be Chinese or at least carrying oil destined for China. Perhaps his calculation is that this will encourage President Xi Jinping to put pressure on Iran to negotiate. Yet Trump must also reckon with the possibility that as his own summit with President Xi in Beijing on May 14-15 gets closer, the US Navy may become engaged in a confrontation with Chinese vessels.

For the rest of the world, the greatest risk is that of prolonging and worsening the crisis in energy and other commodity markets caused by the cut-off of supplies from the Persian Gulf. Russia would be happy if that were to happen, since high prices for its exports of crude oil and natural gas help compensate both for the loss of Putin’s ally Viktor Orban in the councils of the European Union and for the damage being done by Ukrainian missiles and drones to Russia’s oil export facilities. But the rest of Europe would suffer, along with most other countries.

How much Europe and other oil-consuming countries suffer depends, as before, on how long the confrontation between America and Iran continues. Hopes that the current ceasefire might prove durable, even if a long-term agreement remains elusive, must now have dimmed. Since it is impossible to predict whether Trump’s latest bluff produces escalation, continued stalemate or the eventual resumption of talks, many governments will find themselves trying to encourage energy conservation while contradicting that effort through subsidies for users of oil and gas.

The reality is that there is no shortage of oil and gas in the world, let alone other sources of energy. Over the next several years new pipelines and other routes will be created to enable the Strait of Hormuz to be circumvented. In the longer term, countries must and will invest more in wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as costlier, more time-consuming options such as nuclear energy, to make themselves more resilient in the face of the way politics can make market prices for energy so volatile. But these brighter long-term prospects offer little balm for the short-term pain we are all suffering.

This original English version of an article first published in Italian by La Stampa can also be read on Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished with permission.