The Energy War That Cannot Be Won: America Inverts 1973

When Donald Trump rejected Iran’s seven-day de-escalation proposal on Saturday, he did more than snub a diplomatic overture. He confirmed that the United States is now fighting a war in which the primary weapon is not the missile but the molecule. The Wall Street Journal reports that Treasury officials have visited over fifty countries this month with a simple ultimatum: choose between doing business with Tehran or Washington. The Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes — remains, by private tracking data, effectively paralyzed. The Bab al-Mandeb is little better. And in New York, a frantic Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded with Turkey, India, and Egypt to broker a Black Sea ceasefire with Russia, admitting in the same breath that Ukraine needs 27 billion dollars to keep its drone campaign airborne through the winter.

These are not separate crises. They are the same crisis, viewed from different angles of a single compass: the weaponization of energy.

Half a century ago, in October 1973, the Arab members of OPEC turned off the taps and demonstrated what energy-as-leverage really meant. The embargo quadrupled oil prices, broke the post-war economic order, and seared into Western consciousness the terrifying realization that industrial civilization could be held hostage by the geology and politics of a handful of desert kingdoms. Henry Kissinger, ever the realist, understood immediately: whoever controls the flow of hydrocarbons controls the arteries of modern power.

The irony of the present moment is that the United States — the country that spent the last fifty years organizing its entire global military posture around preventing another 1973 — is now the aggressor in an energy war of its own making. And it is losing it.

The Colby Doctrine and the Scorched Suppliers

Einar Tangen, in conversation with Lena Petrova, identified the strategic logic with precision. Elbridge Colby, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, laid out the playbook in his 2021 book: deny China access to energy and you deny it the capacity to challenge American primacy. The doctrine has been implemented with a brutalism that surprised even its architects. Nigeria was bombed. Venezuela was seized. Iran was attacked. What these three countries share, Tangen notes, is not ideology but geology: they were all major crude suppliers to China.

“This was not an accident,” Tangen argues. The Colby framework envisioned exactly this sequence — strike China’s energy partners, choke the supply lines, force Beijing into submission through economic asphyxiation. The Strait of Hormuz, the Bab al-Mandeb, the Panama Canal, the Northern Sea Route — these are not separate theaters. They are pressure points in a single campaign.

But campaigns have a habit of developing fronts their commanders did not anticipate. The attack on Iran did not produce the swift regime collapse that Benjamin Netanyahu promised and that Trump, by Hanke’s account, believed. Instead, it produced a paralyzed Strait of Hormuz, a Yemeni insurgency that has chased the US Navy from the Red Sea, and oil prices that refuse to fall. Professor Steve Hanke, who tracks the shipping data daily, reports that private satellite monitoring shows near-zero tanker traffic through Hormuz. The 40 million barrels per day figure cited by officials is, in his telling, a fiction.

The Boomerang

Tony Norfield, the British economist, offers a structural reading. The United States, he argues, no longer depends on Middle Eastern crude the way it once did. It has boosted domestic production, filled European gaps with its own LNG, and now views the Gulf states less as indispensable suppliers than as sources of investable capital — trillions parked in US equities and treasuries, extractable on demand. For Washington, the risk calculation has shifted: the energy disruption hurts everyone else more than it hurts the hegemon.

This is the logic of a power that believes it can externalize the costs of its own aggression. But energy markets do not respect great power vanity.

Europe is the most exposed casualty. Norfield notes storage levels well below seasonal norms, a continent importing nearly 450 million tonnes of crude annually, and a political class that sacrificed Russian supply lines for a loyalty Washington does not reciprocate. “They would be really concerned if you saw another 20 percent on oil and gas prices,” he says. The deindustrialization of Germany is not a cultural phenomenon. It is the downstream consequence of an energy architecture deliberately detonated.

Then there are the Gulf allies themselves, the intended beneficiaries of American protection who now find themselves the collateral damage of American strategy. Hanke describes the UAE’s long-term business model being “thrown into question.” Saudi Arabia, running budget deficits, hemorrhaging money on a Yemen campaign it cannot win, and watching the East-West pipeline — its only alternative to Hormuz — operate at unknown capacity, is now sufficiently alarmed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman picked up the phone and called Vladimir Putin on September 22nd.

The Kremlin readout of that call, as Alex Mercouris notes, was telling: both sides affirmed that there is “no alternative to political and diplomatic solutions.” MBS, who had once reportedly urged Trump toward military options against Iran, now finds himself agreeing with Putin that diplomacy — “taking into account the interests of all parties” — is the only way forward. The Saudi pivot is not a change of heart. It is a change of circumstance. The energy war has burned its own architect’s house.

The Inversion of 1973

What makes the current moment historically strange is not that energy is being used as a weapon. It is that the consumer is the aggressor. In 1973, the producers turned the tap off. In 2026, the world’s largest economy is trying to turn the tap off for everyone — including itself — in pursuit of strategic objectives that are failing.

The Colby doctrine assumed that energy denial would weaken China. Instead, it has accelerated Beijing’s pivot to domestic energy production, its investment in renewables, and its consolidation of rare earth leverage — the one supply chain where China holds the equivalent of a Strait of Hormuz. Tangen notes that Washington’s desperation for rare earths is palpable, but China will not trade them for Taiwan or anything else. The asymmetry cuts both ways.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war supplies the parallel energy plot. Putin’s Saturday press conference dissected Zelensky’s ceasefire pleas with clinical precision: “They started all of this,” he said, enumerating Ukrainian attacks on refineries, the September drone swarm on Moscow, strikes on polling stations. Then the hard conclusion: “We will make all our decisions based exclusively on Russia’s interests.” The Black Sea blockade that Zelensky once claimed Ukraine had broken is now a fact of geography. His admission that drone production requires 27 billion European dollars merely exposes the arithmetic behind the theater: Europe is funding an energy war it cannot afford.

Europe is paying for a war it cannot win with energy money it no longer has. The United States is prosecuting an energy blockade it cannot sustain against adversaries it cannot defeat. The Gulf monarchies watch their business models dissolve while their American patron demands they choose sides in a conflict that offers them no side worth choosing.

The Physics of Fire

There is a deeper lesson here, one Washington has consistently ignored. Energy is not a weapon like a missile or a sanction. It is a substrate. Every economy floats on it. When you disrupt energy flows, you do not punish a single adversary — you punish the entire system, including yourself.

The 1973 embargo ended because the producers realized they were immolating their own revenue streams along with the West’s industrial base. The 2026 energy war will end not because the United States achieves its objectives — regime change in Iran, submission from China — but because the physics of interdependence will reassert itself. Already, MBS is talking to Putin. Already, the Iranians have offered a seven-day de-escalation path that Trump rejected for domestic political reasons. Already, the oil price is betraying the official narrative that “everything is fine.”

Norfield captures the predicament bluntly: the Europeans “have to come up with these stunts” — sending a few tanks to Saudi Arabia, offering air defense systems — because they are sliding into irrelevance and have nothing else to offer. An empire that can no longer guarantee the energy flows upon which its allies depend is an empire approaching the end of its credit line.

The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. It must, because the global economy cannot function indefinitely without it. The question is not whether, but under whose terms. The inversion of 1973 means that when the taps turn again, they will not turn under American control. The producers of 1973 dictated terms to consumers. The consumer-aggressor of 2026 will discover that burning down the energy architecture does not earn the right to rebuild it. It merely ensures that someone else lays the new foundation.

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