Hanieh challenges narrow accounts of the war that reduce its significance to fluctuations in oil prices. Instead, he situates the conflict within a broader political economy of empire, tracing how the Gulf’s strategic importance lies not only in energy exports but also in its central role in global supply chains, financial markets, and emerging infrastructure corridors… Hanieh’s central intervention is that the war should be understood not as a discrete geopolitical event but as part of a wider struggle over the organization of trade, capital flows, infrastructure, and political authority in a rapidly changing global order.
2025 saw the largest consumption of oil, gas, and coal in human history… [R]ather than a move away from fossil fuels, we are seeing renewables layered onto an expanding hydrocarbon base.
Since the 1970s, these surpluses have largely flowed into dollar assets, Western banks, US Treasury markets, and consumption of US military hardware. Through these financial flows, the Gulf has played a key part in sustaining both the international role of the dollar and the wider architecture of US financial power.
What has changed over the last two decades is the emergence of new centres of capital accumulation outside the United States, above all China.
The war has seen a sharp increase in repression in the GCC, including the detention and death in custody of Sayed Moustafa Mousawi in Bahrain, and the revocation of citizenship of thousands of people in Kuwait.
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