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 ...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51