The article argues that recent military escalations involving Iran, Israel, and the United States represent a fundamental challenge to the post-WWI geopolitical order in the Middle East. The author contends that Iran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz—a critical chokepoint for global oil trade—has shifted regional power dynamics away from Western hegemony and toward Iranian influence.
The latest confrontation involving Iran, Israel and the United States may come to be remembered as more than another Middle Eastern war. It represents the first serious challenge to the geopolitical order that has governed the region since the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate after the First World War. If Iran grows into a hegemon, as explained below, the consequences will extend well beyond the battlefield. They will set the scene for crisis in global finance, energy supply chains and great-power competition, and forge changes in alliances in the region. Much of the commentary surrounding the conflict has focused on missiles, nuclear facilities and ceasefire negotiations. Yet these are only the visible manifestations of a deeper struggle. The real contest concerns who will shape the political and economic order of the Middle East going forward.
For over a century, external powers have exercised decisive influence over the region because they recognized a simple geopolitical reality: whoever commands the Middle East’s energy resources and strategic sea lanes enjoys disproportionate influence over the global economy. The Strait of Hormuz, through which around one-fifth of the world’s oil trade normally passes, is not merely a regional waterway; it is one of the principal arteries of the international economic system.
The conflict should therefore be understood not as an isolated military confrontation but as a struggle over the future of the post-First World War order. Iran has succeeded in fundamentally altering the regional balance of power. Diplomacy alone will not restore the status quo for the empire, and Iran knows it. History demonstrates that empires rarely surrender strategic dominance voluntarily, while states that believe they have secured transformational gains rarely exchange them for uncertain diplomatic guarantees. Consequently, financial winter, rather than negotiated peace, may become the defining consequence of this conflict.
America Fights for Oil, Blood and Empire and Cannot Accept Seismic Loss in the Middle East
To understand the present, it is necessary to return to the end of the First World War.
For more than four centuries, the Ottoman Caliphate had remained the dominant Muslim power across much of the Middle East. Whatever its internal weaknesses during its final decades, it provided a single strategic authority across vast territories stretching from Anatolia through the Arab provinces. Its defeat in the First World War transformed the geopolitical map of the region.
The Sykes–Picot Agreement had already envisaged dividing Ottoman Arab lands into British and French spheres of influence. The Balfour Declaration added another strategic commitment concerning planting Israel as a forward military outpost for the empire. The Treaty of Sèvres proposed dismantling much of the Ottoman state before it was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne, and the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate marked the end of an institution that had symbolized political unity for centuries.
The collapse of the caliphate and the plantation of agent rulers and weak, broken-up states, with Israel acting as the empire’s forward military enforcer, marked the beginning of a regional order in which the Middle East’s political architecture would exclusively be designed and guaranteed by outside Western powers.
The importance of this transformation became even greater as oil emerged as the indispensable fuel of industrial civilization. Control over energy became inseparable from military power, economic growth and international influence. Britain initially occupied the dominant position, but after the Second World War the United States gradually assumed responsibility for dictating Gulf security and the maritime routes upon which the global economy depended.
The petrodollar became one of the most important pillars of that system. Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods gold exchange system in 1971, the United States reached arrangements with major Gulf oil producers that reinforced the pricing of most internationally traded oil in US dollars. The implications were profound. Every country requiring imported oil also required dollars. Persistent global demand for energy therefore created persistent global demand for the American currency.
This arrangement helped sustain the dollar’s role as the world’s primary reserve currency, lowered borrowing costs for the United States, strengthened Washington’s ability to impose financial sanctions and provided an enduring financial foundation for American global influence. Military supremacy protected the energy system, the energy system reinforced dollar dominance and dollar dominance helped finance continued military supremacy. Oil, finance and military power became mutually reinforcing pillars of a single geopolitical architecture. America with Israel have always fought to maintain it.
