The bombs are falling on tankers now, and International Trade is taking the hit. So, who benefits if the global economy becomes more fragmented?
What is this battlefield coming to? Tankers have now become retaliatory targets. That goes far beyond the Strait of Hormuz. A missile fired at a tanker does not stop when the smoke clears. It travels through people's grief, to begin with, and also through insurance rates, freight costs, oil prices, factory costs, and supermarket shelves, before it reaches your living room. Brent is already approaching $100 a barrel, diesel prices have reached record highs, and shipping through Hormuz has fallen sharply as operators reassess the risk. This is the domino effect of modern war: attack a ship, disrupt a route, raise the cost of moving energy, raise the cost of moving everything else. But there is a larger question here. What happens to globalization when the world's most important trade routes become potential battlefields? And who benefits from the world this war is creating?
The answer to the first question does not have to be the collapse of globalization. It may be something quieter: countries deciding that dependence itself has become a security risk. Like the United Arab Emirates, which developed alternative export routes because it does not want its economy held hostage by Hormuz. Right now, LNG cargoes have been transferred between ships outside the strait. Governments and businesses have every reason to look for other ports, pipelines, suppliers, and routes.
That is how systems change. Not necessarily through a grand declaration, but through thousands of decisions to become less dependent on somebody else. And we should be careful with the word globalization. The old model produced enormous wealth, but it also produced enormous concentrations of wealth and left many workers and communities carrying costs they did not choose. A more connected world is not automatically a fairer one.
The danger is that the alternative may be no fairer at all. A world divided into economic and political blocs could give states greater control over their own supply chains. It could also give governments greater control over the people who depend on those supply chains. Trade could become more regional, more political and more coercive. Economic security could increasingly mean choosing which power you are willing to depend upon. And that raises the question we should be asking before the shooting gets worse:
Who benefits from the world this war is creating?
The wealthy certainly have ways to profit from upheaval, and the defense industry stands to gain from a war that generates more demand for weapons, ships and security. Washington gets security and leverage, while politically, a retreat from globalization could strengthen Trump's economic and nationalist argument. Tehran gets another reason to demand survival, sanctions relief and greater control over its strategic backyard. The Gulf states now have an increasingly urgent reason to escape their dependence on Hormuz. China has an incentive to secure energy through routes and suppliers less vulnerable to Western pressure, including the Arctic. Russia gets higher energy prices and another crack in the cohesion of its Western adversaries. None of this proves that any of them wanted this war or designed it to produce these consequences. It means only that a fragmented world can create opportunities for powerful nationalistic states that a highly integrated one does not. It also means something more disturbing:
As the battlefield is turning into a target range, and the targets are no longer only oil tankers, a war nobody planned — until proven otherwise — may be producing incentives that several powerful states can use. But, as governments calculate leverage, ideology, resilience, sovereignty and strategic advantage, the rest of us get to calculate the price of diesel, food, freight and the next heating bill. Eventually, the target is us.
So this is what you should be asking. Who really benefits from the world this war is creating? Not who wins the next exchange of missiles. Who benefits if international trade becomes more fragmented, if energy routes become political weapons, if countries retreat into competing blocs, and if global economic interdependence begins to look less like prosperity and more like vulnerability? There is no evidence yet that the present war was designed to produce such a world. But history rarely cares what wars were designed to do. It cares what they actually do.
Some of you may be asking now: Is there still time to change direction? Can we stop this war before the world it is creating becomes harder to undo than the war itself? Perhaps. But that requires recognizing what is happening while there is still something left to change. Because wars eventually end. The systems they damage, reshape, or destroy may not.
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