But this wasn’t the 1970s oil crisis, in the end, let alone a bigger one. To some significant degree, this was the result of what analysts call “demand destruction” — cuts to consumption out of concern over price or supply. This was particularly substantial in China, which dropped oil imports via tanker by about half, stabilizing the world’s markets and also demonstrating what the Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas noted was its own weapon-like power over the oil markets. But it also demonstrated the remarkable flexibility of the world’s energy systems, in which strategic reserves served their purpose and huge recent investments in renewables have provided an additional buffer against fossil fuel shortages. And it also suggests that all those dumb-seeming traders, counting on the return to normal and the ability of the market to absorb short-term turmoil, were onto something.
The green transition kicked into higher gear.
As when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the earliest predictions forecast a return to coal in the name of energy security. As in that case, too, the predictions proved too pessimistic: The fossil fuel rebound was small to nonexistent, and the most striking spikes in the energy world were the ones marking exports of Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles. Anyone with open eyes saw the new risks of fossil fuel dependency — the need for constant imports, the dependency on foreign actors for fuel and the way that the jaggedness of contemporary geopolitics had produced three energy shocks in six years. (If you look further back, it marks perhaps the 14th oil shock in 60 years.) Across 60 countries, 200 emergency energy-saving policies were rapidly enacted, after a few years in which there had been little new climate policy anywhere in the world. What might have seemed at the outset like a war between petrostates turned into an obvious spur to the rollout of energy alternatives worldwide. Before the war, the term “energy security” tended to mean the need for fossil fuel; after, it seems to describe a growing awareness that renewable resources may be much safer and more reliable sources of power.
The United States does not know how to win a modern war.
It wasn’t just Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Pentagon who expected this conflict to be a military cakewalk. Even those who worried about the risks of a war of choice in the Middle East, at the outset of conflict, tended to emphasize the risk of domestic political chaos inside Iran. Few warned that the American military would be fought to a standstill. And yet that is, basically, what happened: U.S. forces inflicted considerable damage to the Iranian military, nuclear program and civilian infrastructure, but suffered what officials judged to be unacceptable losses, too, with U.S. forces evacuating local bases out of fear of drone and missile attacks. That a new class of cheap drones could so scare the world’s most fearsome military, and so freeze the flow of one of the world’s most critical commercial waterways, was a further sign that superpowers no longer commanded an unbreachable natural advantage (and an ironic turn, given all of Hegseth’s talk about the need to unleash America’s natural “warfighting” capacity). Perhaps the United States will now learn this lesson, committing itself to a new kind of military-industrial production. But it did not learn it in time to win this war.
But America remains capable of committing obvious war crimes — and then acting as though nothing happened.
The first-day attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab remains arguably the most memorable event of the entire war, with more than 175 killed in an apparent double-tap strike in which a second missile was dispatched once families and rescue workers had arrived to attend to all the killed and wounded children. The Pentagon has half-acknowledged that it was responsible, but there has been no real public reckoning with how such a strike occurred or who was responsible — including, perhaps, some targeting system run by artificial intelligence. I suspect that the attack was not the result of autonomous targeting, but I do worry that this is a foretaste of how we will handle warfare in the age of A.I. more generally — focusing less on adjudicating responsibility than we might have in earlier eras, and instead accepting some large amount of collateral damage as an inevitable consequence of the fog of war, which, we tell ourselves, has been made foggier still by machine intelligence.
