There is a particular kind of geopolitical imagination that assumes history is a Netflix series: you drop the bombs in Episode 3, declare victory in Episode 5, and roll the credits before the global economy notices the plot holes.
Donald Trump appeared to script the Iran confrontation like that — a high-stakes trailer of ultimatums, strikes, deadlines and capital-letter diplomacy. Markets duly convulsed. Oil surged. Then — plot twist — Iran did the unthinkable: it behaved like a country with agency, leverage and a map of the world’s energy arteries.
Blocking or threatening the Strait of Hormuz is not a symbolic gesture. It’s the economic equivalent of putting a choke-hold on the global bloodstream. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes through that narrow channel. Close it — or even whisper about closing it — and suddenly inflation, bond yields and pension funds all start sweating like diplomats at a sanctions conference.
Markets reacted in real time to the drama. Stocks slid on escalation fears, then bounced when Trump abruptly postponed strikes for five days after claiming “productive conversations Oil prices lurched accordingly, reminding everyone that geopolitics is the ultimate algorithmic trade.
What seemed missing was strategic imagination: the ability to foresee that Iran’s retaliation would not necessarily be symmetrical or cinematic. You don’t need aircraft carriers when you can weaponise supply chains, shipping insurance, tanker routes and investor psychology. Economic warfare today comes with spreadsheets, not just missiles.
Meanwhile Israel, the United States and everyone else discovered the uncomfortable truth: globalisation is mutual vulnerability in a tailored suit. You can threaten to “obliterate” infrastructure, but infrastructure has cousins — pipelines, ports, currencies, commodities — and they all RSVP to the crisis.
In the end, the lesson may be brutally simple. Starting fires is easy. Predicting where the smoke drifts — across markets, mortgages and supermarket shelves — requires imagination. And imagination, unlike oil, can’t be pumped overnight.
Trump is far too stupid to fully grasp the intricacies of geopolitics. He obviously stands to pilfer even more filthy money, his religious fanatics who are trying to bring about their Armageddon and the Israelis are leading him by the nose. It seems he realises that Iran is not Gaza or Lebanon. They are fighting back. No imperial bully ever likes that. Trump will be thought of as the greedy man who was brought down by Iran. I have as much in common with Protestant end of times theology as I have with Islam. Trump of course has no religious convictions. He does have criminal convictions.