Why oil wars will never yield victory
By Professor Dato Dr Ahmad Ibrahim
As the world feels the heat of another US-Iran confrontation, the current crisis reveals a truth far more terrifying than the sum of its parts. The International Energy Agency’s warning that this may become the worst oil crisis in human history is not merely an economic forecast; it is an epitaph for a century-old world order. We are watching history perform its cruelest trick: repeating itself, but with higher stakes. Fuel rationing is no longer a distant memory of the 1970s; it is a present reality. The aviation industry, the very symbol of global connectivity, is buckling under prices that threaten to make the pandemic-era travel collapse look like a minor turbulence. All forms of travel are restricted, not by viral contagion, but by the cold, hard arithmetic of cost.
And yet, despite the global pain—the grounded planes, the empty highways, the inflation spreading like wildfire—the refrain remains the same: “Nobody will ever win a war.” It is a lose-lose game. But if we know this to be true, why does humanity keep shuffling the deck and dealing the same losing hand? The answer is that we have mistaken energy security for national strength. For decades, nations have treated oil not as a commodity, but as a weapon. The United States, with its military might, seeks to police the Strait of Hormuz; Iran, with its asymmetric warfare, strikes at tankers and infrastructure. In this exchange, they inflict wounds upon each other, but the hemorrhage belongs to the world. When the two titans clash, the rest of humanity pays the price at the pump.
The tragedy is that the architecture of this conflict is obsolete. We are fighting over the bones of a dead era. The premise of oil wars was always that the victor would secure the flow of cheap energy. But today, there are no victors—only victims. The “lose-lose” dynamic has intensified to the point where the protagonists themselves are suffering the consequences of their own aggression. Inflation cripples the American consumer; sanctions and isolation choke the Iranian economy. The “win” has vanished from the calculus of war.
If history teaches us anything, it is that we will not stop fighting over oil until we stop needing oil. The way out is not a ceasefire brokered by a neutral party—though that would be a welcome salve—but a collective, accelerated sprint away from the very resource that holds us hostage. We are looking for a diplomatic solution to a geological problem. The root cause of this crisis is not merely the animosity between Washington and Tehran; it is the fragility of a global system that remains tethered to a single, volatile, geographically concentrated source of energy. Every barrel of oil extracted from the Middle East comes with a hidden surcharge: the cost of the wars fought to protect its transit.
The only sustainable exit strategy is obsolescence. We need to treat this crisis as the definitive final chapter of the fossil fuel age. Governments scrambling to ration fuel and subsidize costs are treating the symptom. The cure lies in treating this oil shock the way we treated the pandemic: as a global emergency requiring a wartime footing. We need a mobilization to electrify transportation, to invest in nuclear and renewable baseload power, and to break the monopoly that cartels and geopolitics hold over our daily lives.
Imagine if the trillions of dollars spent over the last two decades on securing oil fields had been invested in making oil irrelevant. We would not be standing at the mercy of the Strait of Hormuz today. We would not be watching airlines collapse because of the price of jet fuel. We would not be rationing the ability to move. The aviation business, now “badly impacted,” must be the canary in the coal mine. If flying becomes a luxury only the ultra-wealthy can afford, the world doesn’t just become less convenient; it becomes less connected, less understanding, and more prone to the very nationalist fervor that starts wars.
Men never learn from history. We are learning the wrong lesson. We keep trying to perfect the art of war to secure resources. The lesson of the 20th century was that resource wars are bloody. The lesson of this current crisis is that they are also futile. The way out of this mess is to render it obsolete. It is to build an energy system so decentralized, so resilient, and so independent of the geopolitical fault lines of the Middle East that the next time a confrontation brews, the world can shrug. It can say, “Fight if you must, but you no longer hold our civilization hostage.”
The author is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at ahmadibrahim@ucsiuniversity.edu.my.