Oil wars aren’t always, or even usually, about actually seizing oil fields. They are about control: ideally control leading to healthy profit margins and secure investment environments. 

Trump declared “my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran”. He - or the rational part of his regime - actually wants Iran as a client-state where the US dictates how and where the oil flows.

But this war isn’t just about control over oil. It’s about control over the future – a future that otherwise increasingly looks like one without oil or the US at its centre. It’s a war of transition.

Supremacy

Trump’s illegal war on Iran – one of five oil rich countries attacked by the US in the past year and a half – forms part of a broader assault on the emerging transition economy, one that includes an assault on green policies and renewable energy investments. 

This war is part of a rearguard action underway by the US government to try to contain the emerging transition economy - the economy without the US at its centre.

Attacking Iran is an act of desperation, signalling not US supremacy but rather that the world hegemon has conceded the future and is now fighting to hold onto the past.

Petro vs transition economy

The closure of the Straight of Hormuz has made is crystal clear just how deep our contemporary petro-dependency is: from food to medicine, there is little production that is not shaped by fossil fuels. 

Such dependency - coupled with not-yet declining oil and gas consumption - makes it seem as though any talk of transition is premature. That for all the talk of net zero or climate policies, the reality is a world built on oil.

But such a volumetric approach to political economy mistakes the current state of the global economy for its direction of travel. And that direction is into the transition.

The emerging transition economy is being built through green frontier industries – industries that can deliver on investment with future returns and growth – and orchestrated through specific regimes of government support and policy. 

It is state-led, not state-managed: the transition economy is organised around making business feel secure in its investments, not the direct organisation of production by state industries. 

Industries

Government contents itself with encouraging and de-risking investment. It is the effective privatisation of climate change as a challange.

It could be said that there is no real transition - that what exists under the name net zero is just false promises and greenwashing. 

But this mistakes what the transition economy is. It uses climate change as a means towards economic growth as an end. What it is not is a climate solution. 

The petrodollar complex could fall, bringing the AI bubble down with it.

Its measure is not in decrees centigrade as we barrel towards 3C of global warming. CapEx and investment figures are its true accounting. And on those measures, the transition economy is booming.

Globally, investment in transition industries is double that in fossil fuels. Growth rates for what is often called the net zero sector are upwards of eight times that of the rest of the economy. 

Value

Europe generated more power from solar energy last year than fossil fuels, while EV’s just outsold petrol cars for the first time. And Europe is not alone. Globally, sales of greentech from solar panels to electric trucks is rapidly eclipsing petro-tech.

Both the US and Europe attempted to establish industrial dominance in transition industries in the 90s and early 2000s. Along with the other core technologies of the fourth industrial revolution - including AI and biotechnology, both mobilised to secure a lead, or at least a foothold - in new sectors and markets.

But the combination of industrial climate denial, cross-party support for fossil industries and relentless anti-climate compromises hobbled the US’s greentech sectors. 

In the end the transition is a race that China largely won. This is not an either-or outcome. Both the US and the EU have transition industries, and large net zero workforces where employment is growing at double the rate of the rest of the economy. 

But these industries and workforces are developing within a reorganised global value chain, one not centred on US or European IP or companies - but on Chinese firms.

Transformation

Symptomatic here is the reality of the transition in a supportive country like Britain.   

The British government has announced millions in support for green industries, including the assembly and deployment of floating wind turbines in Port Talbot. The town was just recently subject to green deindustrialisation as the steel mill closed down its blast furnaces.

This will deliver thousands of jobs. But it is not high value manufacturing - but instead installing wind turbines that are actually made in China. Built using imported and not local steel. The real economic value will go elsewhere.

While talk is of petro-states vs electro-states, the real challenge is to the structure of global value chains. The transition economy reorders production through a transformation of how the global factory is structured. 

Decolonisation

IP and research increasingly takes place outside of the US-European core, while high-value manufacturing is already concentrated in East Asia. 

Despite the rise of neo-mercantilism in response to the zero sum conflicts of a stagnant global economy, production remains globally dispersed: globalisation may have slowed down but it has not seriously regressed.

The focus on the 'new cold war' obscures the real fear animating Trump’s war on Iran: that the US will lose its privileged place at the heart the global economy and fall down the value-chain. 

When Trump claims renewable energy is “destroying a large part of the free world”, what we should hear is a fear not dissimilar to those of European empires faced with decolonisation movements – that of the end of tribute and power, and the rise of competitors ill disposed towards us.

Oil’s return?

Faced with this threat, Trump moved to reaffirm the primacy of the petro-economy. And so, the Trump regime has aggressively pursued petro-supremecy since taking office in 2025. 

Trump has repeatedly tried to buttress oil and gas production - from attacks on the Inflation Reduction Act and halting offshore wind permitting while pushing for fossil fuel use and production. 

And not just in the US. He has bullied Europe, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia into committing to purchase more liquefied natural gas (LNG). 

He has kidnapped the Venezuelan president and pushed for oil and gas industry investment alongside ensuring Texas would be where Venezuelan oil would be refined. 

And now he’s waging war on Iran while making his desire for control over Iran’s gas and oil, the world’s second and third largest reserves respectively, plain.

Exploration

But Trump’s list of achievements is also a list of failures. His efforts have not led to a boom in fossil fuel investment. 

Shale producers are not planning on expanding investment, while productivity growth in the industry has flatlined. While US shale production is forecast to peak imminently, this has not led to a rush to invest elsewhere. Rather, global upstream investment has declined.

Prior to the war on Iran, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast an increasing gap between oil supply and demand, a gap that has since widened due to the rapid acceleration of both consumer and national spending on alternatives. 

Given future prospects of little to no growth, downward pressure on prices, and the increasing costs of exploration and production, oil majors see little reason to invest in expanding production. Consolidation, not expansion, is the order of the day.

Bribing

Trump has had to resort to threats and presidential dictates in an attempt to create both demand and investment. Yet while countries promise to buy more US oil and gas, the reality is decreasing demand. 

Worse, in Venezuela Trump had to threaten oil companies in order to force them to promise investment, signing an executive order to block courts or creditors from seizing revenue tied to the sale of Venezuelan oil held in US Treasury accounts.

When Exxon suggested they might not invest in Venezuela, Trump directly put debts owned to them at risk, declaring “I didn’t like Exxon’s response, I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out”.

Symptomatic of the whole debacle, Trump’s regime has had to resort to bribing energy companies to not build renewables, handing over US$1bn to French oil major TotalEnergies to walk away from an off-shore windfarm. 

Windfall

We can contrast this with the £1bn in climate funding for logistics companies announced the same week by the British government. 

Where the former is an effort to block construction, the latter focuses on spurring investment and supporting small and medium sized businesses. 

Of course, this fund is not to build electric vans but to buy them. Despite promises to the contrary, the transition won’t revive Western industry. Instead, business will focus on installation, not manufacture.

The war on Iran is only accelerating these trends. Far from securing a fossil fuel future, the war looks set to delivery both a windfall for oil companies and push the world’s majority-oil importing countries to more aggressively invest in and adopt transition technologies.

Twilight of the West?

The war on Iran is part of a broader project to ensure the US is unchallenged at the summit of the value chain, as well as to control oil and thus the global economy. 

The pursuit of crypto-dominance, of aggressively positioning US tech and AI as indispensable and untaxable computing infrastructure, and the war against the transition economy are all part of this campaign.

Unlike the assaults on Venezuela, Sudan, Nigeria and over a dozen other countries conducted by the Trump regime, the war on Iran is not proceeding well. 

To be sure, short-term the US is generating a cash windfall from the rising price of oil - but so too is Iran and Russia. 

And while most of us are focused on looming shortages and inflationary spikes, more worrying for Trump’s project is the threat to his allies in the Gulf. 

Bombed

The Gulf states are more than just ‘petrodollar pumps’, anchoring the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency, a status that is coming under pressure, not least as Iran announces that passage through Hormuz will only be granted to oil priced in renminbi. 

These states are key funders for the AI build-out. And that funding is steadily disappearing under Iranian retaliation, putting the emerging petro-compute complex under immense strain. 

Coupled to higher energy prices, rampant inflation and helium shortages, there is every chance that this war finally bursts the AI bubble, bringing down the one pillar propping up the k-shaped US economy.

If so, it would be a fitting end. 

All that appears left as a social horizon in the US is grift and pyramid schemes. AI is making a small number of people fabulously wealthy, but for the rest produces little more than slop, job losses and increased workloads. It only appears to excel when producing lists of schools to be bombed by stand-off missiles in record time. 

Embedded

But it’s not AI that captures the state of the US, but the prediction market Polymarket. Gambling on future events. Gambling and, for most people, losing. 

Around 80 per cent of Polymarket users lose money; the vast majority of profits are captured by so-called elite traders. Elite not in the sense of good at gambling, but elite in the sense of having insider information, from the timing of attacks to Whitehouse announcements on oil.

Grift and corruption are not future-orientated. While the future as a material thing has been bound to fossil fuels for most of the past century and a half, with the very idea of the economy as an autonomous sphere being a product of oil in a real sense, that is coming to an end.

A new regime of energy abundance and security is emerging. It is not one that will arrest climate change below supposedly ‘safe’ levels. It is, however, one that will strand fossil assets and the regions they are embedded within. 

Fascism

It is also one upending the existing structure of global production, not only eroding existing power structures where the centres of economic development are located in Asia, not Europe or the US.

It may well be that this moment is pivotal in the decline of the US empire: chased from its bases across the Middle East, revealed as incapable of anything beyond bullying allies and throwing missiles at countries without any capacity to fight back. 

The petrodollar complex could fall, bringing the AI bubble down with it. Israel, already battered and economically broken, could implode, finally enabling progress towards something like peace.

But the loss is bigger than that. The US has lost its grip on the future. Perhaps that’s why fascism has become distinctly American, no longer rushing towards a future renewal but now a force of reactionary nostalgia, taking aim at the future as a threat to what it imagined it once had.

This Author

Dr Nicholas Beuret is a lecturer at the University of Essex researching the politics and political economy of climate change and the green transition. His book Or Something Worse: Why we ned to disrupt the climate transition is out now with Verso.