KJS DC 4.26

Today, oil crossed $116 a barrel.

Today, US forces struck Kharg Island for the second time — the tiny coral island that handles 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard warned it would “deprive the US and its allies of the region’s oil and gas for years.”

Today, the President of the United States said — and these are his actual words — “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not open the Strait of Hormuz by his 8pm deadline.

And today, the head of the International Energy Agency told Le Figaro newspaper: “The world has never experienced a disruption to energy supply of such magnitude. The current oil and gas crisis is more serious than the ones in 1973, 1979 and 2022 together.”

In numbers: global supply losses now total 12 million barrels per day. The 1973 and 1979 crises each cost about 5 million barrels per day. Both of them together were 10 million. We are already past that and the IEA chief said April will be “much worse than March.”

The worst energy disruption in recorded human history. Engineered, in part, by the deliberate escalation strategy of the United States government.

Now let me tell you who pays for this. Not the wealthy.

The Squeeze

The IEA chief was precise about who bears the worst of this: “The countries most at risk were developing nations, which will suffer from higher oil and gas prices, higher food prices and a general acceleration of inflation.”

Here is the mechanism. Roughly half of the world’s urea supply — the critical compound for fertilizer — transits the Strait of Hormuz. Brazil is almost entirely dependent on imported fertilizers, with nearly half of its supply transiting the strait. Brazil accounts for nearly 60% of global soybean exports and is a major exporter of corn and sugar. When Brazilian crop yields drop, the world’s food supply tightens. When the world’s food supply tightens, the people who starve are not in Manhattan or Mar-a-Lago.

Nitrogen fertilizer prices could roughly double from 2024 levels. Phosphate prices are projected to spike proportionally. A farmer in Nigeria, a smallholder in Bangladesh, a family in Sudan — they don’t have strategic petroleum reserves. They don’t have a hedge fund. They have a field and a water pump. When diesel costs three times what it did in January and fertilizer doubles, they don’t produce less. They produce nothing.

This is what a food crisis looks like at its origin. Not a drought, not a flood — a war of choice, fought for reasons that still haven’t been coherently explained, that has severed the supply chain of global agriculture at the exact moment it was most vulnerable.

The Business Model

This part should enrage you — anyone who understands how transactions and democracy work.

The same administration that is driving this crisis is simultaneously positioning itself to profit from it. Trump offered naval escorts and a $20 billion insurance plan to keep oil tankers moving through the Strait. NATO allies were told to pay for military protection or lose it. Today, a $500 million oil deal was signed with Hungary in Budapest while the Vice President attended a campaign rally for a pro-Kremlin strongman. The Pentagon’s new procurement surge — funded by the $175 billion military budget passed this year — benefits the defense contractors whose stocks rose as the war began.

This is not leadership. This is protection money dressed in the language of national security.

China saw this coming. While the US built the crisis, China spent two decades building the exit ramp — solar, wind, grid, EVs, energy sovereignty. UN Secretary-General Guterres said it plainly: “The resources of the clean-energy era cannot be blockaded or weaponised. There are no price spikes for sunlight and no embargoes on the wind.”

China is offering Taiwan that energy stability as the price of reunification. The US is offering Hungary an oil deal as the price of political loyalty. One of these is a vision for the next century. The other is a racket dressed as policy.

Who Dies

A war that costs the developing world its fertilizer supply and doubles its food prices is not a footnote. It is a famine in slow motion. The people who will die from this — not from bombs, but from the cascading supply chain collapse that bombs trigger — are the ones who have no insurance, no reserves, no portfolio, no exit ramp.

The IEA said this is the worst energy crisis in history. The man who started it is threatening to make it worse tonight.

“A whole civilization will die tonight.”

He said that about Iran. But civilizations are already paying the price of this war in hunger, disease, and collapse – which are not Iran.

They are the same people who were dying from USAID cuts. The same people whose HIV and malaria supply chains were severed by the May 30 deadline. The same people who don’t register in the transactional calculus of an administration that has decided, explicitly, that their lives have no value to American taxpayers.