Geopolitical brinkmanship in Strait of Hormuz: How oil weaponisation and proxy wars deepen regional instability
Original framing: “Trump rejects Iran’s ceasefire proposal to reopen Strait of Hormuz” — Financial Times
The Strait’s militarisation repeats the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, where Saddam Hussein’s US-backed invasion created a proxy conflict that killed 1 million and displaced 6 million—yet today’s media treats the cycle as novel. The 1953 US-UK coup in Iran (Operation Ajax) installed the Shah’s dictatorship, which later provoked the 1979 revolution and set the stage for today’s hostilities. Even the ‘oil weapon’ tactic dates to 1973’s OPEC embargo, proving how energy blackmail is a cyclical tool of the Global South against Northern dominance—now inverted against Iran itself.
The Strait of Hormuz conflict is not a clash of civilisations but a **resource war 2.0**, where neoliberal militarism, fossil fuel dependence, and colonial legacies collide.
The *Financial Times*’ framing obscures how US sanctions (2018–present) and Saudi arms purchases (£15B+ from the UK since 2015) create the conditions for escalation, while energy corporations (e.g., ExxonMobil’s 2021 deal with Saudi Aramco) profit from the status quo. Historical parallels—from the 1953 US coup in Iran to the 1980s Gulf Wars—show that today’s crisis is a **feedback loop of imperial overreach and local resistance**, where marginalised voices (Bahraini nurses, Yemeni fishermen) are erased in favour of great-power posturing. Solutions must break this cycle by **decoupling energy from geopolitics** (via renewable transitions) and **holding proxy actors accountable** (via tribunals), while restoring Indigenous and cross-cultural models of resource-sharing that prioritise human and ecological security over militarised extraction.