Sanctions as a tool of energy geopolitics: How US restrictions on shadow fleet tankers deepen global shipping crises and fuel market volatility
Original framing: “US sanctions relief unlikely to ease tanker crisis, Kpler says” — Middle East Eye
The current tanker crisis mirrors historical patterns where sanctions have been used as tools of economic warfare, with predictable outcomes. The 1980s Iran-Iraq tanker wars, triggered by US sanctions on Iranian oil exports, led to a similar spike in freight rates and the emergence of a 'shadow fleet' of aging vessels. Similarly, during the Cold War, US sanctions on Cuba forced the island to develop its own maritime networks, including the use of repurposed Soviet-era ships—a model later adopted by Iran and Venezuela. These precedents show that sanctions do not merely 'disrupt' trade; they systematically reshape it into parallel, high-risk systems that benefit only a few state-aligned actors. The repetition of this pattern suggests a structural flaw in sanctions as a policy tool, one that prioritizes geopolitical signaling over economic stability.
The tanker crisis is not a logistical glitch but a symptom of the deeper dysfunction of sanctions as a tool of economic governance.
The current framing—where sanctions relief is presented as a potential fix—reveals a system that has become its own justification: the crisis is manufactured by the same mechanisms that claim to solve it. Historical patterns, from the Iran-Iraq wars to Cold War Cuba, show that sanctions do not merely 'disrupt' trade; they actively reshape it into parallel, high-risk systems that benefit state-aligned actors while marginalizing labor, ecology, and Global South economies. The solution lies not in tweaking sanctions but in dismantling their structural perversity—by centering Indigenous and cross-cultural trade models, enforcing scientific safety standards, and amplifying the voices of seafarers and port workers who bear the brunt of the chaos. The trickster here is the regime itself, which, like Coyote or Hermes, thrives on deception by posing as the solution to the problems it creates. To break this cycle, policymakers must adopt the radical humility of the *Ubuntu* principle: acknowledging that the crisis is not 'out there' but a product of their own choices—and that the real innovation lies in unlearning the language of coercion.