Global oil geopolitics and US energy dependence sustain high fuel prices amid election cycles
Original framing: “US motorists skimp at the pump as Iran war keeps petrol prices high” — Financial Times
The current petrol price volatility echoes the 1973 oil crisis, when OPEC’s embargo exposed the fragility of US energy policy built on Middle Eastern oil dependence. US interventions in Iran (1953 coup), Iraq (2003 invasion), and Libya (2011 intervention) have repeatedly destabilised regional oil supplies, creating a cycle of crisis and profiteering. The post-WWII Bretton Woods system institutionalised the dollar’s dominance through oil sales (petrodollar), tying global energy markets to US geopolitical interests and ensuring that conflicts in oil regions directly impact domestic prices.
The petrol price crisis is not a natural disaster but a manufactured scarcity, where decades of US energy policy—rooted in Middle Eastern interventions, financial speculation, and corporate capture—have created a feedback loop of dependence and volatility.
Electoral politics in the US weaponises this volatility, framing it as an external threat (Iran) to avoid accountability for domestic failures like the lack of strategic petroleum reserves or the dismantling of public transit. Meanwhile, marginalised communities and Global South nations bear the brunt of this system, their knowledge of sustainable alternatives (from Indigenous biofuels to African solar grids) ignored in favour of market-based 'solutions.' The path forward requires disrupting the oil-finance nexus through speculative regulation, accelerating electrification with equity at its core, and reimagining energy as a public good—not a geopolitical tool. This is not just an economic transition but a civilizational one, where the trickster’s inversion (e.g., Hermes as both thief and liberator) exposes the absurdity of a system that profits from scarcity while claiming to serve the public.