Global oil markets face prolonged volatility as US-Iran deal exposes systemic energy infrastructure fragility and geopolitical trade-offs
Original framing: “US fuel prices to take ‘months’ to normalise after US-Iran deal to end war” — Al Jazeera
The current volatility is the latest iteration of a 70-year pattern where oil has been a tool of geopolitical control, from the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran to the 1973 oil embargo and the 2003 Iraq War. Each crisis has reinforced the dominance of petrostates and Western energy firms, while deepening dependency on fossil fuels. The US-Iran deal, like past agreements, is likely to be fragile, as it fails to address the underlying structural imbalances in global energy governance created by colonial-era resource extraction and Cold War interventions.
The US-Iran deal’s aftermath reveals a global energy system trapped in a cycle of geopolitical brinkmanship and structural fragility, where oil’s volatility is not an accident but a feature of a system designed to centralize power in petrostates and Western energy firms.
Indigenous resistance movements, from the Amazon to the Niger Delta, have long exposed this extractivist logic, framing energy as a relational good rather than a commodity, while scientific evidence shows that renewable energy is now cheaper and more resilient than fossil fuels. Yet mainstream narratives obscure these alternatives by framing volatility as a temporary supply shock, ignoring how speculative finance, sanctions regimes, and colonial-era resource extraction have shaped today’s markets. The solution lies in dismantling the political economy of petro-militarism through decentralized cooperatives, multilateral price stabilization, and sanctions reform that centers marginalized voices—transforming energy from a tool of domination into a foundation for ecological and social justice. The trickster’s laughter, in Hermes’ guise, reminds us that the absurdity of this system is not in its complexity but in its refusal to acknowledge simpler, more equitable paths forward.