Trump Freezes Iran Power-Plant Strikes for Five-Day Negotiating Window

Great-power brinkmanship over Gulf oil lanes has echoes of the 1956 Suez Crisis—when Britain and France tried to seize a canal and instead accelerated their post-imperial decline—and of the 1973 Arab oil embargo that quadrupled prices and rewired global monetary policy. Today’s pause underscores a century-long pattern: energy chokepoints invite military compellence, but economic feedback loops quickly constrain it. The shale era had lulled Washington into believing it was shielded; the price spike and the need for the biggest reserve draw in IEA history expose that fallacy. Whether this five-day lull leads to diplomacy or merely resets the fuse, it will shape long-wave trends—energy security calculus, the dollar’s petropower, and the strategic relevance of Hormuz—for decades to come, much as the 1970s crises still frame policy half a century later.