Trump Threatens Seizure of Iran’s Kharg Island Oil Terminal

Great-power grabs for strategic infrastructure echo Britain’s 1951–53 confrontation with Iran over Abadan— and the 1956 Anglo-French attempt to seize the Suez Canal—both efforts that back-fired and accelerated de-colonisation. Trump’s threat fits a century-long pattern of military force marshalled to secure oil chokepoints from Mesopotamia in 1918 to Iraq’s Rumaila fields in 2003, but doing so today collides with precision missiles, drone swarms and a market wired for instant price shock. If the U.S. actually occupies Kharg, it would mark the first live capture of a G-20 nation’s main export asset since World War II, potentially normalising resource expropriation and pushing non-Western states to diversify away from dollar-denominated energy trade— a structural shift that could reverberate longer than the war itself. Conversely, should the idea fizzle, it may join Suez and Abadan in the catalogue of overreaches that hastened imperial decline.