Five EU Finance Chiefs Urge New Windfall Tax After Hormuz Oil Shock

European politicians reaching for extraordinary profit taxes in wartime recalls Britain’s 1915 ‘Munitions of War Act’ capping armament profits and the U.S. excess-profits tax of 1917; both were born of social pressure when external shocks inflated corporate margins. The current call fits a two-decade trend of the EU drifting from liberalized energy markets toward crisis-era intervention—first after the 2008 crash, then Russia’s 2022 invasion, now Iran’s 2026 blockade—each time normalizing a bigger state role. If adopted, it would entrench a precedent that war-induced resource windfalls are temporary common goods, potentially shaping corporate investment calculations and Europe’s strategic autonomy for decades. On a 100-year arc, the measure itself may be minor, but the pattern—recurrent militarized supply shocks cascading into industrial policy—signals a global energy order inching back toward the managed markets of the 1970s, with private profit increasingly subordinated to security politics.