Brent Crude Tops $125 as Trump Weighs Fresh Iran Strikes, Deepening Hormuz Blockade

Great-power politics once again weaponises an energy chokepoint. The Strait of Hormuz handled roughly a fifth of global oil in 2018; its closure now echoes the 1956 Suez Crisis, when a blocked canal briefly removed ~10 % of world supply, and the 1973 Arab oil embargo that sent prices quadrupling. Recurrent Gulf disruptions (the 1984-88 “Tanker War,” the 2019 drone attacks, now 2026) reveal a long-running structural vulnerability: a fossil-fuel system concentrated in a narrow maritime corridor. Simultaneously, OPEC cohesion frays—mirroring Indonesia’s 2008 withdrawal and Qatar’s 2019 exit—as producers pursue national agendas. Whether this price shock accelerates demand destruction and investment in non-oil energy, as 1979-1983 did, or entrenches a new normal of militarised supply management, will shape energy geopolitics for decades. On a century scale, today’s spike may be remembered less for the dollar figure than for underscoring how 20th-century energy infrastructure remains hostage to 19th-century-style gunboat diplomacy in a world trying to decarbonise.