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Comment to the reader.
This entry interrupts the chronological arc of the project, sitting between the close of the How We Came About science series at EL #0011 and the opening of the next chronological arc at EL #0013, in order to record an unfolding crisis at the moment of writing. It is the second Earth Log of its kind. The first, EL #0002, was inscribed in March 2026, in the second week of a war between Iran, Israel, and the United States that had begun on the 28th of February. Two months later, that war is still ongoing, with a layered set of ceasefires, blockades, and announced and cancelled negotiations between the parties. The energy and food consequences of the first months of the war are now reaching the rest of the world. This entry records what is observable from the moment of writing, the choices that the parties to the conflict appear to face, and the dilemmas now confronting the rest of the planet.
The views in this entry are my own. They are informed by long engagement with many sources of analysis, including some whose framings I find more persuasive than others. Where named analysts have most shaped my understanding of this moment — Jeffrey Sachs on the historical and economic context, Brian Berletic on the wider geopolitical strategy, Ben Norton on the energy and food consequences, Mohammad Marandi on the Iranian perspective — I cite their work in the references section so a reader can engage with the underlying argument directly. None of them is a neutral authority. Nor am I. I have chosen the sources whose analyses I find most convincing, and that choice is itself a bias.
Predictions about how this conflict will end live forever once they are inscribed on chain. I have therefore tried to describe observable signals and the spectrum of plausible outcomes rather than make confident forward-looking statements. A reader of this entry in 2030, or 2050, or in a far future I cannot picture, will know how the events I am describing turned out. I do not.
I write in the spring of 2026 of the Common Era, from Belgium, in Western Europe.
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It has been almost two months since the United States and Israel launched the war against Iran I described in EL #0002. The active phase of the fighting paused at the end of its first weeks and resumed and paused and resumed again, in a cycle that one analyst has aptly called "a Schrödinger's ceasefire" — a ceasefire that is simultaneously holding and not holding, depending on which day's news the observer happens to be reading.
What has not changed in those two months is the shape of the choice that the parties face. They can take what is being called the off-ramp — a halt to the bombing, an opening of the maritime traffic that has been disrupted, a return to the kind of diplomatic process that produced the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the major world powers. Or they can let the situation continue to slide, with the risk that the slide passes some threshold and what has been a regional war becomes a wider one — possibly drawing in other major nations, possibly approaching the kind of war the twentieth century twice had and the twenty-first has so far avoided.
In the language of Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist whose readings of this region I have followed for years, the world is at a fork in the road. One path is the off-ramp. The other path is uncontrolled escalation. There may not be a third path that is stable for very long.
This entry is being written from Western Europe in the eighth week of the conflict. The visible signals are not encouraging.
In response to the bombing of its territory, Iran in early March took a step it had not previously taken in any of its long disputes with the United States: it closed the Strait of Hormuz to most maritime traffic. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel of water, about thirty-three kilometres across at its narrowest, between the southern coast of Iran and the northern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It opens from the Persian Gulf — the inland sea bordered by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman — into the Arabian Sea and then to the wider Indian Ocean. Through that narrow channel, in normal times, passes roughly twenty per cent of all the oil consumed on the planet on any given day, together with a significant fraction of the world's natural gas, the petrochemicals (industrial compounds derived from oil and gas) produced from it, and — through the same shipping lanes — much of the world's supply of urea and other nitrogen compounds that are the raw material for agricultural fertilizer.
The closure was not absolute. Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and a handful of other ships from countries Iran considers friendly were allowed through. According to reporting that has emerged across the past two months, Iran also began requiring that any oil moving through the strait under its arrangement be priced and paid for in the Chinese national currency, the renminbi, rather than in United States dollars. That is a significant departure from the half-century-old practice that has anchored most of the world's oil trade in the dollar — the petrodollar system, under which Persian Gulf oil exporters priced their oil in dollars and recycled the proceeds into United States financial markets, giving the dollar a role in the world economy that no other currency has shared. But the larger flow of vessels — tankers from the Gulf monarchies who had supported the United States and Israel in the war, and a great deal of the daily traffic that supplies the rest of the world — has been reduced to a small fraction of its normal volume. Where on a typical day before the war some fifty large tankers passed through the strait, the number for several weeks of March and April could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The United States response was to announce a counter-blockade — an attempt by the U.S. Navy to prevent Iran from controlling the strait, which has had the practical effect, alongside the partial closure, of further reducing the flow. The International Energy Agency, the inter-governmental body that tracks the global energy market, described the resulting disruption in a March 2026 report as the largest in the history of the global oil market. That description is not casual. Larger, by the agency's measure, than the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Larger than the 1979 disruption that followed the Iranian Revolution. Both of those earlier shocks shaped the world economies of their decades. The present one is already exceeding them on the supply side and may exceed them again on the consequences.
The countries most directly affected by the closure of the strait are not in the West. Of the oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz in normal times, on the standard pre-war estimates, roughly thirty-eight per cent goes to China, fifteen per cent to India, and twelve per cent to South Korea. About four per cent goes to Europe, and only about two and a half per cent to the United States itself. East and South-East Asia, in other words, is where the supply shock falls hardest in the first instance.
The shock has already produced visible effects. The Philippines, an island nation in South-East Asia that imports nearly all of its oil from the Persian Gulf, has declared a state of national emergency over its energy supply, reducing its work week to four days, shortening its school days, and rationing public transport. Other nations of the region are taking similar measures. Japan, which depends almost entirely on imported oil and which sources around ninety-five per cent of its imports from the Persian Gulf in normal times, is drawing down its national reserves. South Korea, which depends on the strait for the majority of its oil, has begun discussions of rationing.
In Europe, where I am writing this, the direct dependence on Persian Gulf oil is smaller, but the indirect effect is real. The price of oil is set in a single global market, and a shock anywhere in that market is a shock everywhere. Fuel prices at European service stations have risen substantially since February. The European Union has begun discussing demand-management measures of a kind not seen for decades. The bond markets have moved in ways that suggest investors are positioning for an extended period of higher costs and lower growth.
But the most consequential effect of the disruption may not be the energy bill at all. The Persian Gulf region is also one of the world's major sources of nitrogen fertilizer, much of which is produced from the natural gas that comes from the same fields and is shipped through the same straits. Urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer on Earth, has become substantially harder to obtain on the world market over the past two months. The current planting season in much of the Northern Hemisphere is taking place under a fertilizer shortage. The harvests that follow that planting would, on the standard relationship between fertilizer input and grain yield, be smaller than they would otherwise have been. The grain prices that follow those harvests would, on the same logic, be higher. The countries that already had difficulty paying for food imports before this began will have more difficulty doing so when prices rise. Whether this translates into hunger in the global South or into political instability in the countries that experience the food-price rises depends on how long the disruption lasts and how successfully alternative fertilizer supplies can be brought online. Some United Nations agencies have already warned of a possible global food crisis in the second half of 2026. The warning is not a certainty. It is plausible enough that it should be on every reader's list of things to watch.
The combination of higher energy prices, higher food prices, and slowing economic growth is what economists of the 1970s called stagflation — the simultaneous occurrence of stagnation and inflation, two macro-economic conditions which, in textbook accounts, are not supposed to coexist. The shocks of 1973 and 1979 produced stagflation in much of the developed world. Forecasters who study these things, including those at Oxford Economics, have begun to publish analyses suggesting that the present shock could produce stagflation again, and possibly a global recession. Whether that happens depends on whether the disruption resolves quickly, and on whether the underlying conflict resolves at all.
It is worth spending a moment on why the path off this fork is harder, for the leaders involved, than the path along it.