global geopolitics

Why the fight over oil is really a fight over China, and why the Middle East has to be broken first.

The 2025 National Security Strategy, the national energy emergency and the RAND and Brookings planning documents together reveal a coherent strategy of energy dominance directed against China and the multipolar order, and the scapegoating of Israel and Trump is the mechanism through which that strategy is protected from public scrutiny.

Editorial Analysis | November 2026

The destruction of the Middle East is being prosecuted as a deliberate strategy rather than suffered as an accident, and the strategy is documented in the policy papers that the American state and its associated think tanks have published for public consumption. The 2025 National Security Strategy declares that restoring American energy dominance in oil, gas, coal and nuclear, and reshoring the key energy components that underpin that dominance, is a top strategic priority for the United States. The strategy rejects the climate change and net zero ideologies that it says have harmed Europe and subsidised adversaries, and it explicitly frames abundant and affordable energy as the foundation of good jobs, lower costs, industrial revival and the technological edge required for artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. The national energy emergency declared on 20 January 2025 provides the legal instrument through which that priority is executed, and its text describes energy security as an increasingly crucial theatre of global competition in which hostile foreign actors have weaponised American reliance on foreign energy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated at the G20 ministerial meetings in October 2026 that it is in the economic and national security interest of the United States to be a leader in energy, to maintain solid supply chains, to remove regulatory obstacles to growth and to lead the development of artificial intelligence. These are not the utterances of a state that has been captured by a foreign power or confused by a personality; they are the coherent statements of a state pursuing a strategy that its own documents describe in explicit terms.

The think-tank literature that supplies the intellectual architecture for this strategy is equally explicit, and it predates the current administration by more than a decade. The RAND Corporation’s 2019 report Extending Russia concludes that the most attractive American policy options for competing with Russia, with the greatest benefits and the highest likelihood of success and the least risk, lie in the economic domain, featuring a combination of boosting United States energy production and multilateral sanctions. The report identifies hindering petroleum exports, reducing natural gas exports and hindering pipeline expansions as economic measures, and it acknowledges that diversifying Europe away from Russian gas carries a medium to low likelihood of success because the projects are expensive and difficult to accomplish. The report also recommends providing lethal aid to Ukraine on the calculation that it would increase the costs to Russia in blood and treasure of holding the Donbas region, which is a strategy for transforming a peacetime obstacle to energy market share into a wartime necessity for American supply. The Brookings Institution’s 2009 study Which Path to Persia lays out the options for American strategy toward Iran across diplomacy, military action, regime change and containment, and it notes that all options carry high risks and potential costs. The convergence of these documents is not a coincidence of authorship but a continuity of strategic purpose, and the fact that the same recommendations appear across institutions with different funding sources and different partisan alignments is evidence that the strategy is class-directed rather than party-directed.

The material logic of the strategy is visible in the economics of American energy production, because the expansion of domestic capacity was undertaken when it made no commercial sense to do so. The United States invested in liquefied natural gas export terminals and in shale production at a time when American energy was substantially more expensive than Middle Eastern and Russian energy, and the RAND report itself admitted that diversifying Europe away from Russian gas was expensive and unlikely to succeed on market grounds. The investment was nevertheless made, and the war in Ukraine subsequently destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines and produced the sanctions regime that made otherwise irrational American liquefied natural gas imports to Europe essential. The pattern is one in which strategic objectives are pursued through the deliberate construction of market conditions rather than through the ordinary operation of comparative advantage, and the destruction of a competitor’s infrastructure is the mechanism through which the constructed market is made to appear natural. The same pattern is now being applied to the Middle East, where the disruption of energy exports to Asia is intended to decouple the continent from cheap and reliable supply and to place it under American energy dependence, thereby providing Washington with strategic leverage over Asia to create a united front against China.

The energy dimension of the China containment strategy is not a secondary consideration but the central mechanism through which containment is to be achieved. China is the world’s largest crude oil importer, purchasing roughly eleven point six million barrels per day in 2025, and about two point six million barrels of those imports consist of discounted or sanctioned crude including one point three eight million barrels per day from Iran, which equates to about thirteen per cent of Chinese oil imports. Prior to the conflict, China had been buying roughly ninety per cent of Iranian oil exports, and it had been the largest buyer of Venezuelan oil, taking about eighty per cent of that country’s crude exports. The pattern of American military action against Venezuela and Iran, combined with direct sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies including Rosneft, which is the single biggest corporate supplier of oil to Beijing, is a systematic attempt to shut off China’s oil taps one by one. The strategy is coherent because it attacks the material foundation of Chinese industrial capacity rather than the political superstructure, and it is rational because it imposes costs on a rival without requiring a direct military confrontation that would carry unacceptable escalation risks. The proxy war and the trade embargo that the strategy anticipates are the logical extensions of the energy squeeze, because a rival that cannot fuel its industry cannot sustain its manufacturing base, and a rival that cannot export its goods cannot finance its military modernisation.

The class analysis that the strategy requires admits of two readings that the available evidence supports unevenly, and the difference between them is analytical rather than merely rhetorical. The first reading, which is the orthodox Leninist position, treats the strategy as the deliberate and coherent expression of a unified transnational capitalist class that owns the institutions of power and exercises a dictatorship over the state. On this reading the policy documents are the minutes of a class that has decided what it intends to do, the expansion of uneconomic energy capacity is the class investing its own resources in its own strategic project, and the scapegoating of Israel and Trump is a propaganda device deployed by an agent that knows exactly what it is doing. The strength of this reading is that it explains the coherence of the strategy across institutions and administrations, and it explains why the same recommendations appear in RAND, Brookings and the National Security Strategy without any coordinating author. The second reading, which is a structural Marxist position rather than an instrumentalist one, treats the strategy as the contested outcome of bargaining among capitalist fractions whose interests overlap but do not coincide. On this reading energy capital, financial capital and military capital each pursue their own accumulation strategies, the state is a condensation of the balance of forces among them rather than a simple transmission belt, and the strategy that emerges is a compromise that bears the marks of the compromises that produced it. The strength of this reading is that it explains the strategy’s failures and contradictions, including the fact that the Iran war has damaged American interests in some respects, that the administration is divided against itself, and that the policy has produced a stuck president whom the class cannot easily discard.

The evidence does not decisively favour either reading, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the instrumentalist and structural accounts are competing explanations rather than one settled truth and one error. The instrumentalist reading is supported by the coherence of the published strategy, by the convergence of think-tank recommendations across institutions and decades, and by the absence of any significant dissent from the strategy within the institutions that matter. The structural reading is supported by the visible fractures within the ruling bloc, by the acknowledged failure of the Iran campaign to achieve its objectives, by the fact that the war has strategically benefited China in the assessment of Brookings analysts, and by the historical record of capitalist states pursuing strategies that damage their own long-term interests because no fraction was powerful enough to impose coherence. A Leninist would answer that the fractures are tactical and that the class closes ranks when its fundamental interests are threatened, and that argument has force. A structural Marxist would answer that the Leninist model cannot explain why a class with such complete control keeps producing outcomes it did not intend, and that argument has force as well. The analytical conclusion that survives both readings is that the strategy is real, that it is class-directed, and that the class which directs it is neither omnipotent nor unified, whatever the precise balance between coherence and contestation may be.

A realist analysis must acknowledge the strength of the strategy’s coherence while questioning its capacity to succeed, because the pursuit of energy dominance is a bid for structural power that the other major powers have every incentive to resist. The destruction of the Middle East as an energy competitor raises the cost of energy for China and the multipolar world while lowering the relative cost for the United States and its allies, and the disciplinary effect on allies is a secondary benefit because dependent allies have fewer options for independent action. The strategy nevertheless confronts a coordination problem, because the states that are asked to accept American energy dominance have strategies of their own, and the Brookings Institution’s own analysis concludes that the war between the United States, Israel and Iran has strategically benefited China by exposing the limits of American power and deepening divisions between Washington and its allies. The Brookings analysis argues that the conflict confirmed Beijing’s assessment that it does not need to confront Washington directly to elevate its position in the international order, and that the United States and Israel fought Iran while China won. The realist conclusion is that a strategy of energy dominance can impose substantial costs on rivals without producing the decisive victory that its architects intend, because the international system is not a single-move game and the other players have strategies of their own.

Game theory illuminates the incentive structure through which the strategy is pursued and contested, because the pursuit of energy dominance is a strategy for changing the payoff matrix of the international economy rather than for winning a single confrontation. A state that controls the supply of a critical input can impose costs on rivals without resorting to military force, and the destruction of a competitor’s export infrastructure is a move that raises the cost of energy for the rival while creating demand for the dominant state’s own exports. The strategy is rational from the perspective of a player seeking to preserve a dominant position, and the scapegoating of Israel and Trump is rational from the perspective of a class seeking to protect the strategy from democratic accountability. The other players in the game have countervailing strategies, and the Brookings analysis suggests that China’s strategy is to avoid direct confrontation while allowing the United States to exhaust itself on multiple fronts, which is a strategy of patience rather than passivity. The equilibrium that emerges from these strategies is not the unipolar dominance that the strategy’s architects intend but a prolonged contest in which all parties bear costs and none achieves decisive advantage, and the populations that bear those costs are the working classes of every nation involved.

A materialist analysis must take seriously the claim that the strategy is documented in policy papers and that the economic expenditures are consistent with strategic objectives rather than with market logic. The expansion of American energy production capacity was uneconomic by market criteria, and that is precisely what reveals the strategic criteria that were actually operative, because a state that invests in loss-making capacity is a state that is pursuing objectives other than profit. The materialist analysis must also note that the class that benefits from this strategy is not a disembodied transnational abstraction but a concrete set of owners and managers of energy infrastructure, financial institutions and military-industrial firms, and that the strategy is material in the most literal sense because it involves the extraction, transport and sale of physical commodities. The materialist conclusion is that the relevant question is not who is personally wicked but who controls the infrastructure through which value must pass, because that control determines the terms on which every other actor, including the state, must operate.

The Marxist-socialist class analysis that the strategy requires must weigh the instrumentalist and structural readings against the evidence and state plainly where the evidence is insufficient to adjudicate between them. The strategy is real and class-directed, and the policy documents are the evidence that makes it real, while the degree to which it expresses a unified will rather than a negotiated compromise among capitalist fractions remains genuinely contested. The orthodox Leninist reading has the advantage of parsimony and the disadvantage of difficulty in explaining strategic failure and intra-governmental division. The structural reading has the advantage of explanatory power for the strategy’s contradictions and the disadvantage of appearing to soften the critique of class power at precisely the moment when that critique needs to be sharp. Both readings converge on the conclusion that the problem is the capitalist system and the class that owns it, and they diverge on the question of whether that class is a single intelligence or a set of competing interests whose competition nonetheless produces a coherent direction. The socialist response is not to abandon the critique of class power but to ground it in a material analysis that can account for both the coherence of the strategy and the fractures within the class that pursues it, because a politics that misjudges the ruling class will misjudge the opportunities for challenging it.

The multipolar question admits of a similar division of interpretation that ought to be stated rather than assumed. The Leninist view, which the analysis of energy dominance naturally invites, is that multipolarism weakens Western unipolar hegemony and thereby creates conditions more favourable to socialism, because the end of a single dominant centre of capital opens space for alternative development paths and for working-class movements that are not constrained by a single imperial discipline. The historical counter-argument is that multipolar systems have not historically been favourable to socialism but have instead produced intensified inter-imperial rivalry in which the working classes of all nations bear the costs of competition among their ruling classes. The First World War was a multipolar war, the interwar period was a multipolar period that produced fascism, and the Cold War was a bipolar contest in which both superpowers disciplined their own populations in the name of the struggle. The evidence on this question is genuinely mixed, and the honest conclusion is that multipolarism creates openings rather than guarantees, and that whether those openings are used depends on the political capacity of the working class rather than on the structure of the international system alone.

The deadly combination of liberalism and neoliberalism that the strategy expresses is the ideological form through which class power is legitimated, and the liberal scapegoating of Israel and Trump is the mechanism through which the class that benefits from the strategy avoids accountability for its consequences. Liberalism supplies the moral vocabulary of human rights, democracy and the rule of law, while neoliberalism supplies the economic vocabulary of market efficiency, comparative advantage and free trade, and together they produce a system in which the pursuit of class power is presented as the pursuit of universal values. The scapegoating mechanism works because it attributes the strategy to actors whose removal would not change it, and because it offers a moral satisfaction that costs nothing to the class that benefits from the strategy. The analytical task is to name the class without overestimating its unity, and to name the strategy without underestimating its coherence, because the truth is likely to be found in the tension between those two propositions rather than in either extreme.

The trajectory that follows from this analysis is one of increasing divergence between the formal authority of states and the effective power of the class that controls energy, finance and military infrastructure. The strategy of energy dominance will continue to impose costs on China and the multipolar world, but it will also impose costs on the American and European working classes through higher energy prices, fiscal strain and the erosion of industrial capacity. The scapegoating of Israel and Trump will continue to function as the mechanism through which the strategy is protected from democratic accountability, because it attributes the strategy to actors whose removal would not change it. The multipolar order that the strategy seeks to prevent is nevertheless emerging, and the end of Western unipolar hegemony may create conditions that are more favourable to socialism than the present configuration, though it may also create conditions of great-power rivalry in which the working classes of all nations are at risk. The analytical task that remains is to hold all of these propositions together without collapsing them into a single narrative, and the politics that follows from that analysis must be attentive to both the structural power of capital and the fractures within it.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

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