The Board Is Set

I’m writing this from a room in Leipzig that should be in Dubai. It isn’t. Because a week ago, Iranian missiles started to hit Jebel Ali port, the five-star belt along the coast, Abu Dhabi’s port infrastructure, making it a weird time to go back to say the least. The city I’ve spent years watching build itself into the world’s most convincing economic diversification story just became a target in someone else’s war. Brent crude opened at seventy-three dollars on a Friday. By Monday it was pushing ninety. By Sunday it cracked a hundred. If you run a business through the Gulf, you felt that in your chest before you saw it on a screen.

My business partners are actively opening new connections to Venezuelan oil, to help supply struggling economies. A sentence I didn’t think I would be able to write a couple of years ago. Heck, not even months.

What I want to do here is something I haven’t seen anyone else attempt. Not because the information isn’t available. It is. But because I feel the framing isn’t enough everywhere I look. The Iran war, the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict, the Russia-Ukraine grind, the US-China rivalry. Four crises. Covered as four stories.

They are one story!

And the thread that connects them is not ideology, not democracy, not religion. It is energy. Specifically: who controls the chokepoints through which energy moves, who depends on those flows, and what happens when the people who draw lines on maps run into the people who actually live inside those lines.

A friend said back in January “Can’t you see? We’re already in World War Three”, and when seeing how there’s only the Caucasus corridor left for direct flight routes between East and West, I tend to agree. I still have a manuscript on my computer for my geopolitical outlook for 2026…might need a full edit or rewrite now. By the time I’m finished, we might see a China-Taiwan, Thailand-Cambodia, or North Korea-South Korea conflict erupt, or Russia going deeper into the Caucasus.

I wrote about Empire 4.0 a few weeks ago, which still fits the story. Overall, this might even be the last time we fight about energy. Water might be next. But let’s focus on this story first.

The Chokepoint That Runs the World

The Strait of Hormuz is roughly twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest. Through that gap passes roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption and about the same share of liquefied natural gas. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar all route the bulk of their exports through it. Three-quarters of those barrels end up in Asia. China alone receives about half of its seaborne crude through the Strait. India, Japan, and South Korea take most of the rest.

I’ve flown over the Strait dozens of times. From thirty thousand feet it looks like nothing. A sliver of water between Arabia and Iran. The Arabic and the Persian world/s. Sunni and Shia Islam. You wouldn’t think twice about it unless someone told you that the entire global economy pivots on whether ships can pass through that sliver without being hit by a mine, a missile, or an insurance premium that makes the transit commercially unviable.

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. Coordinated airstrikes on Iranian military facilities, nuclear sites, and leadership targets. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, was killed. This was not a symbolic strike or the carefully managed exchange of June 2025, when both sides fired enough to save face and not enough to break anything irreplaceable. Israel and its partner, the US, attempted to end a regime. Like they’ve tried multiple times throughout the last century, especially in the MENA region.

Iran’s response was immediate and unconstrained. Missile and drone strikes hit US bases in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain. Qatari gas facilities were attacked by Iranian drones. Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery was targeted. A tanker anchored near a Kuwaiti port was struck by a large explosion, causing an oil spill. Tankers in the Strait itself were hit by projectiles and drone boats. Two Indian crew members were killed on one vessel. Another Indian sailor killed on another. By 2 March, an IRGC commander officially confirmed the Strait was closed and threatened to set ablaze any vessel that attempted passage.

Within seventy-two hours, tanker traffic dropped to near zero. Over a hundred and fifty ships sat anchored outside the Strait, their crews waiting for someone to tell them it was safe. Nobody could. A tugboat dispatched to help a damaged vessel was struck by two missiles and sank.

The insurance market, which is where the real decisions about maritime transit get made, responded before the missiles landed. War-risk premiums had already tripled in the days before the strikes, climbing from 0.125 percent to between 0.2 and 0.4 percent of vessel value per transit. For a very large crude carrier, that translates to a quarter of a million dollars, on top of standard premiums. When the first tankers were actually hit, most underwriters simply stopped writing coverage for Hormuz transits altogether. No insurance means no shipping. No shipping means the oil doesn’t move. The chokepoint doesn’t need to be physically blocked. It just needs to be commercially uninsurable.

Even Iran understood this in the days before the strikes. In the two weeks preceding the attack, Iran tripled its oil export rate, frantically moving crude into floating storage and onto ships headed for China before the inevitable disruption. Saudi Arabia did the same. Both sides were front-loading exports, trying to get barrels through the gap before the gap closed. That preemptive behavior tells you that everyone involved knew what was coming. The question was never whether the Strait would be disrupted. It was how long the disruption would last.

There is a detail that tells you everything about where power actually lies in this crisis. On 4 March, Iran announced that it would allow Chinese-flagged vessels to transit the Strait. The next day, a bulk carrier operated by Cetus Maritime Shanghai sailed through while broadcasting “CHINA OWNER” on its identification system. A Turkish-operated LPG tanker got through by broadcasting that it was Muslim-owned. By 5 March, the IRGC clarified: the Strait was closed only to ships from the US, Israel, and their Western allies.

One might call this a selective tariff enforced by missiles. And it tells you that Iran, even in what should be its most desperate hour, understands that its leverage over global energy flows is the only card it has left. Closing Hormuz completely would strangle Iran’s own economy. Closing it selectively, to everyone except your most important customer, turns a military crisis into a commercial restructuring of global energy trade. China gets preferential access. Everyone else pays the premium. Or finds another route. Or does without.

The bypass options are limited and everyone who covers energy knows this. Saudi Arabia has a pipeline spanning the country from its eastern oil fields to the Red Sea coast. The UAE has a pipeline that terminates at the Gulf of Oman, skirting the Strait. Together, those pipelines can redirect roughly four million barrels per day. That sounds significant until you remember that sixteen million barrels per day of oil flows remain at risk from a full closure.

The arithmetic is brutal. Even if every pipeline runs at capacity, even if strategic petroleum reserves are tapped globally, even if the rest of OPEC pushes production to its theoretical maximum, a sustained Hormuz closure leaves a gap that no combination of alternatives can fill. A Dallas Fed scenario model found that WTI at a hundred dollars per barrel would push annualized US headline inflation 1.3 percentage points above baseline.

And then there’s the LNG dimension. Eighty million tons per year of liquefied natural gas transit the Strait. That’s nineteen percent of global LNG supply. Thirty percent of Europe’s jet fuel originates from or transits through the Strait. European natural gas prices nearly doubled when Qatari facilities were hit. Kuwait, a central hub for jet fuel supply to European airlines, is directly in the conflict zone. The energy disruption is not limited to crude oil. It cascades through jet fuel, LNG, petrochemicals, fertilizers, and from there into food prices, airline economics, and industrial production costs.

Goldman Sachs estimated that traders were demanding about fourteen dollars more per barrel to compensate for the increased risk, even before the worst of the disruptions materialized. Their model suggested European natural gas prices could hit seventy-four euros per megawatt-hour if LNG flows were halted for one month, and exceed a hundred euros if the disruption lasted longer than two months. For context, gas was trading at about thirty-two euros before the strikes.

The Preparation That Many Didn’t Notice

I’ve spent the past two years watching China’s energy strategy, partly because some of my friends and clients are advising companies on where to position capital, and partly because the patterns were so clear that ignoring them felt irresponsible.

Throughout 2025, China imported record volumes of crude. Roughly 11.5 million barrels per day. A significant portion of those barrels didn’t go into refineries. They went into storage. Government strategic reserves. Commercial inventories. Underground caverns. Floating storage at sea. By January 2026, China held an estimated 1.2 billion barrels of onshore crude stockpiles. That’s three to four months of import cover. The US Energy Information Administration expected China to expand those stockpiles by a further million barrels a day through 2026.

The buying strategy was specific. Beijing focused on sanctions-discounted crude. Russian oil, sold cheap because of Western sanctions. Iranian oil, sold cheap because of US sanctions. Venezuelan oil, sold cheap because of decades of sanctions. The pattern was consistent: buy from the countries the West has isolated, buy at a discount, and store it. When analysts in Washington looked at this behavior, most interpreted it as Beijing being an opportunistic buyer. What it actually was, and what the current crisis reveals, is a national security operation disguised as bargain shopping.

When Venezuelan exports collapsed after the US captured Maduro in January 2026, Chinese refiners didn’t panic. They switched to Iranian crude and tapped stored reserves. When the Iran strikes came two months later, China had already diversified further. Canadian crude through the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, averaging roughly 200,000 barrels per day and climbing. Russian oil through overland pipelines that bypass every maritime chokepoint. By 2030, China aims to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to twenty-five percent, up from just under twenty-two percent in 2025.

The renewables buildout that most Western analysts still categorize as “climate policy” is equally a national security strategy. Each incremental expansion of renewable capacity lowers China’s dependence on precisely the geopolitical conditions now driving market anxiety. Every solar panel installed is a barrel of imported oil that doesn’t need to transit the Strait.

This is what fifteen years of strategic planning looks like when it meets the crisis it was designed for. Chinese policymakers assumed the international system would become more volatile and less predictable. They built accordingly. Events in Iran validate that worldview. Short-term disruption reinforces long-term resilience while positioning China for expanded economic opportunity in the future.

Rush Doshi, who directs the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it clearly: China has spent twenty years reducing its dependence on maritime oil flows. New overland pipelines, renewable diversification, and accumulated reserves mean the country now relies on the Strait of Hormuz for only about forty to fifty percent of its seaborne oil imports. Down from a far higher share a decade ago. OCBC analysts concluded that China may be “less sensitive to a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz than many of its Asian peers.” That sentence contains more strategic reality than most of the military analysis I’ve read.

And here’s what makes me think about this differently from most analysts. I operate between Dubai, Singapore, and Europe. I’ve built companies across all three environments. What I’ve learned is that operators self-select based on whether systems optimize for speed or certainty. Dubai optimizes for speed. Low friction, fast decisions, light regulation. Singapore optimizes for certainty. Heavy infrastructure, deep institutions, rigorous process. Europe, depending on where you are, offers some combination of both, but usually heavily regulated.

This crisis is impacting the speed environments. Dubai, the Gulf generally. These are the places that attracted capital precisely because they moved fast. Now they’re absorbing missile strikes. The certainty environments, Singapore and parts of Europe, are absorbing capital flows. Money doesn’t care about ideology. Money cares about whether the building it’s sitting in is going to be hit by a drone. I’ve already seen the early indicators. Real estate inquiries in Singapore from Gulf-based operators. European fund structures being activated that had been dormant for years. Capital repositioning at a speed that tells me the big players made their decisions before the public did.

I do believe that Dubai is built to recover and that most of the above mentioned behavior comes down to either how scared you are when looking at the world and deployed capital, and how well you can plan for uncertainties. Might be the topic of my next essay.

Plus, Singapore with the Strait of Malacca is another choke point that’s close to geopolitical tension.

Risk and Go

There’s a framing I keep returning to when I try to make sense of how the US and China behave in crises like this. The US plays Risk. China plays Go.

In Risk, you win by removing pieces from the board. You attack, you conquer territory, you project force. The objective is elimination. Every engagement is about whether you can take the other player’s position. It’s dramatic, visible, and it produces clear winners and losers in the short term.

In Go, you win by building position. You place stones patiently. You accept losses in some areas to gain advantage in others. The objective isn’t to destroy your opponent’s pieces. It’s to surround territory so completely that resistance becomes futile (just adding a little Star Trek reference…). It’s quiet, incremental, and it produces outcomes that only become visible when it’s too late to reverse them.

Watch what the US did in a single quarter. In January, special forces captured Maduro in Venezuela. No matter how you see it from other standpoints, the operation itself was militarily stunning. US aircraft controlled the skies, Venezuelan radar and electrical systems were jammed, air defenses destroyed. Maduro was on the USS Iwo Jima within hours, en route to face federal drug trafficking charges in New York. Trump announced the US would “run the country” until a transition could occur. He also expressed interest in controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves. Tar-like goo that could hardly be considered oil anymore compared to the juice-like premium flowing out of Iran, but still the world’s largest proven reserves.

In February, airstrikes killed Khamenei in Iran. Two of China’s major oil suppliers, eliminated or destabilized within sixty days. Venezuela had been supplying China with discounted crude. Iran was providing roughly 1.5 million barrels per day. Both gone or severely disrupted, back to back.

In Risk terms, that’s brilliant. Two pieces removed. Two opposing positions neutralized. The board looks dramatically different.

Now watch what China did in response. Beijing condemned the attacks. Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the killing of a sovereign leader “unacceptable” and urged an immediate ceasefire. China barred the export of rare earth elements for military use. These elements are essential for missiles, fighter jets, and the full spectrum of advanced weapons systems. The restriction doesn’t affect today’s military operations. It affects tomorrow’s weapons production. It’s a move that only makes sense if you’re thinking in years, not weeks.

China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system, which it quietly provided to Iran after GPS jamming crippled Iranian military operations during the June 2025 war, is now the primary positioning system for what remains of Iran’s defense capability. The story behind this is telling. During the twelve-day war in June 2025, widespread GPS jamming by the US and Israel paralyzed nearly a thousand Iranian civilian and military vessels, disrupted agricultural systems, and degraded logistics infrastructure. Iran formally deactivated GPS nationwide on 23 June 2025 and switched entirely to BeiDou. The Chinese system gave Iran its military strategic depth back. It did so quietly, without a press conference, without a UN vote, without a carrier group.

Mizarvision, a Beijing-based satellite intelligence company, began publicly disseminating near-real-time maritime and aerial surveillance of US military deployments in the Middle East via social media. Precise coordinates. Imagery of US Navy vessels. This is intelligence warfare conducted through a commercial entity, deniable and effective.

But China didn’t escalate militarily. It didn’t threaten. It didn’t deploy naval assets. As one CNN analysis noted, Beijing has done little more than look on as its geopolitical rival shakes up the rules of engagement. For Chinese leader Xi Jinping, hard-nosed pragmatism is at play. Iran ultimately ranks below his top priorities, including the stability of relations with the US and the upcoming summit with Trump in Beijing.

Some Chinese analysts have argued, publicly, that not providing security guarantees to partners represents a calculated approach. It gives Beijing greater flexibility, reduces the risk of strategic overstretch, and avoids the costs of underwriting allies’ security. But it also constrains Beijing’s ability to shape outcomes once a crisis turns violent.

This is Go. You don’t respond to your opponent’s aggressive move by counter-attacking. You respond by having already placed stones in positions that make the attack less consequential than your opponent intended. China filled its reserves before the crisis. It diversified its suppliers before the disruption. It built its own satellite navigation system before GPS was jammed. It accelerated renewables before oil became a weapon. It restricted rare earth exports, not to win this battle, but to constrain the next one.

The paradox is visible if you know where to look. The same instability producing short-term economic strain for China simultaneously reinforces the logic behind its long-term planning. Every crisis that disrupts oil supply validates the decision to invest in alternatives. Every act of US force projection validates the decision to build independent systems. The harder the US hits, the more correct China’s preparation looks in retrospect.

There’s another dimension here, and it’s the one that makes this a Contour Magazine story rather than a Foreign Affairs article. The twenty-five-year China-Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, signed in 2021, promised four hundred billion dollars in Chinese investment. In practice, most of those projects never materialized at scale. The actual trade and investment flows between China and several Gulf states eclipse those with Iran. The partnership is pragmatic and real, but constrained by US sanctions and Chinese caution.

That gap between announcement and execution tells you something fundamental about how China operates in the Middle East. It maintains options without committing to positions. It signs agreements without building dependencies. It provides satellite systems and intelligence access without signing mutual defense treaties. The relationship with Iran is a hedge, not an alliance. And hedges are designed to limit downside, not to win wars.

I’ve had this conversation with founders and operators in Kuala Lumpur back when I lived there. The question isn’t whether China will “win” this confrontation. The question is whether the US realizes it’s playing a different game than its opponent. You can remove every piece from the Risk board and still lose at Go. Because in Go, the pieces you remove were already sacrificed as part of a larger design.

Interlude: If you’re a German reading this, look at how China was and is preparing, and now look at how the current government is scrambling through this crisis. I feel they’re playing Jenga while three ministries argue over the instruction manual.

The Borders We Drew and the Wars They Produce

I was born in Leipzig in 1981. I grew up on the eastern side of a line that someone else had drawn through the middle of a country, through the middle of cities, through the middle of families. The inner-German border wasn’t old. It was imposed in 1949 and dissolved in 1990. Forty years. Long enough to create two distinct societies from one population. Not long enough to make either side forget what was on the other side.

I think about that experience whenever I look at the Durand Line.

The Durand Line is 2,600 kilometers of border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was drawn in 1893 by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, a British colonial diplomat, in negotiations with the Afghan emir Abdur Rahman Khan. It split the Pashtun ethnic group between two political entities. Afghanistan has never formally recognized it. Pakistan, which inherited the line when it was created in 1947, insists on its validity under international law. Neither side fully accepts it today.

A friend of mine was on a call with a logistics operator in Karachi the week before the border closed. He was already rerouting shipments. Not because anyone had declared war. Because the insurance rates on cross-border freight had become unworkable. The premiums told the story before the missiles did. On 26 February 2026, Afghanistan’s Taliban government launched what it called “large-scale offensive operations” against Pakistani military positions along the Durand Line. Pakistan responded by bombing Kabul, Kandahar, and border provinces. Pakistan’s defense minister declared “open war.” As of this writing, the conflict has entered its second week with no sign of resolution.

The escalation didn’t come from nowhere. In 2025, over 1,200 people were killed in Pakistan by TTP violence. More than double the number recorded in 2021, when the US ended its twenty-year presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan deported over a million Afghan refugees in 2025 and closed the border in October. A ceasefire brokered by Qatar and Turkey lasted weeks before collapsing. Negotiations mediated by Saudi Arabia dissolved toward the end of 2025. A suicide bombing killed eleven Pakistani security personnel and a child at a border checkpoint in February 2026. Pakistan blamed Taliban-harbored militants. Afghanistan denied it. Both were probably telling partial truths.

At Istanbul talks in late October 2025, Pakistan’s information minister accused the Afghan delegation of “deflection and ruses.” Afghan officials accused Pakistan of “lack of coordination” and leaving the negotiating table. The core impasse was structural: Pakistan demanded Kabul dismantle TTP sanctuaries. Afghanistan’s defense minister insisted there was “no universal or clear definition of terrorism.” That sentence is the entire conflict compressed into ten words.

I’ve seen huge commodity deals dissolve over miscommunication, unclear phrasing, or only slightly misaligned agendas. Politics is not different.

The Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban share ideology, culture, and ethnic composition. But they differ in one critical respect. The Afghan Taliban seeks cooperation with Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban seeks to overthrow the Pakistani state. Afghanistan’s government is unwilling to crack down on the TTP, partly because of historical affinity, partly because doing so would risk TTP fighters defecting to ISIS-Khorasan Province, the Afghan Taliban’s primary rival. This creates a structural impossibility: Pakistan’s security depends on Afghanistan controlling a group that Afghanistan cannot control without undermining its own internal position.

Here’s the structural pattern I keep seeing repeat. A colonial power draws a line through a population for its own administrative convenience. It leaves. The line remains. The population on both sides of the line doesn’t recognize it as legitimate. Militants, refugees, trade, culture, family ties, all flow across the border as if it doesn’t exist, because for the people who live there, it doesn’t. The successor states on each side of the line spend decades trying to enforce a boundary that was designed for someone else’s empire, mostly French or British.

The Durand Line, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Scramble for Africa, the McMahon Line between India and China. Different maps, same logic. The specific geographies differ. The structural logic is identical. Every one of these lines was drawn by European powers in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Every one of them split ethnic, linguistic, or cultural groups across political boundaries. Every one of them produces conflict that the people who drew the lines never have to live with.

The Strait of Hormuz exists as a strategic chokepoint partly because of this same cartographic inheritance. The borders of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are all products of colonial-era agreements, treaties, and impositions. The Gulf’s political geography is not natural. It was drawn up on a board - engineered even. The conflicts that erupt from that engineering are not surprises. They are structural consequences of decisions made by people who are long dead, in rooms that no longer exist, with maps that prioritized imperial administration over human geography.

The West keeps being surprised by conflicts it literally drew on a map. The surprise itself is the most telling symptom. It reveals a blind spot so fundamental that it amounts to a civilizational inability to accept responsibility for consequences that unfold on timescales longer than an election cycle.

What I learned growing up in Leipzig is that imposed borders have a half-life. They hold until the pressure behind them exceeds the force required to maintain them. Then they don’t just open. They rupture. The open rifts aggressively. The question is never whether the rupture will come. The question is how much damage it causes when it does. And the answer, in my experience, is always more than anyone predicted. Because predictions are made by people who don’t live on the line.

The Seventy-Three-Year Loop

In 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The reason was oil. Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran’s petroleum industry. The British, who had been extracting Iranian oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, were not pleased. The Americans, worried about communist influence during the Cold War, agreed to help. They installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah lasted twenty-six years before the 1979 revolution swept him away and installed the Islamic Republic.

In February 2026, the United States killed the supreme leader of that Islamic Republic and is now attempting regime change for the second time in seventy-three years. In the same country. Over the same resource.

One must be blind to not see the pattern. And that pattern has a remarkably consistent failure rate.

I’ve looked at the academic literature on this. Across sixty-four (64!) documented cases of regime change, the failure rate exceeds sixty percent. The failures share a common story. The operation succeeds tactically. The leader is removed. But strategically, the successor state is unstable, hostile, or both. The population that was supposed to welcome liberation coalesces around national identity in opposition to foreign intervention. The power vacuum draws in regional competitors and creates conditions worse than the ones that motivated the intervention in the first place.

Iraq 2003. Libya 2011. Afghanistan 2001 through 2021. The pattern is so consistent that it functions as a law of political physics: the probability that a military intervention will produce the outcome its architects intended decreases in direct proportion to the ambition of that outcome.

The Iran case has an additional dimension that makes the loop even tighter. The stated justification for the February 2026 strikes included Iran’s nuclear program. But Iran’s nuclear ambitions were themselves a response to the 1953 coup and its aftermath. The Shah started Iran’s nuclear program with American help. The Islamic Republic continued it. The logic was straightforward: a country that has been overthrown once by foreign powers has an existential incentive to acquire the one weapon that makes overthrow prohibitively expensive.

The strikes designed to prevent nuclear weapons create the strongest motivation to acquire them. This is a paradox baked into the logic of preventive war. You cannot simultaneously destroy a country’s nuclear capability and remove its incentive to rebuild it. The destruction is the incentive.

Trump’s own public statements illustrate the loop in real time. In June 2025, after the twelve-day air conflict, US officials claimed that Iranian nuclear facilities had been severely damaged. Eight months later, those same facilities were cited as justification for the February 2026 strikes. Either the June strikes were less effective than claimed, or the February justification was less honest than presented. Either way, the narrative contradicts itself across the span of a single administration.

Iran’s crackdown on dissent follows the pattern that every conflict generates. The stated motive of “protecting protesters” sits uneasily beside the fact that strikes have killed civilians, displaced populations, and given the regime’s successors, whoever they turn out to be, the strongest possible argument for authoritarian consolidation. The administration’s framing of events as “preventive strikes” while Just Security’s analysis describes a “manifest violation of Article 2(4)” of the UN Charter doesn’t matter to the people absorbing the strikes. Legal categories are for the people who launch wars. Consequences are for the people who live through them. Definitely not for those sitting in the situation room thousands of kilometers/miles away, or playing the most hours of golf of any US president in history.

And there’s the duration illusion. Every conflict launched in the past seventy years was supposed to be short. Afghanistan was supposed to be a punitive expedition. It lasted twenty years. Iraq was supposed to be weeks. The insurgency lasted a decade. Libya was supposed to be a no-fly zone. The country is still fractured fifteen years later. Trump said the Iran strikes would take “four to five weeks.” The Israeli prime minister estimated the same. As I write this, the conflict is in its second week, the Strait is still closed, oil is over a hundred dollars, and nobody I talk to in the region expects resolution soon. Maybe these old men in their late 70s have a different perception of time. Who knows.

History suggests otherwise. It always does. And the people who plan the strike almost never plan for the after. I’ve watched enough operators and founders make this exact mistake. They confuse tactical success with strategic outcome. Taking a market is not the same as holding a market. Launching a product is not the same as building a business. Killing a leader is not the same as changing a regime. The hard part is never the strike. The hard part is everything that follows.

The Energy Map That Connects Everything

Here is where the four stories become one.

Start with Venezuela. On 3 January 2026, US special forces captured Maduro. Trump stated interest in controlling Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest proven reserves on earth. The CSIS analysis noted this was the first overt US military strike aimed at regime change against a South American government, a “profound rupture of regional precedent.” Venezuela was a significant source of discounted crude for China. That supply was disrupted overnight.

Move to Iran. On 28 February, US and Israeli forces killed Khamenei and struck military and nuclear infrastructure across the country. Iran was a major oil supplier to China, providing roughly 1.5 million barrels per day. That supply is now disrupted or at extreme risk. The Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly half of China’s seaborne oil imports pass, is functionally closed to Western-aligned shipping.

Look at the sequence. Venezuela in January. Iran in February. Two of China’s three major sources of sanctions-discounted crude, eliminated in consecutive months. If you are playing Risk, this is board clearance. If you are in Beijing, watching a Chinese special envoy meet Maduro mere hours before US forces capture him, this looks less like coincidence and more like a systematic campaign to cut your energy supply lines.

Now factor in Russia. Russia’s war in Ukraine has created a strange paradox. Western sanctions pushed Russian oil into the Chinese market at steep discounts. China became Russia’s most important customer. Russia’s budget posted a record January deficit in 2026. Higher oil prices in March improved its revenue outlook, but a recovery in budget revenues was not yet established. The relationship is symbiotic but unstable. Russia needs Chinese demand. China needs Russian supply. Both need the other more than either wants to admit.

When the Iran strikes happened, something revealing occurred. The US quietly relaxed enforcement of Russian oil sanctions. The logic was straightforward: with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted and Iranian supply offline, global oil prices were spiking toward dangerous levels. Easing pressure on Russian oil was a pressure valve. But it also meant that the US was managing one crisis it had created by partially reversing pressure it had applied in a different crisis. The house of cards of sanctions, strikes, and supply disruptions was starting to interact with itself in ways that no single planning team had anticipated.

This is the part that should unsettle anyone who builds models or runs scenarios for a living. The interdependencies are so dense that no actor, not the US, not China, not Iran, not Russia, can fully predict what their own moves will produce. The US relaxes Russian oil sanctions to manage the Iran crisis, which gives Russia revenue to continue the Ukraine war, which maintains the European energy insecurity that the US was trying to resolve, which keeps European capital looking for safer geographies, which benefits Singapore and parts of Asia at the expense of the Gulf, which is under attack because of the Iran strikes that created the original problem.

And here’s where Pakistan-Afghanistan connects. The Durand Line conflict erupted the same week as the Iran strikes. Pure convergence. Both conflicts are products of the same conditions: colonial borders meeting modern state power, with populations caught between lines they never drew and governments they never chose. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border region is not an energy chokepoint. But it sits adjacent to one. The Port of Gwadar, developed by China as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, was intended to give Beijing an alternative route for energy imports bypassing the Strait of Malacca and reducing maritime exposure. A destabilized Balochistan, where the Balochistan Liberation Army has surged in recent years, and an open war on Pakistan’s western border puts that alternative under direct threat.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has blamed India for backing TTP attacks, with Pakistan’s defense minister accusing Afghanistan of operating as an Indian “proxy.” India established a technical mission in Kabul in 2022, welcomed a Taliban delegation to New Delhi in October 2025, and upgraded the mission to an embassy that month. The South Asian chessboard (to continue with the game analogies) is realigning in real time, and the moves are being driven not by ideology but by who controls which corridor, which port, which route that energy and goods can travel.

Pull back far enough and the map resolves into a single image. The Strait of Hormuz. The Suez Canal, where Egypt is in near-emergency mode as canal revenues collapse. The Strait of Malacca. The overland routes through Central Asia. The pipeline corridors through Russia. The sea lanes from Venezuela. These are not separate systems. They are one system. And the conflicts in Iran, Pakistan-Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the South China Sea are not separate wars. They are pressure points on the same system, being activated simultaneously, by multiple actors, for different reasons, with compounding effects that nobody fully controls.

What This Changes for the People I Write For

Contour Magazine exists for globally mobile operators. Founders, investors, company builders who move between jurisdictions, currencies, and regulatory environments. These people don’t need me to explain what happened. They need me to say what it means for how they position capital, structure supply chains, and choose where to build.

Start with energy. For the past decade, low oil prices and abundant LNG created a world where most operators could ignore energy costs as a strategic variable. That world ended on 28 February. If your supply chain touches the Gulf, you need to reprice everything. If your business depends on affordable jet fuel, and a significant portion of Europe’s jet fuel supply transits or originates from the Strait of Hormuz, you need contingency plans you probably don’t have. If you rely on Qatari LNG for European operations, you now have a geopolitical dependency you didn’t budget for.

Then there’s geography. The entire value proposition of operating from the Gulf was predicated on regional stability. Low tax, fast regulation, proximity to capital. That stability was always somewhat, for the lack of a better word, illusory. It was maintained by US security guarantees and a tacit understanding that Iran’s military capability was containable. Both assumptions were tested hard - simultaneously. The operators who will navigate this best are the ones who maintained optionality. Multiple jurisdictions. Distributed teams. No single point of geographic failure. No concentration risk.

And there’s China’s resilience question. Whether you agree with Beijing’s politics is irrelevant. The strategic logic of diversified supply, domestic production capacity, and reduced dependence on any single chokepoint is now validated by events. Every company, every fund, every operator who doesn’t have a version of this strategy is more exposed than they were a month ago. The lesson applies at every scale. A single-country supply chain is a vulnerability. A single-currency revenue model is a risk. A single-jurisdiction corporate structure is a constraint that might not survive the next crisis.

The one I think about most, because it touches my own experience, is the borders. The colonial borders are not historical curiosities. They are active fault lines. The Durand Line, the Sykes-Picot inheritance, the boundaries of nearly every state in Africa, the Middle East, and huge parts of Asia. These lines are producing the conflicts that are producing the energy disruptions that are reshaping the global economy. If you’re building for the next decade, you need to understand which lines are under pressure and what happens when they move. Not because you can predict the timing. Nobody can. But because the structural conditions that produce rupture are knowable, and knowing them is the difference between being positioned and being exposed.

I grew up watching a border dissolve. The inner-German border came down in 1990, and what followed was not the neat transition that Western politicians promised. It was chaotic, painful, and transformative. Millions of people had to rebuild their economic lives based on a geography that changed overnight. A full 180° system change. What I see happening now, across the Middle East, across South Asia, across the energy map of the world, is the same process operating at continental scale. The borders that defined the post-colonial order are under more simultaneous pressure than at any point in my lifetime.

The board is set. The pieces are moving. The question is not whether the map changes. It already has. The question is whether you’re positioned for the map that’s emerging or the one that just ended.

Perhaps what unsettles me most is how familiar this feels. Not because I’ve lived through a specific war before, but because the pattern repeats so clearly once you learn to see it. Energy flows determine alliances. Alliances determine borders. Borders determine conflicts. Conflicts disrupt energy flows. The circle completes itself. And the people inside it, the humans, the families, the founders trying to build something in a city that was stable last month, they never chose to be part of the game. They just happened to live where the lines were drawn.

I don’t know how the Strait of Hormuz reopens. I don’t know how the Pakistan-Afghanistan war ends. I don’t know whether the regime change in Iran (if there even is one) produces something better or something worse. History doesn’t give me reasons for optimism on that last one. What I know is that treating these as separate crises is the surest way to misunderstand all of them. The board is one board. The game is one game. And the energy that powers the global economy is the prize that nobody talks about because it’s so fundamental that it has become invisible.

Until it isn’t. Until it’s a hundred dollars a barrel and rising, and the shipping lanes are closed, and the missiles are landing where you used to have coffee, and the map you built your life around no longer matches the territory.

Then you see it all at once.