6 min readApr 2, 2026 06:00 AM IST
First published on: Apr 2, 2026 at 06:00 AM IST
There are moments in history when catastrophe announces itself loudly, with sirens and spectacle. And then there are moments when the danger advances quietly, almost politely, while the world carries on as if nothing fundamental has changed. The deepening confrontation around Iran belongs to the latter category. The US-Israeli strikes began on February 28 with the stated aim of regime change and dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. What followed was not the swift collapse promised by a clean decapitation strike. The conflict has now spread across at least a dozen countries, puncturing the illusion of the Gulf as a tax-free sanctuary of order and calm, closing the Strait of Hormuz, and killing thousands across the region. Iran is still firing. Hezbollah has re-entered the fight in Lebanon. The Houthis have joined, too. And the Pentagon is reportedly preparing for weeks of ground operations inside Iran.
This was supposed to be over by now. Instead, it is widening, hardening, and turning into an open-ended, region-wide war with no clear exit and mounting global consequences. This is not a crisis with a fixed cost. Every single day the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, the damage to the global economy compounds. The numbers are not abstract. They are already being calculated, and they are terrifying. Iran’s closure of the strait has been described as the largest disruption to the world’s energy supply since the 1970s energy crisis. Roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day used to transit the Strait of Hormuz — around 20 per cent of global supply, and more than a quarter of all global seaborne oil trade. Only a trickle of that is now passing through. US officials and Wall Street analysts are now starting to consider the prospect of oil hitting $200 a barrel if the strait stays closed into the second quarter. A short closure is an oil shock, but a long one becomes an inflation and growth shock.
The situation with gas is even more alarming. Qatar and the UAE account for 99 per cent of Pakistan’s LNG imports, 72 per cent of Bangladesh’s, and 53 per cent of India’s. Japan and South Korea hold LNG reserves sufficient for only two to four weeks of stable demand. Every extra week of closure moves these countries closer to genuine energy scarcity, not just price pain. The Gulf region accounts for nearly half of the world’s urea exports and 30 per cent of its ammonia exports, with about a third of all globally traded fertiliser passing through the strait. Urea prices have already risen 50 per cent since the start of the war — from $482 a ton on February 27 to $720 by mid-March. The timing is catastrophic. The Northern Hemisphere spring planting season is happening right now. Every additional week that farmers cannot get affordable fertiliser is a week of yield loss that cannot be recovered. You cannot replant the spring.
A third of the world’s helium supply also transits through the Strait of Hormuz. Helium is not a luxury — it is a critical input for semiconductor manufacturing, MRI machines, fibre optic cables, and defence electronics. It cannot be synthesised, stockpiled easily, or quickly replaced with an alternative. Half of all global seaborne sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and sulphur is the feedstock for sulphuric acid, which is essential for processing copper, nickel, and cobalt — the metals inside every battery, every circuit board, and every precision-guided munition being fired in the very war that has blocked the strait. The longer this drags on, the deeper the damage. At this point, there is no economy on Earth that is not in the line of fire. Analysts now calculate that if the closure continues, up to $3.5 trillion of global GDP — over 3 per cent of the entire world economy — is at risk. A quick end to hostilities might limit losses to around $590 billion. But every additional day without a ceasefire closes that gap.
With so much at stake, you would expect that every diplomatic phone line on the planet would be burning. That the UN Security Council would be meeting daily with genuine urgency rather than the theatre of vetoes and procedural delays it has offered so far. You would expect Washington to face serious pressure from allies to define an endgame. You would expect Netanyahu to be pressed to articulate not just objectives, but limits — a clear sense of how escalation stops rather than how it continues. You would expect backchannels with Tehran to be working around the clock. You would expect the countries being most damaged by this war — Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh — to be at the centre of a coordinated push for a ceasefire.
Instead, what we see is something far more disquieting: A strange, collective drift. Statements are issued, envoys are dispatched, and yet the underlying momentum of escalation remains unchecked. The machinery of crisis management is moving, but without the intensity that the scale of the threat demands. Pakistan is attempting to act as a go-between. But with Washington and Tehran still poles apart on every core issue, it is reduced to passing messages between two sides that are not negotiating, only hardening their positions. Most countries are quietly absorbing the pain, hedging their bets, and saying as little as possible in public.
The silence is as alarming as the war itself. When the most consequential supply-chain disruption in half a century produces this little diplomatic urgency, it tells you something about how badly the international system has atrophied — and how much we have all normalised the idea that crises of this magnitude are simply things that happen to us, rather than things we have the power to stop. The world is not watching a contained regional conflict. It is watching the slow unravelling of the energy architecture, the food system, and the supply chains that underpin modern civilisation. We are sleepwalking through it, checking our phones for missile counts, while the consequences stack up quietly in grain markets, gas terminals, and fertiliser depots from Brazil to Bangladesh.
At some point, we will wake up. The question is whether there will still be time to do something about it.
The writer is a novelist and former diplomat
