Trump’s Ego-Trip War Driving the Iran Conflict Toward Catastrophe
US President Donald Trump addresses a press conference after military attacks on Venezuela. (Image White House on X)
Washington and Tel Aviv fatally ignored the Gulf’s role as the nerve centre of global oil, food and fertiliser systems — and the world’s most vulnerable are now paying the price
By NIRENDRA DEV
New Delhi, March 15, 2026 — US President Donald Trump wanted Iran to become his Venezuela. It isn’t working out that way.
Trump’s ego-trip war has collided with economic reality. But nothing much can be done now to undo the damage.
The strikes on Iran — targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, oil installations, nuclear facilities, and fanning internal unrest through Kurdish, Syrian Arab and Jaish ul-Adl proxies — were part of a carefully sequenced US-Israel plan to dismantle Tehran’s instruments of power and engineer regime collapse. But the plan has run into the ‘Persian DNA’ factor: an Iranian population with the historical appetite, and the cultural memory, to absorb punishment and fight back.
The Fatal Intelligence Failure Nobody Is Talking About
Did Israel’s Mossad and American intelligence agencies simply ignore — or choose to overlook — one foundational geopolitical fact? The Gulf region sits at the centre of the global oil and gas system. It’s not just as a supplier of crude, but as a hub for refining, petrochemical and fertiliser industries that sustain global manufacturing and agriculture.
It is a staggering oversight if true. The fallout on global food chains has already taken on ominous dimensions.
From Bombs to Bread: The Food Chain Fallout
This is not merely an energy story. It is a food story. Rising energy costs drive up fertiliser prices. Rising fertiliser prices drive up the cost of growing food. Rising food costs cascade through transport, manufacturing and retail — hitting hardest in the societies least equipped to absorb the shock.
From the 2008 financial crash to the food and energy crises that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global disruptions tend to hit the most vulnerable societies hardest — with poorer households and more fragile economies bearing the greatest burden.
The Iran war is not an exception to that rule. It is its most dangerous expression yet.
The Real War: Not About Democracy, Not About Nukes — About Oil
Were it not for oil and gas, none of this — neither Venezuela nor Iran — would be happening. It is a thesis with deep historical roots.
In the mid-2010s, analysts were already arguing that the most dangerous international conflicts of the era were fundamentally fights over hydrocarbons. In Syria and Iraq, IS militants funded their self-proclaimed caliphate by selling captured oil fields.
From Central Asia to Ukraine, Russia was contesting Washington-backed efforts to wean Europe off Russian energy. Even the Obama administration threatened the maritime choke points through which the bulk of China’s oil imports travel.
The pattern is consistent. The geography changes. The commodity does not.
Warnings Ignored: From Exxon’s 1980s Memo to Today’s Crisis
The deepest indictment is not directed at Trump or Netanyahu — it is directed at a world that had every warning it needed and chose to look away.
As far back as the 1980s, Exxon’s own internal research predicted that CO₂ levels would double preindustrial concentrations by around 2060, pushing average global temperatures up by approximately 2°C. The company buried its findings. The world carried on burning.
By 2014-2015, the writing was on the wall again. China had begun its serious pivot toward electric vehicles. Analysts noted that solar and wind power had become the cheapest available methods of electricity generation. The technology existed that could have made resource-driven warmongering “transparently absurd — even to the most belligerent soul like Donald Trump.”
But the gap between knowing and doing remained unbridged. The so-called discussions at various levels never translated into action on energy transition.
The Iran Nuclear Deal: Trump’s Original Sin
Any honest accounting of this conflict must return to 2018 and Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the Iran nuclear accord painstakingly negotiated under the Obama administration with the backing of the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China.
It was “infantile rage” that drove Trump to tear up a meticulously constructed, globally sponsored agreement. The consequences of that decision are now detonating across the Middle East, the global energy market and the world’s food supply chains.
What India Must Take From This
India too has to be cautious. Opposition-led panic creation is no art to survive these challenges. The country’s deep economic exposure to the Gulf — through energy imports, trade relationships and the livelihoods of ten million members of the Indian diaspora — demands strategic clarity, not political point-scoring.
Global energy production and trade remain dangerously over-dependent on oil and gas. The Iran war has exposed, with brutal clarity, the structural fragility of a world that still runs on fossil fuels. Every international forum that discussed energy transition and produced no binding action has contributed to the conditions that made this war possible. And every year of delay in that transition extends the period during which conflicts like this one remain not just possible, but likely.
Fear Fossil Fuels’ Fury
This war actually brings to the fore the danger of continued dependence on fossil fuels — and why transitioning away from them is now more vital than ever.
The sun and the breeze, as analysts noted years ago, are the cheapest ways to generate power. The world knew this. It chose oil instead. And now, once again, it is paying — in dollars, in disrupted supply chains, and in lives.
(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are author’s own.)
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