From One Chokepoint to Another: The Lesson the World Refuses to Learn

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the wake of the February 2026 Iran war is not merely a crisis of the moment. It is a verdict on the last fifty years of global energy policy — and a warning about the fifty years ahead. Brent crude surging past $126 per barrel, Iraq shutting its oil fields because it has nowhere to put the oil, insurers pulling out of the world's most critical maritime corridor: this is what civilizational dependency looks like when it finally comes due. 

Experts at the Council on Foreign Relations have described this as an unprecedented and escalating global energy crisis. They are not wrong. To put the numbers in terrifying relief: the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 removed roughly 4 million barrels per day from global markets — about 7% of consumption at the time. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens to remove close to 20 million barrels per day, representing 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption. The IEA has taken the unprecedented step of releasing 400 million barrels from strategic reserves — but as analysts note, even the combined drawdown of all IEA partners will cover only a fraction of the disruption. The world is not facing an oil shock. It is facing an oil reckoning. 

A Familiar Nightmare 

History, as ever, tried to warn us. The 1973 Yom Kippur War brought the OPEC embargo. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 triggered another spike. The Iran-Iraq War in 1980, the Gulf War in 1990, the 2022 Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — each time, the world endured its energy seizure, swore to diversify, and then, when prices fell back, quietly returned to its addiction. The Dallas Fed now quantifies that even a single quarter of Strait closure would lower global real GDP growth by an annualized 2.9 percentage points. A three-quarter closure could slice 1.3 percentage points off fourth quarter-over-fourth-quarter global growth for the year. We have built a civilization that can be throttled by a 21-mile-wide body of water. 

What is striking about the 2026 crisis is how little it required of Iran to achieve this. As NPR's reporting makes clear, Iran didn't need a naval armada, naval mines, or even the traditional tools of blockade. It deployed cheap drones — selectively, in the vicinity of the strait — and within days, insurers and shipping companies made the rational decision that no cargo was worth the risk. The world's most consequential energy chokepoint was effectively shut not by military dominance, but by the economics of insurance. The brittleness was always there. It just needed someone to press lightly. 

The Obvious Answer and Its Hidden Trap 

The obvious conclusion to draw is that the world must finally — desperately, urgently — accelerate its transition to clean energy. And that conclusion is correct, as far as it goes. Solar, wind, hydrogen, geothermal, and electrification offer genuine pathways out of the geopolitical hostage situation that fossil fuels have created for a century. They are generated domestically. They cannot be blocked at sea. They are not owned by regimes that might one morning decide the world should go without. 

But the clean energy transition carries within it the seed of a new dependency, one that is already metastasizing into its own geopolitical crisis. The minerals required to build that transition, lithium, cobalt, manganese, graphite, rare earth elements, are no less geographically concentrated than oil. And in the critical domain of processing and refining, the concentration is far, far worse. 

According to IRENA's analysis of critical materials geopolitics, China controls 100% of global refined supply for natural graphite and dysprosium, over 90% of manganese, 70% of cobalt, nearly 60% of lithium, and approximately 40% of copper. The ODI projects that by 2035, China will supply over 60% of refined lithium and cobalt, around 80% of battery-grade graphite and rare earth elements, and approximately 70% of battery-grade manganese. The clean energy future, as currently configured, runs through Beijing. 

The Weaponization Has Already Begun 

This is not a theoretical concern. China's willingness to weaponize its mineral dominance has been demonstrated with increasing boldness. In 2010, it curbed rare earth exports to Japan following a maritime dispute. In 2023, gallium and germanium exports, critical to semiconductor and defense supply chains, fell to near zero within months of Beijing imposing new licensing requirements. In April 2025, export controls were imposed on seven heavy rare earth elements. By October 2025, the regime was expanded to cover twelve rare earths and related processing technologies, extending Beijing's leverage across entire downstream value chains — not merely raw materials, but the knowledge and equipment to do anything with them. 

The parallel to oil should concentrate minds. As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the United States was once the world's largest producer of rare earths. It retreated from the industry over environmental concerns. China stepped in. Washington ignored the lesson that Europe was simultaneously ignoring about Russian gas. By the time the vulnerability became a crisis, decades of infrastructure and expertise had been surrendered. 

The new scramble for critical minerals now looks uncomfortably like the old scramble for oil. The US is signing mineral agreements with Australia, pursuing arrangements in Central Asia, and eyeing Greenland's deposits. The EU has enacted its Critical Raw Materials Act and identified €22.5 billion in strategic projects. S&P Global reports that Chinese state-owned companies dominate extraction and processing, giving Beijing control over the downstream manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, EV batteries, and hydrogen electrolysers. The West is not diversifying fast enough. The timelines for building new mining and refining capacity, typically 10 to 18 years, are longer than the timelines the climate crisis demands. 

The Global South in the Middle 

There is a further dimension that comfortable analyses in Washington and Brussels tend to elide. The mineral wealth of the energy transition is largely located in the Global South: cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium in Chile and Bolivia, nickel in Indonesia, platinum in South Africa. These countries have historically been confined to the lowest-value segments of resource supply chains — shipping raw materials to be refined and manufactured elsewhere, capturing little of the economic value, absorbing all of the environmental cost. 

This is changing. The African Union's Green Minerals Strategy and national initiatives from South Africa, Zambia, Chile, and Indonesia signal a new era of resource nationalism — a determination to process minerals domestically, build value chains, and refuse the old colonial bargain. This is legitimate and just. But it also means that the clean energy supply chain is becoming more contested, more politicized, and more expensive, even as demand for these materials is set to increase exponentially. 

The IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 documents the gathering storm: price volatility, supply chain bottlenecks, and geopolitical competition are converging at precisely the moment when the world needs stable, affordable, rapidly-scaling supply. We are attempting to build an energy future on foundations that are being actively contested. 

The Way Forward: Resilience, Not Just Replacement 

Does all of this mean the clean energy transition is futile, or that we should despair of escaping fossil fuel dependency? Emphatically not. But it does mean that the transition must be designed with geopolitical resilience as a first-order requirement, not an afterthought. 

Several principles should guide this. First, diversification is non-negotiable, across technologies, suppliers, and processing locations. The Hormuz crisis demonstrates what happens when a single chokepoint controls too much of a vital supply. The mineral supply chains for clean energy must not replicate that architecture. The EU's rule that no single country should supply more than 65% of any strategic material is a sensible floor. It should become a global norm. 

Second, the emphasis must shift from mining to innovation. The CFR argues persuasively that the United States, and by extension the democratic world, cannot out-mine China. What it can do is invest massively in recycling, recovery, and material substitution. Batteries that require less cobalt, motors that require fewer rare earths, recycling systems that recover critical minerals from end-of-life products — these are not marginal improvements. They are strategic imperatives. Every tonne of lithium recovered from old batteries is a tonne that does not need to traverse a contested supply chain. 

Third, the energy transition must be genuinely multilateral. The old pattern, in which the West set the terms of resource extraction and the Global South bore the environmental and social costs, will not hold and should not hold. Partnerships that enable domestic processing and value-addition in mineral-rich countries, that share technology and provide fair prices, are not only ethically required. They are strategically necessary. A cobalt supply chain rooted in Congolese prosperity is far more resilient than one rooted in Congolese extraction. 

Finally — and most urgently — the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz should end the political hesitancy about clean energy deployment. Every solar panel installed, every heat pump fitted, every electric vehicle on the road reduces the structural power of the Persian Gulf over the global economy. Energy security and climate action are not competing priorities. They never were. They are the same priority, dressed in different language for different audiences. 

The Choice Before Us 

In the spring of 2026, as oil tankers sit idle outside a militarized strait and oil prices punish every economy on earth, the argument for energy transition writes itself. The argument against, that clean energy merely trades one dependency for another, also writes itself, and must be taken seriously rather than dismissed. 

The answer to that argument is not that the clean energy transition is risk-free. It is that the risks of the transition are manageable in ways the risks of fossil fuels are not. Oil produces a single, catastrophic, irreplaceable chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz. Critical minerals produce multiple chokepoints — which is a problem, but a different kind of problem, one that can be engineered around, recycled around, and innovated around. You cannot innovate your way out of the need for a physical strait. 

Moreover, the very geopolitical pressures that now surround critical minerals are themselves an argument for deploying clean energy at maximum speed. Every year of delay is another year in which fossil fuel revenues fund the adversaries of open societies, another year in which the world economy remains hostage to corridors it cannot control, another year in which the window for avoiding catastrophic climate change narrows. 

The world was not ready for this crisis. It has not been ready for any of the oil crises that preceded it. That pattern of unreadiness — that cycle of shock, resolution, and complacency — must end. The strait will eventually reopen. The underlying vulnerability will not heal itself. The only cure is a clean energy system built with the hard-headedness of people who have learned, finally, what dependency costs. 

The world has been given another lesson. The question is whether, this time, it will do the homework.