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Aftermath: Something Is Going to Snap by Ryan Cooper
You’re not going to believe this, but it turns out Donald Trump’s latest promise that he was going to get a great deal with Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz—one of dozens of such promises—has, as ever, come to nothing. A core Iranian demand is that Israel stop carpet-bombing Lebanon, and Israel, with its contemptuous disregard for American interests and human life alike, instead has greatly stepped up bombing and its occupation of Lebanese territory.
Iran has therefore cut off contact with American negotiators, and the two sides are once again shooting at each other. Trump, for his part, recently told a CNBC reporter that “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less” if negotiations are over. They “started to get very boring,” he added.
I’ll admit that when this started way back in February, I thought that something big would have broken in the global economy by now. Yet so far, despite some serious pain in certain areas—like global diesel prices—there hasn’t been a truly major crisis. But it’s only a matter of time before one or more of the severely strained parts of the global economy breaks.
Let me start with the factors that have so far helped prevent a major crisis. An important one is the green-energy transition. While very far from complete, it has provided the world with invaluable alternatives for energy and transportation. A great deal of fossil fuel energy can be replaced with solar, wind, and batteries, and a great deal of oil-based transportation can be replaced with electric vehicles—even freight trucking. Chinese exports of solar and EVs are soaring, and even very poor countries are buying in bulk. For a nation like Egypt, whose oil imports have been a crushing burden on a struggling economy, renewable energy is not about hippie-dippie environmentalism, it’s a matter of life and death.
Iran has therefore cut off contact with American negotiators, and the two sides are once again shooting at each other. Trump, for his part, recently told a CNBC reporter that “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less” if negotiations are over. They “started to get very boring,” he added.
I’ll admit that when this started way back in February, I thought that something big would have broken in the global economy by now. Yet so far, despite some serious pain in certain areas—like global diesel prices—there hasn’t been a truly major crisis. But it’s only a matter of time before one or more of the severely strained parts of the global economy breaks.
Let me start with the factors that have so far helped prevent a major crisis. An important one is the green-energy transition. While very far from complete, it has provided the world with invaluable alternatives for energy and transportation. A great deal of fossil fuel energy can be replaced with solar, wind, and batteries, and a great deal of oil-based transportation can be replaced with electric vehicles—even freight trucking. Chinese exports of solar and EVs are soaring, and even very poor countries are buying in bulk. For a nation like Egypt, whose oil imports have been a crushing burden on a struggling economy, renewable energy is not about hippie-dippie environmentalism, it’s a matter of life and death.
https://prospect.org/2026/06/03/aftermath-something-is-going-to-snap-iran-strait-of-hormuz/]