The US-Iran war is an energy war, not an ideological one

Why ideology is the wrapper, not the cause

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the US-Iran war as another in a long line of conflicts whose stated cause is not the real cause. Religion, ideology, and end-state language, he argues, are the packaging. The contents are almost always something more material.

“Whenever we have seen conflict in the last fifty years,” he says, “it was given the colour of an ideology, because it is easier to sell it, easier to gather support for it, and it seemingly hides the actual purpose for a lot of these conflicts.”

He uses Syria as the template. Different factions were armed, extremist Islam was introduced as an insurgency, and the world was told a story about sectarian collapse. The substrate, in his telling, was a gas pipeline. A destabilising conflict was enough to stop the pipeline from being built. The ideology was a delivery mechanism for the geometry.

What an energy pipeline is actually worth

To anchor the stakes, Muzamil walks through the numbers. A country producing ten million barrels of oil a day — Saudi Arabia’s order of magnitude — at roughly a hundred dollars a barrel is selling a billion dollars of oil every twenty-four hours. By year-end that is roughly $365 billion. He notes, deliberately, that this approaches Pakistan’s entire GDP.

That is the prize sitting under every pipeline. It is also why a successful sabotage operation can be worth fighting a war over. The Ukraine-Russia conflict, he points out, opened with a false-flag attack that stopped Russian gas reaching Europe. The market that followed went to American LNG, sold at a premium. “America made out well. Europeans took the loss.”

Regime change, in his framing, becomes legible the same way. Governments that begin to act sovereignly — taking decisions in their own national interest, particularly in emerging markets — invite a bigger power to intervene. The fundamental driver, more often than not, is energy.

How the US became the US

Muzamil places the modern energy order in the late nineteenth century. Oil was extracted commercially in a handful of places, including parts of what would become the USSR. But the United States was the first to do it at scale. A refinery in Pennsylvania, by 1875, was processing 77% of global oil.

That number, he insists, is the one to hold. When a single country refines three-quarters of the world’s energy, every downstream activity — industry, transport, economic output — tilts toward it. “The place where energy is produced is the place where conditions logically become better.” America’s industrialisation in the late 1800s, and the superpower status that followed, was built on this base.

The British Empire, he notes in passing, played the same game on a different commodity layer. The lesson is the same. Whoever owns the upstream of the era’s dominant energy source eventually owns the order.

The China flip

The status quo, Muzamil argues, was assumed to extend. The US would keep its head start, leapfrog where necessary, and the rest of the world would arrange itself around American energy market control. What changed is that China — “being China, being the factory of the world” — moved very quickly into renewables.

Over the last decade, China has captured roughly 80% of the global solar panel market and 77% of the battery market. And not just production. The upstream mineral supply chain — the mines in Africa that feed the battery industry — is Chinese-owned. The vertical is complete.

The game the US played for a hundred years was not only producing its own energy but pricing it. Energy suppliers historically split into camps, with the Western alliance controlling the camps that mattered for its own industrial needs. That arrangement is the one that has now flipped. The new dominant energy source is not extracted from the ground. It is manufactured. And the country that manufactures it sets the price.

The solar tipping point already crossed

Muzamil grounds the China point in three pieces of recent literature. He cites an October 2023 paper from the University of Exeter and University College London, The Momentum of the Solar Energy Transition, which argues that the global solar tipping point has already been crossed and that solar will radically out-supply other energy forms in the coming decade. The same paper, he notes, projects roughly 13 million job losses in the oil and gas sector over the next ten years — most of them concentrated in the Middle East and West Asia.

He pairs this with two further reports: The Clean Tech Revolution (2024) and Fossil Fuel Demand Has Already Peaked (2022). The core thesis across both is that fossil fuel demand peaked in 2019 at roughly 100 million barrels a day, plateaued, and will enter steep decline in the late 2020s. Investment is already routing accordingly: roughly five times more capital is now flowing into clean energy than into oil and gas. Last year, 90% of new power generation capacity added to global markets came from renewables, largely solar.

The implication he draws is not subtle. The supply chain of energy is being rebuilt on terms the US does not control. America’s economy, its currency, and its global position all rest on a market that is about to shrink. China’s hold on the replacement market is already structural.

Why the Middle East had to burn now

This is where Muzamil places the actual purpose of the current war. If business as usual continued for another five years, the entire energy dynamic — and therefore the politics and power structure built on top of it — would have moved decisively in China’s favour. To delay that, something had to interrupt the transition.

His reading: a war at the heart of the energy supply region was the instrument. The intended outcome was to bring Iranian oil and gas into global markets in a way that crashed prices. Cheap oil would remove the urgency for Western-aligned economies to move to solar. The renewables transition would be slowed, and the US-controlled energy order would be extended.

Iran’s counter-move, he argues, has been to refuse the script. By keeping the Strait of Hormuz under threat and attacking energy infrastructure across the Middle East, Iran has choked the regional economy in the opposite direction. “Iran has been through sanctions before. Iran has been through blockades before. They can hold out. All they want to do is ensure that oil stays above $120 a barrel.”

Above that line, the American economy takes a direct hit. Interest rates rise. The sovereign debt crisis worsens. A recession — or a depression — becomes the trajectory. And the biggest beneficiary of an American depression that exports itself globally, Muzamil concludes, is China. Iran, directly aligned with China, is playing the role its strategic position allows.

What changes when energy goes sovereign

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil is no longer arguing about one war. He is arguing about what comes after it. The variables he wants the audience to track are clear. How much of a country’s energy now travels through a foreign-controlled supply chain, and how much is indigenous? How much of the energy trade is still dollar-denominated, and how much is being settled outside that system? How quickly is domestic renewable capacity scaling?

As these answers shift, he says, sovereignty begins to return to countries that have not had it for a long time. Dollarisation starts to erode. Energy production becomes a local capability rather than an imported one. And the political, security, and economic shape of regions like South Asia begins to redraw itself.

Muzamil closes by pointing the lens back at Pakistan. The question he leaves the audience with is not whether the US-Iran war will end. It is how much control the Middle East and the United States will retain over countries like Pakistan once the underlying energy order finishes flipping — and what the region will look like on the other side.