Trump has managed to turn a regional conflict into a sort of travelling demolition project. Not just Iran, but bits of the Gulf more broadly now at risk of ending up with holes where expensive infrastructure used to be. Refineries, ports, pipelines. The sort of kit that normally takes years to build and about five minutes to break.
Now, someone will have to to pay to put that lot back together again. It will not be Trump. He isn’t reaching for the American chequebook, partly because he doesn’t see the point and partly because, from his perspective, America has its own oil and can muddle through. Rebuilding the Gulf is someone else’s problem.
The Gulf states themselves could, of course, pay. Places like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are not short of a bob or two. They may well decide to quietly fix things and move on. That is one possible ending.
But it is not the only one, and it is not the interesting one.
Because sitting just offstage is China, which happens to be heavily dependent on Gulf and Iranian oil and has a rather well established habit of turning up with engineers, loans and a long memory. China does not need tidy, risk-adjusted returns. It is perfectly happy to swap infrastructure for influence and oil security over a couple of decades.
Iran, in particular, is where this becomes less of a choice and more of a default. American capital is not “hesitant” there. It is legally barred. So when Iran needs vast sums to rebuild what has just been broken and what was already creaking, there is no queue forming in New York or Houston.
There is, however, a fairly obvious queue forming in Beijing.
Elsewhere in the Gulf it is more of a contest. The locals can self fund. Western capital may turn up if the risk can be priced. China will certainly want in. But the mere fact that this is now a question at all is the point. The door has been opened.
Meanwhile, the clever bit. Oil flows get disrupted, the Strait of Hormuz becomes a little less reliable, and energy prices rise. That is not a regional inconvenience. That is everyone’s problem. Trump, however, is doubling down on oil at precisely the moment when large chunks of the modern economy, particularly AI, need cheap and stable electricity.
And here is the slightly awkward detail. Those data centres are not all sitting in Texas next to a friendly wellhead. They are scattered about, quite a lot of them in Europe, humming away and quietly assuming that energy will remain both available and vaguely affordable. When oil spikes, so does everything else. So while Trump is busy annoying NATO and talking about walking away from it, he is also, in practical terms, pushing up the cost base of the very digital infrastructure his allies rely on.
At the same time, you have Africa. Large parts of it still lack reliable electricity, which is usually presented as a tragedy, but is also, from a strategic point of view, an open invitation. Build the generation, build the grid, and you do not just supply power, you shape the economy that follows. Increasingly, that power will be renewable, because it is the quickest way to get something working at scale without waiting for pipelines that may or may not arrive.
Again, there is a fairly obvious candidate to do that work, and it is not Washington.
And this is where the energy argument stops being a culture war about wind turbines and starts being about power in the literal sense.
Coal built unions because it forced people together. Same pits, same dangers, same towns. Oil spread things out. Still industrial, still risky, but easier to fragment and easier to manage. Renewables look scattered at first glance, but scale them up and you get concentrations again around ports, factories, grid infrastructure and maintenance. Not identical to coal, but enough to rebuild forms of collective organisation that oil diluted.
At the same time, control shifts. With oil, power sits with whoever owns the scarce fuel. With renewables, generation becomes more commoditised and leverage moves into storage, grid access, balancing and trading. Power does not disappear, it moves into systems that are harder to dominate quietly and much more exposed to politics.
Which is why the unease on the right is not really about the view or intermittency. It is about losing a model that concentrated control and kept labour manageable.
Which brings us back to Trump, who knows perfectly well that China is the strategic competitor. That is not the blind spot. The problem is that, having been led by the nose by Israel into this particular mess, he has created precisely the conditions China is best placed to exploit.
China does not need to win a war here. It just needs to turn up afterwards with a clipboard, a financing package, and a willingness to build whatever comes next.
And that is how you hand over influence in the Gulf, a foothold in Africa’s industrialisation, and a quiet bit of leverage over Europe’s energy costs, all while insisting you are backing the future.
It feels less like grand strategy and more like discovering that while you were busy defending the old engine, someone else quietly bought the garage, hired the mechanics, and started sending you the bill for the electricity.
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