By Deborah Martínez
When President Donald Trump launched a military operation against Iran in February, the move was widely framed as a matter of security and preemptive self-defense. Yet behind the official rhetoric, critics argued that economic interests, particularly access to oil, were the real motivation. In trying to secure fossil-fuel dominance, Trump may have produced the opposite effect, exposing the fragility of oil dependence and deepening the urgency of a transition to renewable energy.
The United States’ (US) operation against Iran did not emerge in isolation. Earlier in the year, Trump’s campaign in Venezuela had already signaled his willingness to use military force to extract strategic concessions. Following the abduction and illegal imprisonment of President Nicolás Maduro in a lightning operation on January 3, Washington was able to pressure his successor, President Delcy Rodríguez, into an agreement that granted the US privileged access to Venezuelan oil. This apparent success set a precedent, encouraging Trump to turn to his next target, Iran, in what has become part of a broader Republican strategy to secure control over fossil-fuel supplies.
“With a little more time, we can easily open the Hormuz Strait, take the oil, & make a fortune,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on April 3.
Although Trump declared “hostilities” with Iran “terminated” on May 1, the announcement looked less like an end to the conflict than a legal maneuver to avoid the 60-day War Powers Resolution deadline, after which continued military action would require congressional authorization. The continued blockade of Iranian ports and the Strait of Hormuz, along with Trump’s ongoing threats to restart the conflict, indicates that the confrontation has not ended but taken on a different form, from open military action to a broader regime of naval pressure, economic coercion, and control over oil routes.
The Fragility of Fossil Dependence
These operations have exposed the fragility of an entire global order still built around oil, coal, and gas. Fossil-fuel dependence has never been merely an environmental problem, yet the current crisis has made its geopolitical vulnerabilities harder to ignore.
Since the publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, which introduced sustainability as a model of development, international discourse and governance have repeatedly promoted the transition toward cleaner energy sources. Still, despite decades of sustainability commitments and the growing adoption of renewable energy sources such as biofuels, solar, and wind power, the global economy continues to run on fossil fuels, with oil, coal, and gas accounting for 80.75 percent of the world’s total energy supply, according to the latest available data from the International Energy Agency.
Yet fossil fuels are not merely energy sources; they are embedded in complex socio-technical systems. Their extraction, transport, refinement, financing, regulation, and utilization depend on pipelines, ports, refineries, shipping routes, labor regimes, financial institutions, and geopolitical alliances. As scholars of energy politics and socio-technical transitions have shown, these infrastructures do more than enable energy supply; they produce relations of dependence, exposure, and power that can be used and exploited accordingly. When one part of the system is interrupted, the apparent stability of fossil-fuel dependence quickly gives way to its underlying fragility.
The partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resulting obstruction of maritime trade, has done precisely that. It has not only pushed oil prices upward but also disrupted supply chains and aviation, intensified inflation, and affected everyday consumption. In just a few months, restrictions on passage through the Strait have strained a route that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. In doing so, they have turned an energy crisis into a broader cost-of-living crisis, with the International Monetary Fund now expecting global inflation to reach 4.4 percent by the end of the year and vulnerable populations likely to bear the heaviest burden.
The crisis, therefore, extends far beyond energy markets. Trump’s oil strategy has shown that whoever controls energy routes and resources can also hold leverage over economies, societies, and states. This is the underlying power of the fossil-fuel order, as it not only moves barrels and prices; it distributes vulnerability, deciding who absorbs the shock when oil becomes a geopolitical tool of coercion.
The Accelerated Transition toward Renewable Energy
Energy transitions, as Bruce Podobnik argued, rarely result from technological innovation alone. Historically, they have emerged when geopolitical rivalry, commercial competition, or social conflict destabilizes an existing energy regime, creating openings for another. The shift from coal to petroleum, for instance, was shaped not only by efficiency gains but also by military strategy, state intervention, corporate investment, changing consumption patterns, and the search for more secure energy supplies.
By destabilizing economic and social systems and intensifying geopolitical tensions, Trump’s recent military actions have given new urgency to what had been a slow and uneven transition toward renewable energy. This might produce a paradoxical outcome in the long term: hastening the erosion of the very oil-based order he seeks to protect.
For Europe, this is not an abstract warning. As a major fossil-fuel importer, the EU had already learned from Russia’s long use of gas as geopolitical leverage that energy dependence could quickly become political exposure. The European Green Deal, launched in 2019 primarily as a climate and industrial strategy, was designed in part to reduce that dependence by pushing the bloc toward renewable energy. While that ambition has in recent years become more ambivalent, with a shift toward competitiveness and industrial gains, it became more urgent after Russia’s war in Ukraine turned the reduction of fossil-fuel dependence into a core geopolitical and economic security priority. The conflict with Iran has further reinforced that logic, giving renewed momentum to the EU’s push toward renewable energy.
Just last April, Ursula von der Leyen made this security logic explicit when presenting the European Commission’s plan to scale up clean technologies and shield the bloc from the energy shocks triggered by the war in Iran. “We must accelerate the shift to homegrown, clean energies,” she said. “This will give us energy independence and security, and mean we are better able to weather geopolitical storms.” What is changing, then, is not only the pace of the transition, but the political meaning attached to it. The energy transition is no longer framed simply as a response to climate change but as a geopolitical and economic strategy to reshape patterns of political and economic dependence.
China is another crucial case in this emerging energy divide. The country began approaching the energy transition through a similar security lens long before the EU. Since President Xi Jinping unveiled his energy transition strategy in 2014, Beijing has steadily expanded solar and hydropower, invested heavily in clean technologies, and turned renewable energy into both an industrial and geopolitical strategy. Compared with Washington’s more uneven approach, shaped by partisan shifts between Democratic and Republican administrations, China’s long-term planning has allowed it to present the transition as a source of resilience. The war in Iran has made that strategy appear increasingly prescient.
In early April, Xi framed this long-term strategy as a vindication of China’s earlier choices. “Our pioneering development of wind and solar power has now proven to be forward-thinking,” he said, adding that “a greener, more diversified, and resilient new energy system will provide a strong guarantee for China’s energy security and economic development.” Here, too, renewable energy appears not simply as a long-term environmental commitment, but as a claim to present-day strategic preparedness.
This global shift should concern Washington. As the global transition to renewable energy becomes a contest over who controls the next industrial order, fossil-fuel dominance may no longer translate into the same geopolitical leverage.
If Europe and China reduce their reliance on oil and gas, the US risks losing some of the influence it has historically exercised through fossil-fuel markets, maritime routes, and energy security guarantees. Worse, by betting on oil while its rivals invest in clean technologies, the White House may be weakening its position in the industries that will define the next energy order.
A New Global Energy Divide?
Trump’s strategy reveals a tension between the past and the future. On one side are efforts to preserve the fossil-energy order, with the US seeking renewed leverage through oil-producing states and strategic energy routes. On the other are actors moving, however unevenly, toward renewable energy and clean technologies. Only time will tell whether Trump’s bet pays off. The world may accelerate its shift toward cleaner and more accessible energy, or the existing fossil‑fuel regime may endure, particularly as energy demand surges with the rise of artificial intelligence.
While the answer unfolds, those caught in the middle of this polarization are the victims of war and millions of citizens across the globe who face its economic consequences. They are paying the price of this geopolitical tug‑of‑war through rising prices, shortages, and economic instability — developments that United Nations projections warn could push up to 30 million people into poverty worldwide.
This raises the question of whether we’re witnessing a change in the global order or merely a reconfiguration of power around new resources. After all, the burden continues to fall most heavily on vulnerable populations and peripheral nations, which, as scholars of dependency and post‑colonial theory have long argued, are rendered exploitable precisely by their abundance of natural resources. Whether it is the US operations aimed at securing oil in Iran and Venezuela, or the scramble by China and Europe to lock in supplies of lithium, cobalt, and copper across the Global South for the solar panels and batteries of tomorrow, the pattern remains the same. Peripheral nations and entire populations continue to be affected by decisions taken by those in power.
By using military and political leverage to secure access to fossil energy, Trump has exposed the vulnerabilities of a global order built around oil and gas. This exposure may give governments a renewed security rationale for treating the transition to renewables as a matter of strategic necessity. Yet speed alone will not guarantee a more just energy order. This is the inconvenient truth of Trump’s oil strategy. It has not only exposed the fragility of fossil-fuel dependence but also the rise of a new global division. The green transition could repeat the same hierarchies and power imbalances of the old energy system, just under a cleaner name. The question, then, is not whether the world will move from oil to renewables. It is whether the next energy order will break with the politics of coercion, extraction, and dependence that Trump is using now as liabilities.
Deborah Martínez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University studying how populist discourses frame sustainability. She was an OSUN Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and serves on BYU’s OPUS Steering Committee. Before academia, she worked as an international journalist for Nikkei, Russia Today, and TV Azteca.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
