Introduction This is a follow-up to my previous piece on the economic effects of the Persian Gulf sulfur and urea cutoff. In that piece I argued that the public conversation about the Strait of Hormuz has fixated on crude oil and ignored the other commodities the Gulf supplies: LNG, urea, sulfur and helium. Having covered...

On the morning of September 30, flydubai flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, left Dubai for Tel Aviv with 174 passengers aboard, 27 of them children. About two and a half hours into the flight, the first officer attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. The aircraft dropped roughly 17,000 feet in one...

For seven months, the coverage of the war with Iran has been about oil: tanker counts, the price of Brent, how much is left in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Hardly anyone outside the fertilizer trade has noticed that the Strait of Hormuz also carries close to half of the world’s seaborne sulfur. Sulfur is not...

Benjamin Netanyahu likes to translate Israel’s grief into American. At the United Nations last month, he took the dead of October 7 and multiplied them by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s. The 1,200 Israelis killed that day, he said, were “equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 […]

The global economic damage caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is generally not understood by most policymakers. Public and policy discussion of the Strait of Hormuz closure has fixated on crude oil: tanker counts, Brent prices, strategic petroleum reserves. That focus is understandable, but it misses much of the damage. The Persian...

Benjamin Netanyahu likes to translate Israel’s grief into American. At the United Nations last month, he took the dead of October 7 and multiplied them by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s. The 1,200 Israelis killed that day, he said, were “equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16...

Benjamin Netanyahu has a talent for round numbers, and for knowing which audience gets which one. On the night of October 17, 2024, after Israeli soldiers stumbled on Yahya Sinwar in Rafah and killed him, the prime minister recorded two statements. In Hebrew, he called Sinwar the mass murderer “who murdered thousands of Israelis.” In...

Benjamin Netanyahu has a talent for round numbers, and for knowing which audience gets which one. On the night of October 17, 2024, after Israeli soldiers stumbled on Yahya Sinwar in Rafah and killed him, the prime minister recorded two statements. In Hebrew, he called Sinwar the mass murderer “who murdered thousands of Israelis.” In...

Donald Trump would like you to know that the Strait of Hormuz is in tremendous shape. Possibly the best shape in its history. On September 27, he told reporters that “last night, we took a record amount of oil out of the Hormuz Strait, more than we took out before the war.” Three days later...

Con Coughlin’s September 30 column in the Telegraph tells readers that Vladimir Putin’s decision to raise defense spending is a “desperate gamble” that could end with Russia following the Soviet Union into economic collapse. It is a familiar story. Western commentators have been predicting Russia’s economic implosion since the first sanctions packages in 2022. What...

Once again I am indebted to Karl W. Miller, whose analysis of the energy crisis unleashed by the war with Iran has become essential reading for me. Karl has a habit of seeing around corners. He anticipated the Houthi push in southern Yemen back in July, well before it made headlines, and his recent work...

On paper, the United States should be the world’s safety valve in this fuel crisis. American refineries make far more diesel than Americans burn. But every one of those barrels is already spoken for. Between rising domestic demand, heavy export commitments and refineries running near their limit, the U.S. is drawing down its own stocks,...

Since March 2026, a string of fires and explosions has hit European companies that supply Ukraine’s war effort. Some circulating accounts, including a widely shared video (Borzzikman), have inflated this into a campaign of bombings leveling munitions plants across the continent, including in Romania, France and Britain. The documented record is narrower, but still significant:...