Jet Fuel, Hormuz, and the Shadow of a New World Order

Global markets often reveal geopolitical reality faster than political speeches do. In recent weeks, the sharp rise in jet fuel prices has become one of the clearest signals that the conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran is already rippling through the world economy. Airlines are recalculating operating costs, shipping insurers are raising premiums and energy traders are watching the Persian Gulf with growing anxiety.

The reason is simple: the Strait of Hormuz.
Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply moves through this narrow waterway, making it one of the most strategically important chokepoints in global commerce. Any threat to shipping in Hormuz immediately reverberates through energy markets. The current conflict has already pushed traders to price in the possibility of supply disruptions, and the consequences are being felt far beyond the Middle East.

For countries like South Africa, the consequences are immediate. Rising fuel prices ripple through transport costs, aviation, shipping, food supply chains, and inflation. The South African economy, already navigating structural challenges and currency volatility, is particularly vulnerable to energy shocks originating far beyond its borders. Every surge in fuel prices squeezes consumers, strains logistics networks, and increases the cost of doing business across the entire economy.

But behind the spike in energy markets lies a deeper geopolitical shift.
Iran now finds itself under new leadership following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei earlier in the conflict. His successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has emerged in a moment of extraordinary instability, inheriting a country under military pressure and regional scrutiny. More importantly, he represents a generation of Iranian leadership that many analysts believe is less restrained about pursuing nuclear capability as a strategic deterrent.

That possibility has raised alarm across the region and beyond.
Military analysts studying the conflict have long warned that war with Iran is unlikely to unfold like earlier U.S. interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan. One of the most influential voices on this issue is Professor Robert A. Pape, a leading scholar of airpower and coercive strategy at the University of Chicago.

Through strategic simulations and historical comparisons, Pape has repeatedly argued that air strikes alone cannot decisively defeat Iran or dismantle its nuclear ambitions.

Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is designed to survive precisely such attacks. Facilities such as the Fordow enrichment site are buried deep inside mountainous terrain, making them extremely difficult to destroy. Even if physical infrastructure were damaged, the scientific knowledge and technological expertise required to rebuild cannot be bombed away.

In Pape’s modelling, a war with Iran would likely evolve into a prolonged asymmetric conflict.
Rather than confronting the United States directly in conventional battles, Iran would rely on a combination of missile strikes, drone attacks, naval disruption in the Persian Gulf, and proxy forces operating across the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Syria, and armed groups across the region would become extensions of the battlefield.

In other words, escalation risks spreading conflict across multiple theaters while destabilizing the global energy system.
Which brings us back to the broader question: why does the world seem to enter these moments of upheaval just as the balance of global power begins to shift?

To explore that question, it is worth revisiting a controversial book published more than two decades ago. In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, former consultant John Perkins described what he claimed was a quiet system of influence used by powerful states and corporations to secure access to resources and geopolitical leverage.

According to Perkins, the process worked in stages.
First came the economists and consultants, the so-called “economic hit men” who persuaded developing countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure projects that promised growth but often left nations trapped in debt. When countries could not repay those loans, they became politically dependent, granting access to resources, military facilities, or diplomatic support.

If economic pressure failed, the next stage involved political destabilization or covert intervention.
Only in the final stage, Perkins claimed, did military force appear.
Whether one accepts Perkins’ account fully or not, the broader pattern he describes echoes a deeper historical truth about global power. Wars rarely emerge in isolation. They occur at moments when systems of influence, control and legitimacy begin to strain.

And the current international order is evidently- under strain.
For nearly three decades after the Cold War ended, the world operated under what scholars called a unipolar system dominated by the United States. American military power, financial influence, and global alliances created an order that appeared stable, if imperfect.

But history rarely allows such dominance to remain permanent.
China’s rise has transformed the global political economy more dramatically than any development since World War II.

Through manufacturing power, technological expansion, and global infrastructure investment, most notably through the Belt and Road Initiative. China has created economic relationships that stretch across continents.

For many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, this has created something that did not previously exist: alternatives to Western-led development systems.
Alternatives disrupt power structures.
And when power structures feel threatened, uncertainty often follows.
That uncertainty does not always take the form of open war. It can manifest through economic pressure, technological competition, narrative warfare, and political polarisation.

Even cultural debates can become geopolitical instruments.
Consider the recurring international narrative that South Africa is experiencing a “white genocide.” Despite being rejected by courts, researchers, and official crime statistics, the claim continues to circulate globally. South Africa’s Constitutional Court ruled that the struggle song “Kill the Boer” must be interpreted within its historical context as part of the anti-apartheid movement rather than a literal call to violence.

Yet stripped of that context, the song is frequently presented abroad as evidence of racial persecution.
Why does such a narrative persist?
Because narratives travel faster than facts in moments of geopolitical tension. Domestic political conflicts in strategically important countries can quickly become symbols within larger ideological battles.

South Africa, like many middle powers, finds itself navigating a delicate balance between competing global forces. As a member of BRICS+, it participates in institutions seeking to reshape global economic governance. At the same time, it maintains deep economic and diplomatic ties with Western powers.
Moments of global transition make such balancing acts increasingly complicated.

History suggests that major world orders rarely fade quietly. The collapse of the old European system after World War I produced the unstable Versailles settlement. The devastation of World War II produced the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. The Cold War’s end produced the U.S.-led order that dominated the late twentieth century.

Now that order appears to be shifting once again.
The spike in jet fuel prices may seem like a narrow economic detail, but it is in fact an early signal of something much larger. Energy markets, military tensions, nuclear deterrence debates, and strategic narratives are converging in ways that suggest the global system is entering a new phase of uncertainty.

When empires sense the ground shifting beneath them, history shows they rarely remain calm.
The real question facing the world today is whether the transition now underway will lead to renewed cooperation or whether it will follow the darker patterns that have so often accompanied the birth of new global orders.