Dr Roberto Roccu examines how the Iran war is reshaping the global energy transition, geopolitics, fossil fuels and renewable energy.
This guest post is by Dr Roberto Roccu, Programme Director for the online Global Political Economy MA at King’s College London.
Iran’s effective closure of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz during the US-Israeli war, and the renewed US attacks after the unravelling of the ceasefire and the Memorandum of Understanding, have demonstrated the continuing importance of fossil fuels to the global economy.
Oil supply was severely disrupted, with the International Energy Agency reporting in May that Gulf output was 14.4 million barrels per day below pre-war levels. Brent futures, the main benchmark for oil price, held up, but the Strait disruption went well beyond oil markets, affecting liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows, manufacturing global value chains, shipping insurance, and inflation expectations. If anything, the resumption of attacks has reinforced the point: the war is not only a geopolitical or military crisis, but also a crisis of the infrastructures through which energy, trade, and production are organised globally.
This reaffirmation of the continuing importance of fossil fuels in the global economy occurred after a decade in which renewable energy sources expanded at remarkable speed. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reports that renewable power capacity increased respectively by 15.1% and 15.5% in 2024 and 2025, with renewables accounting for nearly half of global power capacity by the end of 2025.
This explains why governments, international organisations, and commentators typically speak of an ‘energy transition’. The question, then, is whether the war on Iran, the attempted settlement, and the current escalation will affect the rise of renewables, and what this will mean not only for the global energy mix, but also for the future of a US hegemony that has historically been powered by fossil fuels.
There is no shortage of views on these topics. Some stress the inflationary effects of war in a major global energy hub. Others have presented the war on Iran as the clearest indication of imperial overstretching. Others still have suggested that the fossil-fuel disruption would result in an accelerated global rush towards greener energy, accompanied by the rise of an ‘electric world order’, in Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay’s formulation.
Each of these positions captures a crucial element, but even when taken together they fail to cohere into an integrated account that connects these political, economic, and technological dynamics. This is where the cross-disciplinary orientation of our online MA in Global Political Economy becomes especially useful.
How can Global Political Economy help us understand the Iran war and energy transition?
In our online MA in Global Political Economy, we understand GPE not so much as a single discipline itself, but rather as a field of inquiry one can approach from different angles, including most notably International Relations, social, history, geography, political economy, and more. This is especially useful when analysing how a war might reshape long-term socio-economic and technological transformations. A GPE approach helps us connect four dimensions too often studied separately: history, geography, markets, and power.
1. Is the world really transitioning away from fossil fuels?
GPE is sensitive to history. This allows us to see how all too often we tend to uncritically accept notion of an energy transition. Historically, the rise of new energy sources has resulted in an aggregate increase of the total energy consumed. This could be considered an extension of Jevons’ paradox: efficiency gains in using a resource typically increase its total consumption. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in a capitalist world economy, which demands ‘more and more and more’, as argued by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in a highly influential book. In this respect, it might be more appropriate to speak of ‘energy additions’ rather than transitions.
2. Why is the Strait of Hormuz so important to the global economy?
GPE draws from geography. The emergence of global value chains has made geography not less but rather more important. This is why logistics, while in origin primarily a military field, has become central to how businesses and corporations operate. In turn, this has produced a geopolitics and geoeconomics of chokepoints of which the Strait of Hormuz is arguably the clearest example. Only about 30 miles wide at its narrowest point, the Strait is systemically important, since around 25-30% of seaborne oil and 20% of global LNG transits through it. Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab, Suez are not just places on a map, but points where the abstract world market becomes physically vulnerable. In this respect, Iran’s actions have exploited this uneven geography of global capitalism from a position of subordination shaped by decades of sanctions.
3. Who benefits from the energy transition?
GPE does not take markets for granted. Global political economy entails asking the cui bono question, which in turn means looking at who does what and addressing dynamics of power, including corporate power in specific markets. In the case of renewables, for instance, the question is not only whether specific technologies such as solar panels or wind turbines are materially available, but also who owns, finances, and profits from their large-scale diffusion.
Major fossil-fuel companies such as Shell, BP and TotalEnergies have all presented themselves as important actors in the energy transition. Yet, this also means that they can adjust their corporate strategy when oil and gas look more profitable than renewables, as visible in the post-2024 retrenchment of several European oil majors from their ambitious renewable energy plans.
Hence, it might be too facile to assume that the war on Iran, even as it escalates again, will result in an accelerated adoption of renewables: an energy crisis may make renewables more attractive to states and consumers, but it may also strengthen fossil incumbents, increase their revenues as well as their political influence, and intensify lobbying against less profitable clean-energy infrastructures such as grids and storage.
4. Will renewable energy reshape global power and geopolitics?
GPE centres power. GPE’s attention to power helps us resist imagining renewables as geopolitics-free. A more electrified world is still a world of strategic dependencies that could be ‘weaponised’. China accounts for around 85% of solar PV and 80% of lithium-ion battery supply-chain production capacity, and it has overseen a dramatic concentration in the refining and processing of critical minerals.
The United States, in response, has largely revived an ‘energy dominance’ agenda centred on fossil fuels, and hence the expansion of oil, gas, coal, and LNG frontiers, especially visible in Latin America. This is why the ‘electric world order’ provocation requires some caution: the rise of renewables may weaken some forms of fossil power, but it also creates new tensions and hierarchies around which minerals are extracted, which forms of manufacturing are pursued, how they are financed, what type of policies support or obstruct them, and so on.
What does the Iran war mean for the future of the global energy transition?
The rise of renewables in a world still organised around fossil fuels is therefore not a technological inevitability, but rather a contested politico-economic process. As the renewed escalation of the war on Iran shows, military conflict can unsettle oil prices, LNG flows, manufacturing supply chains, inflation expectations, and more.
It can also accelerate calls for electrification, clean technologies, and energy sovereignty. However, who benefits from this acceleration, who bears its costs, and how this reconfigures global hierarchies depends on struggles across multiple scales, involving states, corporations, international organisations, investors, consumers, and more.
This is precisely what Global Political Economy helps us understand. Rather than treating energy as a technical sector separate from politics, the online MA in Global Political Economy at King’s equips students with the theoretical and empirical tools to connect history, geography, markets, power, and inequality, and to analyse the real-world crises through which the global economy is being remade.
