Because in Iran it is not a “war for oil”, but for the governance of global flows.
Cover, via https://armenpress.am/en/article/1244340
Mattia Acerbo, The Ecosocialist via machine translation || For years, we’ve thought of the world of globalization as a smooth sphere: a planet now unified by trade, rights, free movement, markets, and international institutions. A homogeneous surface on which goods, capital, and individuals can move without friction, as if history, having reached its “end,” had finally found its natural form.
Liberal universalism has given this image its most powerful form. With its “universal rights,” it creates the figure of an equally universal individual, a subject who, wherever they are, spontaneously desires our lifestyle, our model of consumption, free elections, private autonomy, and legal recognition. The logic is that everyone is already, potentially, the same liberal individual we know; they just need to be freed from the cultural, political, or religious obstacles that prevent them from becoming fully so.
This universalization of the individual corresponded to an equally universal image of the world : a liberal-democratic order that offered itself as a neutral space of rights, markets, and free movement . This was the true smoothness of globalization: the ideological form of a capitalist universalism that elevated its own particular interests to the general destiny of humanity . Beneath the promise of the “free market” and universal openness, the hierarchies, dependencies, asymmetries, and the material force on which that order was based remained hidden.
What emerges, then, when the surface cracks?
The real background to the so-called “freedom of trade” and the “freedom of the seas” is emerging. Protected routes, fleets, insurance, bases, sanctions, blockades, corridors, and chokepoints are emerging . In a word, the armed circulation of capital is emerging . But these flows do not simply transport goods. They transport energy, fuel, grain, medicines: everything necessary for the continuity of daily life. Governing circulation does not simply mean controlling world trade, but intervening in the material conditions of social reproduction . The world market does not thrive on a spontaneous harmony of exchanges, since its unity must continually be organized, monitored, defended, and, when necessary, imposed with military force. In moments of crisis, in fact, what the business-as-usual of globalization made invisible bursts into full light: war and conflict, far from erupting from the outside, are integral parts of the functioning of the world market , one of the ways in which its material preconditions and balances are produced, defended, or restructured. Capital is a social relationship in motion that, to continue valorizing itself, must constantly produce, defend, and restructure its material prerequisites. This is why war does not simply destroy, but intervenes in the very conditions of circulation.
This is why Hormuz matters so much. Not only because a crucial portion of the world’s energy passes through it, but because the entire problem of fossil-fuel modernity is concentrated in that passage : the fact that the circulation of capital depends on a fragile , militarized, and constantly contested material geography. Striking, blocking, or guarding Hormuz, then, means not only intervening in an energy passage. It means acting on one of the material nodes through which fossil-fuel capitalism organizes accumulation, trade, and the reproduction of daily life on a global scale. Behind the apparent fluidity with which flows of goods, capital, and energy circulate, as if on a completely smooth, homogeneous sphere, the political striations that furrow the divisions of the world reemerge.
In a striated world, in fact, there is no geopolitics without political ecology, since every projection of power presupposes control of the material bases of life and the flows on which social reproduction depends.
Iran: wars for oil?
The most obvious and immediate thesis is also the most seductive: the United States is waging war on Iran over oil. At first glance, it seems almost self-imposed, since the theater of conflict coincides with one of fossil fuel capitalism’s most sensitive energy hubs. More than a quarter of the world’s maritime crude oil trade, approximately 20 million barrels per day, and approximately a fifth of global consumption of petroleum liquids, mostly destined for Asian markets, passes through Hormuz.
A first point is this: the United States does not depend on that oil. It imports barely 2% of its petroleum liquids through Hormuz: a modest share compared to the systemic weight that the strait exerts on the world market.
Yet the closure of Hormuz is not economically advantageous for the United States as a whole : crude oil is rising, along with American gasoline and the resulting inflation, from oil prices, which have soared above $100, to gasoline prices, which are up about 30–33%. In the short term, the crisis has even strengthened the dollar as a safe haven currency; in the medium term, however, it risks accelerating precisely what Washington fears most: the end of the dominance of the petrodollar .
The mechanism is relatively simple. World oil is purchased in dollars, which forces importing countries to accumulate reserves in US currency and recycle that liquidity into Treasury securities , thus financing the debt that supports the United States’ global military projection. If a growing number of countries began trading in yuan or rubles—a trend accelerated by the Hormuz crisis—that source of financing could become unsustainable, turning the “power of the dollar” against itself. A prolonged crisis would also push the Gulf countries, major investors in the US economy and in artificial intelligence data centers , to reduce investment to address the crisis, causing a financial bubble in some tech sectors . The combination of these factors—in addition to the complete lack of internal consensus, the country’s deep divisions, and the slim, if any, chances of a successful ground invasion by Iran—risks gradually leading to the Empire’s definitive collapse.
So why Iran?
The government of flows
The “war for oil” formula is completely inadequate to explain what we are experiencing, because it still suggests the overly simple image of a power waging war to seize a commodity it immediately needs. But it is precisely this image that must be questioned.
The United States, in fact, has no vital need for oil from Iran or any other country, since it is the world’s leading producer 1 .
So what does energy have to do with it?
Marx had grasped an essential problem when, reflecting on water and irrigation systems, he spoke of the “necessity of socially controlling a natural force, of using it with wise parsimony, of appropriating it or taming it on a large scale by the works of human hands”2. What is important here is not a simple analogy between water and oil, but the logic that Marx glimpses: the fact that social reproduction depends on the material government of the conditions of life andnatural forces.
In contemporary fossil capitalism, this logic involves oil as a system of circulation: straits, sea routes, ports, pipelines, fleets, insurance companies, military bases, and financial mechanisms that enable its global flow. What’s at stake is not the simple “possession” of a raw material, but the political control of the conditions of its circulation.
The closure of Hormuz plays a key role, not because it directly involves the United States, but because it concerns one of the main arteries of the Gulf’s oil metabolism , and, with it, a decisive portion of global energy circulation.
Indeed, US dominance continues to be played out precisely in the political-military control of infrastructure, hubs, routes, and more generally, the conditions of capital circulation , on which the global energy market also depends. Precisely for this reason, however, the United States intervenes, not as a resource-hungry power, but as an armed guarantor of the global energy order .
In this sense, Hormuz is important, yes, as a hub or a passage. But even more so as a lever on the fossil metabolism of capital . 3 It is a decisive bottleneck in which geography immediately converts into control, and control becomes power over the flow, prices, insurance, and the very continuity of global material reproduction . Those who influence Hormuz don’t just touch a peripheral point of the system—they seize one of its exposed nerves.
A clear example of this is in the insurance field. While war-risk insurance premiums have exploded—with increases exceeding 1,000%, in some cases reaching 7.5-10% of the value of each vessel—Washington has sought to transform insurance into a tool of political control . The US government agency, the International Development Finance Corporation, has announced a $20 billion transit insurance plan, in collaboration with several private companies. In practice, anyone wishing to pass through the Strait under American protection must enter a political, military, and financial system guaranteed by Washington.
The insurance model is not a purely “technical” or “market” solution to the crisis, but embodies a specific policy of managing flows, which follows the bisectors drawn by a specific architecture of power . The United States is not defending an abstract “freedom of navigation” or trade: it is attempting to bring global energy traffic back under its control , acting both as guarantor and arbiter of its passage.
It is in this context that the Iranian problem arises. Tehran, by threatening a blockade, transforms transit into a politically conditioned one: it controls who passes through the Strait and to which markets, allowing passage only to “non-hostile ” vessels in coordination with its authorities. One example of this is Iran’s willingness to allow Spanish vessels to pass, presenting Madrid as an interlocutor respectful of international law: a revealing signal because it reveals the underlying logic of this strategy. The Revolutionary Guard is imposing its own conditions on the circulation of flows: asserting its ability to influence passage, to impose conditions, to subordinate transit through a strategic area to its own economic and political-military initiative. And this is precisely what Washington cannot tolerate : that passage through a crucial hub of the global market escapes its control and becomes subordinated to the initiative of a hostile regional power.
This is why the war against Iran is about oil, of course, but above all it’s about control over the arteries through which capital’s fossil metabolism continues to flow. At its core, fossil capitalism is a historical form of capital that transforms the planet into the infrastructure of its own circulation and, when this circulation enters crisis, defends it with all the means at its disposal—political, financial, and military. Capital seeks not only resources: it seeks the power to govern the flows on which its continued valorization depends.
Iraq offers an exemplary precedent in this regard. The first and second Gulf Wars, often considered “resource wars” par excellence , cannot be reduced to the simple direct appropriation of oil. There, too, the United States did not simply “take the oil,” but influenced the political, military, and contractual conditions of its extraction and circulation. The war devastated crucial infrastructure, restricting extraction capacity and disrupting an already obsolete and failing production system. The form of control imposed on the Iraqi economy was even more profound: while much of the oil sector remained formally under state control, the bulk of Iraqi oil revenues continue (to this day) to pass through an account held by the Central Bank of Iraq at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York . This structure, established after 2003, has given Washington practical and financial influence over one of the key pillars of Iraq’s state revenues, intricately tying its economy to externally imposed political, financial, and military conditions. More than mere physical possession of the resource, what emerges here is control over the conditions of its flow, its valorization, and its subordination to a precise international hierarchy.
Without understanding this, we cannot comprehend what is happening in Cuba or Venezuela, nor the sanctions against Russia. These scenarios are parts of a single global mosaic, in which embargoes, sanctions regimes, and flow controls combine in the increasingly armed governance of the global market.
From Venezuela to Cuba: The Geography of Control over Human Flows
We all remember January 3, 2026, when before dawn, US special forces stormed the presidential compound in Caracas. Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were loaded onto a helicopter and flown to New York to appear before a federal court on narcoterrorism charges , and Trump declared that the United States would “run the country” until an orderly transition was possible. But following the official narrative of a “war on dictators” and “narcoterrorism” is misleading: you have to follow the oil trail to understand what really happened.
After the beheading of the leader of a hostile country, Washington immediately assumed political control of Venezuelan oil flows . With the exception of tankers chartered by Chevron and a few other foreign giants in collaboration with the state-owned company PDV, almost no crude oil has moved from Venezuela’s main ports without Washington’s authorization . A general license from the U.S. Treasury authorized U.S. companies to buy, sell, transport, store, and refine Venezuelan oil—but explicitly excluded any entity, state or private, linked to China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Cuba. The message is clear: Venezuelan oil still exists, but it will only circulate within a perimeter defined by the United States, to recipients Washington approves, and through channels Washington controls.
Here the dual nature of power over flows emerges . It expresses the exercise of a positive power: the ability to draw on the resources of others, to direct a flow of raw materials toward oneself or one’s allies that would otherwise follow other routes. But it also expresses the reality of a negative power , one that operates by subtraction : the ability to sever the arteries connecting an enemy country to the world market, to the point of determining its political and civil fate. The first was exercised on Venezuela. The second on Cuba—in the form of a brutality almost unprecedented in the modern history of the blockade .
In Cuba, which relies on imports for over 90 percent of its electricity generation, the crisis quickly escalated into a civil and humanitarian catastrophe. For over twenty years, Venezuelan oil—between 30,000 and 35,000 barrels a day—had covered about half of its chronic energy deficit . In early January, the Trump administration ended shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil to Cuba, which had kept the country afloat since the early 2000s. Within weeks, the United States began blocking oil tankers bound for Cuba, also targeting Mexico’s Pemex and threatening tariffs on countries that refused to comply. On January 29, an executive order declared a national emergency and authorized the imposition of additional tariffs on any country exporting oil to the island—directly or indirectly.
The mechanism is that of secondary sanctions : “if you trade with Cuba, you won’t trade with us.” The principle is the construction of a cordon sanitaire around a country, imposed through American economic force on the rest of the world market. Even when Washington opened a valve—at the end of February it issued a license authorizing companies to resell Venezuelan oil to the Cuban private sector—it did so with surgical precision: only for the private sector , explicitly excluding anything involving the government, the state, and the armed forces. Washington doesn’t simply say “no to oil”: it dictates which flows are permitted, for whom, under what license, and through what careful political mediation .
The effects on the island were immediate and devastating. Garbage piled up in the streets of the capital, hospital admissions and surgical operations were limited, people used wood fires to heat water, and blackouts became the norm. In March 2026, Cuba’s national electricity grid collapsed: 64% of the island was left without electricity, with outages lasting up to twenty hours a day. During the worst weeks, only 5% of Havana residents had power. Three total blackouts occurred on the island in just a few weeks. Cuban authorities claim they have not received a single shipment of fuel in three months.
One detail deserves a footnote. Among the victims of the January 3 U.S. military operation in Caracas were thirty-two Cuban security guards. For decades, Cuba had been sending doctors, technicians, and security personnel to Venezuela in exchange for oil—an axis of solidarity and mutual dependence.
Those same Cuban doctors have been working in our Calabrian hospitals since the Covid era . American diplomat Mike Hammer has explicitly asked the Italian government to terminate those cooperation agreements and repatriate the Cuban staff. This, too, is controlling flows: not just of oil, but of manpower, people, skills, networks of alliances, and international solidarity.
The point isn’t that Cuba “lacks energy.” The point is the political dependence on a supply corridor that can be opened or closed from the outside, at the discretion of a foreign power. This demonstrates that the enemy isn’t struck down with bombs alone: it’s strangled by severing the arteries that connect it to the world market. The embargo on Cuba has lasted since 1962—one of the longest in modern history—but never before has it produced such rapid and targeted asphyxiation as that made possible by the simultaneous control of the Venezuelan hub.
Venezuela, Cuba, Hormuz: three seemingly distant scenarios, three parts of a single mosaic. In each, the phenomenon is the same: imposing the conditions of circulation. Whoever decides who can receive what, under what conditions, and through what channels, exercises a form of power that requires neither the occupation of territories nor the governance of populations. Controlling the flow of oil, energy, or supplies—as is immediately visible in Cuba—in addition to influencing the economy, establishes who holds the power to decide which territories can continue to live, produce, be cared for, and reproduce, and which can instead be strangled to the point of poverty and death. It is in this sense that contemporary war affects what we have defined—following Marx—as the social metabolism : not only because it destroys, but because it politically articulates the very conditions of life . It is enough to hold the valves in its hands.
Newsletter by Mattia Acerbo, researcher in political philosophy and critical theory at the University of Potsdam. His work focuses on Marx’s critique of contemporary capitalism, with particular attention to the ecological crisis and the transformation of the global market.
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Footnotes
1 The United States does not directly and immediately depend on Iranian oil. Let’s look at the data: in terms of overall energy, in 2024 it produced 103.31 quadrillion BTUs and consumed 94.21, confirming its position as a net energy exporter. In the same year, it was also the world’s leading crude oil producer, with 13.2 million barrels per day. As for the Strait of Hormuz, in the first half of 2025, the United States received just 2% of its petroleum liquids consumption. In general, the United States, rich in oil and raw materials, unlike many Asian or European countries, is almost entirely self-sufficient in energy.
2 Karl Marx, Capital – Book I.
3 It is in this sense that I use the concept of social metabolism here. In Marx, it designates the material relationship mediated by labor between society and nature: the process through which human beings regulate, transform, and reproduce the conditions of their lives. But under capitalism, this relationship takes on a further scale. The flows of energy, goods, grain, water, credit, fuel, and infrastructure compose a global metabolism of capital, in which the local and the global are not separate levels, but moments of the same unequal totality . This is why control of a seemingly circumscribed node, like Hormuz, can radiate far beyond its immediate space: not because everything is indiscriminately connected to everything else ( “the flap of a butterfly’s wings causes a hurricane on the other side of the world” ) , but because every decisive point of the world market is inserted into a network of dependencies, mediations, and repercussions that amplify its effects on the whole.
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