Three weeks into the Iran war, and the International Energy Agency has already declared that the energy asset disruption in the oil-rich Middle East is equivalent to the two major oil crises of the 1970s and the 2022 natural gas crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine put together. Worse, while the war started on February 28 with Israel and the US combining forces to decapitate Iran’s top leadership and defang its nuclear and missile prowess, it now threatens to include a wider arc of countries and become an all-out regional conflagration. The global economy has already taken a beating, with growth slowing down and inflation soaring, bringing back unhappy memories of the economic freefall that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered six years ago.
