If you have followed my blog, you will realise that I don’t usually write about politics. Then again, since we are not immune to the dirty politics of the World, I just had to write what I am witnessing around me.
I’m writing this from a restaurant that’s serving its menu in halves. Not because business is slow, not because there’s a staff shortage, but because the cooking gas hasn’t arrived. The owner is confused. He doesn’t know when it will.
Somewhere in Washington, a decision was made. A war was authorised. Whether that decision was driven by strategic calculus, domestic distraction, or something darker being quietly walked through file cabinets, nobody fully knows. What we do know is what that decision looks like from the ground: a motorcyclist in Dhaka queuing for fuel twice a day. A family in Gorakhpur cooking on firewood at 3 a.m. A restaurant in India serving half its menu because the gas didn’t show up.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant chunk of the world’s energy supply moves, has slowed to a near standstill. India imports roughly 85% of its LPG from this route. When the strait gets complicated, the ripple doesn’t take long.
What’s striking isn’t the fact that wars disrupt supply chains, because they always do. What’s striking is how completely the cost is separated from the decision. The person who authorised the military action will never wait in a fuel queue. The cabinet that debated the offensive will not be cooking on firewood. The financial and political machine running the war, estimated to be burning through nearly $900 million a day, is insulated from every rupee that ordinary people are now paying as a surcharge on daily life.
This is the quiet architecture of economic failure that nobody really wants to name. It’s not war as tragedy, it’s war as externality. The costs don’t disappear, they just get redistributed, down the economic ladder, across the global south, landing hardest on people with the least ability to absorb them.
South Korea imposed its first fuel cap in nearly three decades. The Philippines moved to a four-day workweek. Thailand is asking government workers to stay home. Pakistan has shut schools. These aren’t responses to a natural disaster or a pandemic. They’re the downstream consequence of a single military decision made in a country whose citizens, by and large, will not skip a meal over it.
The International Energy Agency has done what it can, releasing 400 million barrels from emergency stockpiles, the largest such release on record. The UN has warned of catastrophic consequences. These are the instruments of a system trying to contain damage it wasn’t built to prevent.
And that’s the real failure here. Not just the war, but the economic architecture that allows the impact of war to be so cleanly offshored. There is no mechanism, no institution, no treaty that ensures the people who bear the cost have any say in the decision. The system isn’t broken in the sense of malfunctioning. It’s working exactly as designed. Some decisions get made by a few (or just one man), and the consequences get distributed among billions.
Back at the restaurant, the owner tells me he’s called his supplier three times. He’s been told there’s a shortage. He doesn’t know why. He just knows the gas isn’t there.
He’s not angry at any government. He doesn’t know who to be angry at. That, too, is part of the design.
