We are entering an age of prolonged insecurity, the way a gray dawn creeps in before you know it’s morning. That phrase, spoken by a former United States energy official, wasn’t delivered with the drama of a wartime warning, but with the weary, matter-of-fact tone of someone who has watched too many briefing slides fill with red. It was a reflection on what have clearly become chronic threats to the Middle East’s energy core—lines that draw a map from the Arabian Gulf to the Red Sea, from Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field to the narrow Straits of Hormuz. For most of us, this map lives somewhere in the back of our minds, flickering into relevance only when we look at a gas pump or watch the evening news show a burning tanker. But for the handful of men and women who have spent their careers inside energy security, the map is always lit. They have seen the tables, the scenarios, the war games that never make it into public conversation. When one of them says we’re entering an age of prolonged insecurity, they’re not guessing. They’re remembering every conflict, every blockade, every embargo and drone strike that ever seemed like a one-off—and realizing together they form a pattern, not an exception.
What exactly does “prolonged insecurity” mean? It means we can no longer expect the old predictable rhythm of the oil age, where a handful of states, with a mixture of military might and diplomatic agreements, kept the crude flowing on a schedule. It means the assumption that underpinned the past seventy years—that even during crises there would be a handbrake, a backchannel, a moment where cooler heads prevailed—has worn thin. The Middle East’s energy core is the world’s beating heart, and that heart is no longer just threatened by big ideological wars or full-scale invasions. It’s threatened by chronic, low-grade friction: a missile landed on a facility here, a drone struck a pipeline there, a tanker’s GPS spoofed in the open sea, a refinery fire that takes months to repair. These aren’t events that require a general’s strategy or a nation’s war cabinet; they are the product of proxies, militias, and ideologically fueled groups who have learned that a single speedboat with a drone can move global markets in a way that armies never could. The fatigue among energy officials is understandable. They have traded the existential threat of an oil embargo by a single superpower for the persistent everyday anxiety of a thousand small cuts. And each cut, by itself, might seem manageable; accumulated, they redefine the entire landscape. War used to be a pause button. Today, the pause buttons are gone.
We should be clear about the geography, because it matters more than headlines suggest. The Strait of Hormuz, a sliver of water roughly twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest, carries about a fifth of the world’s oil consumption—maybe a quarter of its liquefied natural gas. On any given day, a ribbon of tankers slides through, each one tied to the economy of a distant country: heating oil for Seoul in winter, gasoline for Los Angeles commuters, jet fuel for a flight over Brazil. Around Hormuz, the shores touch Iran, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, and the waters are bristling with patrols, mine-detection gear, and, when tensions peak, aircraft carriers. Farther west, the Bab el-Mandeb strait links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, another choke point that, when threatened by Houthi missile fire from Yemen, can reroute the world’s shipping. And beneath all this lie the infrastructure marvels of the Arabian Peninsula: pipelines so massive they look like continents crawling across sand; processing plants that hum through the night; port terminals where a mooring line has more security than the gate of a small country. When officials talk about an age of prolonged insecurity, they are saying that all of this now lives in a permanent state of twilight—a reality that held its breath when a 2019 attack temporarily knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s production, that held its breath again when Houthi attacks in 2024 forced tankers to take the long way around Africa, and that will hold its breath many more times in the coming years.
Part of the problem is that the old stress absorbers have worn thin. For decades, the global oil system was cushioned by spare capacity—the ability of a few big producers to pump more quickly when disruptions occurred, like a shock absorber for the global economy. That cushion has shrunk, both because of underinvestment in new fields and because OPEC’s production decisions are now tangled in the politics of a hundred rivalries. Meanwhile, the threats have become more sophisticated and more diffuse. Remember the 2019 Abqaiq attack: a swarm of low-cost drones and cruise missiles, likely launched by Yemeni forces with Iranian support, struck the heart of Saudi oil processing, creating a fireball visible from space and momentarily wiping out more than five percent of the world’s daily oil supply. The market shuddered, prices spiked, and then, almost as if by a collective act of will, the world went back to focusing on celebrity gossip and sports scores. That is the signature of the age of prolonged insecurity: catastrophes that are big enough to alter the odds, but too scattered to hold our attention. A tanker might get seized one week, a pipeline might get bombed the next, and in between we adjust, because adjusting is easier than facing the alternative. None of these incidents leads to war by itself, yet they all lead nowhere. They simply persist, rotating like a playlist of regional anxieties.
For the ordinary person, all of this boils down to something far less abstract than geopolitics: the price you pay to drive to work, heat your home, or buy food. Transportation costs ripple through every product we touch; a disruption in the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t just affect people in Dubai or Tehran, it silently adds a few cents to your bread, your rent, your airplane ticket. It shifts the balance of power between nations, reshapes alliances, and forces governments to stockpile supplies the way their grandparents stocked hurricane provisions. In that sense, insecurity is personal. It’s the sense of queasiness an energy trader feels at 3 a.m. when a news alert buzzes from a phone; the worry of a small-business owner whose delivery fleet runs on diesel; the quiet anxiety of a policy analyst trying to guess how many more disruptions the global market can absorb before panic sets in. And behind every calculation lies a deeper human story: the Saudi engineer who fought the Abqaiq fire, the Iranian coast guard officer searching a cargo ship, the Yemeni fisherman watching a missile streak overhead, unsure if his home will be the next target. They didn’t ask to be at the center of world history, but they are. And the rest of us, however far away we live, are passengers on the same tanker, sailing through the same narrow strait, only we can’t see the water or the danger.
There is, however, a way out of the fog, and it’s not the one you might expect. The transition toward cleaner energy—wind, solar, electric vehicles, local battery storage—is partly about saving the climate, but it’s also about freeing ourselves from the geography of fear. When your power doesn’t depend on a pipeline that crosses three borders, and your car doesn’t depend on a barrel that sailed through a strait guarded by missiles, you have built a different kind of security: resilience through distribution. That doesn’t mean the transition will be easy, or that renewable systems are immune to sabotage and cyberattacks, or that the power of the region that still sits on hydrocarbons will vanish overnight. It simply means we should understand the energy transition as more than an environmental project; it is a security project, a peace project, a human project that puts the fate of our economy a little more in our own hands and a little less in the storms of the Middle East. The former official’s warning—that we are entering an age of prolonged insecurity—should not be met with fatalism. It should be met with the quiet determination of those who know that no age lasts forever, that the era of single chokepoints is giving way to a more complex world, and that, as a species, we have survived chronic threats before. The heart of the Middle East will keep beating, with its wounds and scars, and we will keep navigating those straits as long as we need to. But we can also make the choice to build a world where a missile over a desert refinery is no longer a reason to wake up at 3 a.m. That is the deeper message hidden inside the words: insecurity is our inheritance, but resilience is our work, and we are just starting to understand how much of it is within our reach.
