Is the Global Energy Crisis a Grand Strategy? A Sceptic’s Reading

Analysis · Geopolitics & Supply Chain

Is the global energy crisis a grand strategy? A sceptic reads the board.

We are a packaging manufacturer in Nairobi. We make woven polypropylene sacks, bulk bags, and laminated packaging. Our raw material is polypropylene resin derived from oil. So when the world’s energy map is redrawn, we pay attention — not because we are geopolitical analysts, but because we are operators and what happens in the Strait of Hormuz lands on our cost sheet within weeks.

A piece of analysis circulating on X, written by entrepreneur and investor Martin Varsavsky, stopped us. We are not endorsing it. We are not certain it is correct. But it is coherent enough, and internally consistent enough, that we think it deserves to be read carefully — and then tested against the counterarguments. What follows is that exercise.

The thesis: four moves, one endgame

Five years ago, the global energy market had multiple suppliers of scale. Russia supplied Europe with 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually through pipelines operating for decades. Iran and Venezuela sold heavy crude to China outside the dollar financial system. Qatar supplied roughly a fifth of the world’s LNG from Ras Laffan. China was building overland energy corridors through Iran, Iraq, and Syria designed to bypass the maritime chokepoints controlled by the US Navy. When a buyer has options, the seller has no power.

Varsavsky’s argument is that what followed was not a series of separate crises, but a deliberate sequence of moves eliminating those options one by one.

Move one: Europe. The Ukraine conflict provided justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas deliveries to Europe. Nord Stream was then destroyed — permanently eliminating any route back. The United States went from supplying 28% of Europe’s LNG in 2021 to approximately 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million metric tons. This is confirmed by independent data. The Petroleum Economist, writing before the current conflict began, described LNG as “a key instrument in the global geopolitical arena” and noted that the EU — which imported 150 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually in 2021 — is now projected to import over 140 billion cubic meters of LNG in 2025, with around 60% of that originating from the US. Europe went from a customer with alternatives to a captive market purchasing its energy security in dollars. The US ScienceDirect research corroborates this, noting that investigations have led final responsibility for the Nord Stream destruction to the US administration.

Move two: Syria. The fall of Assad severed the land corridor connecting Iran and Iraq to the Mediterranean — the backbone of China’s Belt and Road overland energy bypass route. Whether this was engineered or opportunistic, the effect was the same: China’s overland alternative to maritime chokepoints was eliminated.

Move three: Venezuela. The United States moved to effectively take control of Venezuela’s oil sector in early 2026. Venezuela holds the world’s largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast refining complex — Phillips 66, Valero, and others — was built specifically to process this type of heavy sour crude. Venezuela and Iran were the two major oil supply channels operating outside the dollar system, both selling primarily to China. Both are being neutralised within 90 days of each other.

Move four: Iran and the current Middle East shock. Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field. Iran retaliated, including against Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex. The Strait of Hormuz has been largely closed. The only remaining scaled supplier of LNG to global markets is the United States. The EIA confirmed in its March 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook that reduced LNG flows through the Strait of Hormuz have caused gas prices in Europe and Asia to increase, while US domestic gas prices “are expected to be relatively unaffected.” That asymmetry — the world pays more, America pays less — is precisely what Varsavsky describes as the architecture of dominance.

The layer beneath the energy story: AI compute and the civilisational endgame

Varsavsky’s most provocative argument is not about oil. It is about artificial intelligence. AI data centres require massive, uninterrupted baseload electricity — primarily provided by natural gas. By choking the Strait of Hormuz and crippling Middle Eastern LNG production, the argument goes, the United States is degrading China’s ability to power its AI compute infrastructure at scale. The United States is energy self-sufficient and increasingly drawing on Venezuelan reserves and Gulf Coast capacity. China is import-dependent, and every joule it imports now transits chokepoints controlled by the US Navy.

This is not as far-fetched as it might first appear. Brookings, in January 2026, wrote explicitly that “the AI race is fundamentally an energy race” and that China has a significant advantage in energy — an advantage that is now under structural pressure from the supply shock. A Fox Business analysis concluded that “in order to win the AI race, you must win the power race” — with natural gas projected to meet 60% of AI data centre power demand growth in the near term. The Stanford Review noted that China’s AI ambitions depend on cheap and abundant energy, and that dependency is precisely what the Hormuz closure is attacking.

Now the scepticism — where the thesis has holes

We find the thesis intellectually compelling. We also find it incomplete in ways that matter.

China has a renewable energy hedge the thesis underweights. China spent USD 625 billion on renewable energy in 2024 — more than the US and EU combined. It leads global solar and wind manufacturing. The World Economic Forum noted in December 2025 that China has “cemented its status as the world’s clean energy powerhouse.” A country building 30 gigawatts of nuclear capacity — over half of the world’s current nuclear construction pipeline — is not a country that can be easily stranded by a gas supply shock. China’s AI data centres are increasingly running on domestic solar, wind, and nuclear, not just imported LNG. The thesis assumes China is more gas-dependent than it may actually be in two to three years.

Russia remains China’s energy lifeline — and the thesis has not closed that route. The Petroleum Economist’s 2026 outlook noted that China has essentially ceased importing US LNG following tariffs, and has instead deepened its reliance on Russian pipeline gas and Arctic LNG. OilPrice.com’s analysis of China’s 2026 energy strategy confirmed that Russia figures prominently in China’s energy security planning, supplying oil via pipelines across shared borders and LNG from the Arctic via the Northern Sea Route — a route that bypasses every chokepoint the US Navy controls. The Power of Siberia pipeline is expanding. The Power of Siberia 2 is under negotiation. The Russia-China energy corridor is not broken. The thesis’s claim that China faces a closed Malacca Trap with no bypass is questionable while this corridor exists.

The domestic cost to America may be higher than the thesis admits. US LNG export expansion is tightening domestic supply. Pre-conflict energy analysts forecast that natural gas prices could be 60% higher in the US in 2026 compared to 2024 — not because of the conflict, but because of the structural diversion of gas to export markets. If the hypothesis is that America is seizing global energy dominance as a geopolitical weapon, it is doing so with real domestic consequences that any democratic government must eventually account for.

Grand strategy requires a level of coordination that governments rarely achieve. The thesis implies that Nord Stream, the fall of Assad, Venezuela, and the Iran conflict are a coherent four-move sequence orchestrated by a single strategic hand. The simpler explanation — that these are separate crises, each with its own internal logic, that happen to benefit US energy exporters — cannot be dismissed. Outcomes that benefit a powerful actor do not necessarily imply that the actor caused them. The US has undeniably benefited from each of these events. Whether it engineered them is a different question, and one the available evidence does not definitively answer.

What we think is probably true

The complete conspiracy version — a single architect moving four pieces across a board in a perfect sequence — probably overstates the coherence of any government’s actual decision-making. Governments do not typically operate with that level of coordinated foresight across five-year timescales.

But the opportunistic version is harder to dismiss. The United States does have a well-documented “energy dominance” doctrine — it is official policy, not speculation. The previous Trump administration articulated a policy framework centred on “energy dominance,” prioritising the unfettered production and export of fossil fuels, using LNG exports as a diplomatic tool to reinforce alliances and reduce the leverage of competing powers. When events happen to align with that doctrine — each crisis eliminating an alternative supplier and directing buyers toward US product — the question of whether those events were planned, enabled, or simply exploited becomes less important than the outcome. The outcome is the same regardless of the mechanism.

What we are probably watching is not a grand conspiracy but something more mundane and more durable: a powerful actor with a clear strategic interest, operating in an environment where chaos repeatedly produces outcomes that happen to serve that interest, and making sure it is positioned to capture those outcomes each time. That is not the same as orchestrating the chaos. But it produces similar results on a spreadsheet.

What this means if you are a business in East Africa

Whether the thesis is correct or not, the operational reality for any business in Kenya or East Africa is the same. The era of multiple supplier options for energy and energy-derived commodities — oil, resin, fertilizer, chemicals — is over for now. The surviving scaled supplier is pricing into a market with fewer alternatives. LNG infrastructure requires long-term contracts and regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. This is not a temporary market disruption. It is a structural repricing of the global energy system, and East Africa — as a net energy importer, buyer of PP resin, consumer of fertilizers, and dependent on fuel for every mile of logistics — sits downstream of all of it.

The question for us as a manufacturer, and for our customers, is not who caused this. The question is how long it lasts, how far the price moves before it stabilises, and whether the businesses on the receiving end planned for it or were caught by it. Varsavsky’s framework, right or wrong in its attribution, is correct in one thing: the world that existed five years ago, where a buyer had options, is gone. Operating as if it is coming back in the next quarter is the most expensive mistake available.

Sources: Martin Varsavsky, original analysis (X, April 2026); Petroleum Economist, “Outlook 2026: The Geopolitical Weaponisation of LNG” (2026); EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook (March 2026); Brookings Institution, “How will the United States and China power the AI race?” (January 2026); Brookings, “Interwoven Frontiers: Energy, AI, and US-China Competition” (August 2025); PwC, “Navigating the future of LNG” (2025); World Economic Forum, “Global energy in 2026: Growth, resilience and competition” (December 2025); OilPrice.com, “The Five Key Trends Driving China’s 2026 Energy Strategy” (January 2026); ScienceDirect, “The economic and geostrategic role of LNG in EU energy transition” (April 2025); Stanford Review, “How China’s Energy Supremacy Threatens US AI Dominance” (October 2025); Fox Business, “America’s AI dominance depends on winning the power race” (December 2025).