There's a phrase that gets tossed around a lot: the world is interconnected. It sounds abstract until a conflict thousands of miles away makes your groceries more expensive. The truth is, modern civilization runs on a web of dependencies so deep and so tangled that pulling on one thread can unravel things you never expected.

The recent escalation in the Middle East has made this painfully clear. But this isn't just a story about oil or war. It's a story about how the systems we've built to make everything cheaper and faster have also made everything more fragile.

One strait, twenty million barrels

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, roughly 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. In 2024, approximately 20 million barrels of oil per day passed through it, representing about 27% of global maritime oil trade and roughly one-fifth of the world's petroleum consumption. About one-fifth of all liquefied natural gas trade also transited the strait, primarily from Qatar.

When the US-Iran conflict escalated in early March 2026, disruption hit immediately. Iran's retaliatory strikes targeted Gulf neighbours including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Oil loadings at the key port of Fujairah were halted. Saudi Aramco shut down its largest refinery at Ras Tanura. Brent crude jumped as much as 13% in a single day, briefly surpassing $82 a barrel, before eventually climbing past $100 as the conflict continued.

The burden of these disruptions is wildly uneven. Around 84% of crude oil moving through Hormuz in 2024 was destined for Asian markets. Countries like India, China, Japan, and South Korea are on the front line of any supply shock. But even regions with lower direct dependence on Gulf crude, like Europe and the United States, feel the impact through diesel prices, freight costs, aviation fuel, and broader inflation expectations.

Oil doesn't stay in its lane

Here's the thing most people miss: oil isn't just fuel for your car. It's an input into everything.

Plastics, packaging, fabrics, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, construction materials. The food on your plate travelled in a truck that runs on diesel, was grown with fertiliser derived from natural gas, and was wrapped in petroleum-based packaging. When oil prices surge, it's not one line item on your budget that changes. It's all of them.

As one economics professor put it, "pretty much everything we put in our mouths, we put in our houses, we put on our bodies, is made from oil, so everything is gonna be more expensive." Airlines face the same squeeze. Jet fuel is a major operating cost, so sustained price increases reshape ticket prices and even which routes get flown.

The International Monetary Fund warned that a prolonged conflict keeping energy prices elevated could drive up inflation globally, complicate interest rate decisions for central banks, and weigh on economic growth. Before the strikes on Iran, the IMF expected the global economy to grow by a healthy 3.3% in 2026. That forecast is now under serious pressure.

The dependency chain you don't see

The Strait of Hormuz is dramatic because it's a single physical chokepoint. But the deeper lesson is that the global economy is full of these invisible dependency chains.

The UN's Review of Maritime Transport found that critical chokepoints like the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Black Sea are all under increasing strain from a combination of geopolitical tensions, climate impacts, and conflicts. When Houthi attacks disrupted Red Sea shipping, vessels rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to transit times and billions in costs.

McKinsey reports that major supply chain disruptions can cost businesses up to 45% of one year's profits over a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic proved this in real time: factories shut down, trade routes closed, container shipping hit unprecedented bottlenecks. Shortages of essential goods, shipping delays, and price spikes rippled outward for years.

And it's not just physical goods. The World Economic Forum found that nearly 60% of organisations say their cybersecurity strategies are now influenced by geopolitical tensions, because supply chains for software and technology are just as interconnected as those for oil and grain.

Interdependence was supposed to keep the peace

There's an irony here. One of the foundational ideas of modern international relations, articulated by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in the 1970s, is that economic interdependence makes war less likely. The theory of complex interdependence argues that when nations are deeply connected through trade, the cost of conflict becomes prohibitively high. Cooperation happens not out of idealism but out of calculation: the pain of breaking ties outweighs the potential gains.

Research broadly supports this. Studies have found that increases in bilateral trade interdependence and global trade integration significantly promote peace between countries. The logic is intuitive: if your economy depends on stable relationships with trading partners, you have a powerful incentive to resolve disputes diplomatically.

But the current moment reveals the limits of this idea. Interdependence can deter conflict, but it can't prevent it. And when conflict does break out within an interdependent system, the damage is amplified precisely because everything is connected. The same trade links that were supposed to incentivise peace become channels through which disruption propagates.

A closure of the Strait of Hormuz doesn't just hurt Iran's adversaries. It hurts countries that have nothing to do with the conflict. Indian consumers paying more for cooking gas. Japanese manufacturers facing energy shortages. European airlines raising ticket prices. The interconnection that was meant to be a stabilising force becomes a vulnerability.

Everyone relies on everyone

The author of the notes that inspired this post put it simply: "everyone relies on each other." That's not a platitude. It's a description of a system so complex that no single actor fully understands all the ways they depend on others.

Consider fertiliser. The Strait of Hormuz disruption threatens global fertiliser supplies ahead of critical planting seasons. If fertiliser gets more expensive or harder to source, crop yields drop. If crop yields drop, food prices rise. If food prices rise in already fragile economies, you get social instability. A maritime chokepoint in the Persian Gulf can contribute to political unrest in sub-Saharan Africa, not through any direct connection, but through a chain of dependencies that spans continents and industries.

This is what makes global interdependence a double-edged sword. It has delivered enormous benefits: lower costs, wider access to goods, and yes, meaningful incentives for peace. But it has also created a system where shocks propagate faster and further than ever before, and where the most vulnerable populations bear the heaviest costs.

What this means for the rest of us

You don't need to be a policymaker or an economist to take something from this. A few things are worth sitting with:

Nothing is truly "over there." A conflict in the Middle East isn't a foreign affairs story. It's a story about your energy bill, your grocery prices, and your retirement portfolio. Geographic distance doesn't equal economic distance.

Resilience has a cost, but so does fragility. Companies and countries spent decades optimising for efficiency, building lean, just-in-time supply chains that minimised waste. The pandemic and now the Hormuz crisis have shown that efficiency without redundancy is a gamble. Building buffers, diversifying suppliers, and investing in alternatives isn't waste. It's insurance.

Peace is an economic asset. The Global Peace Index consistently shows that peaceful nations allocate resources more efficiently, invest more in education and healthcare, and achieve better outcomes across nearly every metric. Conflict doesn't just destroy what exists. It destroys what could have been built.

The world's dependencies aren't going away. If anything, they're deepening as economies become more specialised and supply chains stretch further. The question isn't whether we can untangle the web. It's whether we can build systems resilient enough to absorb shocks without letting them cascade into crises.

That starts with understanding just how connected everything really is. And right now, the Strait of Hormuz is giving everyone a lesson they didn't sign up for.

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