Gas, Geopolitics
& Hegemony

On 18 March 2026, Israeli forces carried out strikes against Iran's Pars gas field, the southern component of the world's largest natural gas reservoir.¹ The Pars field shares its geological formation with Qatar's North Field across the Persian Gulf, and together these twin structures account for the largest concentration of natural gas on the planet.² The attack represents a significant qualitative escalation in the Israel–Iran war, moving from military and nuclear infrastructure to the centrepiece of the Iranian energy economy.

Energy markets responded immediately, with prices rising on news of the strike. Historical precedent suggests that infrastructure attacks in the Gulf trigger rapid and disproportionate price responses, regardless of the actual volume of supply disrupted.³ With the Strait of Hormuz already effectively closed following Iran's retaliatory operations under Operation Epic Fury, global energy markets are now facing compounding disruption: both the transit route and a key production node have simultaneously been placed under threat.⁴

The Iranian response has been rapid, if initially rhetorical. IRGC-affiliated media have called for the evacuation of the following Gulf energy installations as an explicit signal of forthcoming tit-for-tat retaliation:⁵

• The SAMREF oil refinery in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia⁶ — one of Saudi Arabia's largest export refineries, with a capacity of approximately 400,000 barrels per day.
• The Al Hasan gas field in the United Arab Emirates — a principal node in the UAE's domestic gas network.
• The Jubail petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia⁷ — the world's largest petrochemical complex, operated by SABIC and Saudi Aramco affiliates.
• The Mesaieed Petrochemical Holding Company (MPHC) complex in Qatar⁸ — processing ethylene, polyethylene, and vinyl chloride monomer at significant scale.

Taken together, these four installations represent a cross-section of the Gulf Cooperation Council's (GCC) most economically significant energy infrastructure. A successful strike on even one of these targets would trigger energy price shocks of global magnitude and destabilise the very Gulf states that Israel maintains warm — if unofficial — relations with. This points to the central contradiction at the heart of Israel's current strategic posture.

3.1 The Immunity Asymmetry

Israel's willingness to strike energy infrastructure — first Iranian, now potentially catalysing Iranian strikes on Gulf facilities — reflects a strategic position of near-total energy immunity. Israel's domestic gas supplies (the Leviathan and Tamar fields in the Mediterranean) are supplemented by pipeline imports from Egypt and Azerbaijani crude transiting Turkey's Ceyhan terminal.⁹ Israel has no dependence on Persian Gulf transit routes. It faces neither supply shortages nor price exposure from Hormuz disruption. It can therefore pursue energy warfare as a pure geopolitical instrument without bearing any of its economic costs.

3.2 The Gulf Hegemony Calculus

This asymmetry extends to Israel's relationship with the Gulf states themselves. Despite the Abraham Accords normalisation with the UAE and Bahrain, and despite the warm de-facto ties that have developed with Gulf monarchies over the past decade, Israel harbours a long-term interest in preventing any Arab state from emerging as a dominant regional power.¹⁰ The Gulf monarchies represent precisely the kind of wealthy, influential and resource-backed entities that constrain Israeli regional hegemony. A weaker Gulf — economically destabilised by Iranian retaliatory strikes on its energy infrastructure — would, from an Israeli strategic perspective, be a more tractable Gulf. This opposition to Gulf military empowerment has been demonstrated in practice: following the Abraham Accords, Israel actively lobbied Washington to block the transfer of F-35 aircraft to the UAE — a platform that had been offered as part of the normalisation incentive package — on the grounds of preserving its qualitative military edge in the region.¹¹

3.3 The Hegemony Objective

Israel's long-term strategic objective is regional hegemony: the position of the undisputed dominant power in the Middle East, unchallenged by a nuclear-capable Iran, unconstrained by a powerful Arab bloc, and capable of projecting influence from a position of unrivalled military and economic superiority.¹² The current conflict, deliberately prolonged and now deliberately extended to energy infrastructure, serves this objective with remarkable consistency.

4.1 Disregarded Warnings

The United States has found itself in an increasingly untenable position. Earlier in Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration signalled to Israel that attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure were unwelcome — a recognition that energy price spikes would harm the U.S. domestic economy and undermine Trump's signature economic agenda.¹³ Those signals appear to have been disregarded. Today's strike on the Pars field suggests either that Israel calculated the U.S. would not act on its warnings, or that U.S. approval was quietly extended.

4.2 The Coalition-Building Calculation

The evidence points to the latter. The strikes are assessed to have been coordinated with the United States — and U.S. approval, even if reluctant, may reflect a secondary strategic calculation: that attacks on Gulf-adjacent energy infrastructure, and the resulting energy crisis, will compel European allies and energy-dependent Asian nations — particularly Japan and South Korea — to join military operations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.^{14 15} From this perspective, the energy crisis is not a side-effect of the war but a deliberate instrument of coalition-building.

4.3 The Russian Oil Contradiction

This calculation is rendered deeply incoherent by a separate and proximate decision: the Trump administration's earlier partial lifting of sanctions on Russian oil, framed as a concession in the context of Ukraine negotiations.¹⁶ Washington is simultaneously enabling Russian energy exports — which undermined the sanctions architecture designed to constrain Moscow — while presiding over a campaign that is systematically destroying Middle Eastern energy infrastructure and choking global supply. It bears noting that the partial sanctions relief on Russian oil came after NATO allies and Asian partners declined the call-to-arms to reopen the Hormuz Strait — suggesting this was as much a reactive concession as an incoherent policy. Nevertheless, that the sanctions relief was explicitly motivated by a desire to dampen global oil prices makes authorisation of the Pars field strike — which predictably drove prices sharply higher — a direct act of self-sabotage, as an Iranian response is expected.¹⁷ The contradiction is not merely rhetorical: it represents a fundamental incoherence in U.S. energy and foreign policy that allies and adversaries alike are observing with alarm.

Israel's current willingness to escalate — to strike energy infrastructure, to court Iranian retaliatory attacks on Gulf facilities, to prolong a war that the United States, the Gulf states, and much of the international community wishes to conclude — reflects a specific institutional learning from the 2023–2024 Gaza campaign. During that campaign, Israel repeatedly exceeded stated Western red lines and faced no meaningful consequences: no sanctions, no arms embargoes, no diplomatic ruptures with Washington that altered actual U.S. policy.¹⁸

Israel has therefore concluded, with reasonable empirical basis, that it operates within a zone of effective impunity when acting in what it defines as its own security interest. The Gaza precedent has been generalised: if there was no cost for Gaza, there will be no cost for the Pars field. If there was no cost for the Pars field, there will be no cost for whatever comes next.

The departure of Joe Kent from the Trump administration on 17 March 2026 — the first senior official to resign explicitly over the Iran war — is a symptom of the growing fissure within the "America First" coalition between those who supported confronting Iran and those who now fear an open-ended military commitment with no clear exit.¹⁹ Kent is unlikely to be the last. The mounting domestic political pressure on the Trump administration to conclude the war stands in direct contradiction to Israel's interest in prolonging it. This divergence is structural and will intensify.

The international consensus — among the Gulf states, the European Union, Asian powers and the broader international community — is that Operation Epic Fury should be concluded as rapidly as possible.²⁰ The Gulf monarchies, though they hosted U.S. military assets and in some cases facilitated strike operations, are acutely aware that they are now themselves in the targeting calculus of IRGC retaliation. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar face a nightmare scenario: they allowed their territory to be used for a war against their neighbour, and that neighbour is now threatening their most critical economic infrastructure.

Europe faces a parallel crisis. The European Union imports a significant share of its LNG from Qatar; any successful IRGC strike on Qatari infrastructure would constitute a direct energy security emergency for EU member states that abandoned Russian pipeline gas after 2022.²¹ The irony is severe: Europe diversified away from Russian energy to reduce dependence on an authoritarian power, only to find itself now exposed to the consequences of a conflict it had no voice in initiating and no mechanism to stop.

Japan and other East Asian economies face an even starker calculation. Japan imports approximately 90 per cent of its crude oil, with a substantial proportion transiting the Strait of Hormuz.²² A sustained closure represents an existential energy security threat. If the United States is using the energy crisis as leverage to compel Japanese military or logistical participation in Hormuz reopening operations, it is doing so over the objections of a Japanese government deeply reluctant to deploy forces in any context that could be construed as offensive military action.

Israel's strike on the Pars field on 18 March 2026 is not an aberration. It is the logical expression of a coherent, if deeply dangerous, strategic programme: to use an energy crisis as a geopolitical instrument, to draw external powers into a war that prolongs Iranian destruction, to weaken Gulf competitors under the cover of a conflict with Iran, and to operate within an accountability vacuum that the Gaza campaign demonstrated was real and durable.

The United States faces a choice it has so far been unwilling to make: impose real costs on Israeli conduct, or accept that it will be held responsible — by its allies, by energy markets, and by its own domestic political base — for the consequences of a war it cannot control and cannot conclude. Every day that passes without that choice widens the gap between U.S. interests and Israeli strategy.

The rest of the world is watching — and waiting for a fire that Israel has no interest in extinguishing.