Six months into the Iran war, the oil market is being shaped less by OPEC+ policy than by the physical disruption of Middle Eastern exports and the behavior of Chinese demand. That marks a major change in the hierarchy of global energy influence.

For decades, OPEC and later OPEC+ mattered because they could remove barrels from the market or add them back when prices moved too far. In 2026, the group can still announce output decisions, but much of its capacity is constrained by war, damaged infrastructure and the effective closure of one of the world’s most important export routes.

Europe’s natural gas market is moving back toward crisis conditions as the continent struggles to rebuild storage before winter while disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continue to restrict liquefied natural gas flows from the Middle East.

The immediate danger is not that Europe has already run out of gas. It is that the region may enter the heating season with too small a storage cushion, leaving it vulnerable to a cold winter, weak renewable output, nuclear disruptions and intense competition with Asia for flexible LNG cargoes.

Germany is moving closer to a harder China policy, a shift that could significantly strengthen the European Union’s ability to respond to Chinese industrial overcapacity and widening trade imbalances. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has signaled that Berlin is reassessing its long-standing reluctance to disrupt commercial ties with Beijing, reflecting a broader change inside German industry and politics.

For decades, Germany was one of the main voices inside Europe cautioning against confrontation with China. That caution is now weakening because the economic bargain that sustained it has deteriorated.

China’s latest industrial profit figures point to a recovery that is losing momentum just as the country’s economy faces renewed pressure from weak domestic demand, fading commodity-price support and uneven performance across major sectors.

Profit growth among large industrial firms slowed for a third consecutive month in July, reaching its weakest pace of the year. The data suggest that the rebound in corporate earnings, which had been supported earlier by higher commodity prices and strong demand for artificial intelligence-linked electronics, is becoming more fragile.

Green hydrogen has been the energy transition’s most persistent disappointment. Projects announced with fanfare across Europe, Australia and the Gulf have been shelved as costs ballooned and buyers failed to materialise, and the fuel’s reputation has shifted from indispensable to speculative.

China has responded to that record by building more of it than everyone else combined. Operational capacity has more than tripled since the end of 2024 to nearly 250,000 tonnes annually, over twice the rest of the world’s total, with a further 900,000 tonnes under active construction. The 15th Five-Year Plan targets an eightfold increase to 2 million tonnes by 2030.

Six months of conflict have produced an energy picture that resists simple summary, and the temptation on all sides is to select the half that suits the argument. Renewables are surging worldwide and will overtake coal as the largest source of electricity for the first time this year.

Coal-fired generation is also rising, against a forecast made in February that had it entering permanent decline. Power sector emissions are heading to a record. Every one of those statements is true, and understanding why requires abandoning the assumption that a fossil fuel crisis automatically helps the transition.

The most consequential detail in Wednesday’s announcement is not the money. It is a sentence about who is in charge. The reactors being built at five American bases will have to meet all environmental and safety rules applying to commercial reactors, but they will be regulated by the Army rather than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

That single decision explains how a programme announced in 2025 expects to have a reactor operating by September 2028, a timeline that would be impossible under the licensing process every civilian reactor must navigate.

A national emergency is a specific legal instrument, not a rhetorical flourish. Wednesday’s executive order invokes the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act to declare that foreign-produced bulk-power system equipment constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to American national security, foreign policy and economy.

The order’s own language contains the phrase that gives it reach: this threat exists both in the case of individual transactions and when transactions are considered as a class. That is not a mechanism for blocking a particular purchase. It is authority over an entire category of equipment.