The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has revived an old Asian strategic fear: if one maritime chokepoint can be weaponized, every other chokepoint starts to look less like neutral geography and more like latent coercive leverage. That is why attention has shifted so quickly to the Strait of Malacca.

The waterway is the shortest maritime link between East Asia and the Middle East and Europe, stretches about 900 kilometers, and remains one of the most heavily used shipping lanes in the world. It carries roughly 22% of global maritime trade and, in the first half of 2025, about 23.2 million barrels per day of oil, making it the world’s largest oil transit chokepoint, even larger than Hormuz on that measure. More than 102,500 ships transited it in 2025, up sharply from 2024.

The European Commission is trying to thread a very difficult needle: give governments more room to shield vulnerable sectors from the Iran war’s energy shock without recreating the kind of broad, expensive support schemes that still weigh on public finances after Covid and the 2022 gas crisis.

Brussels will loosen state-aid rules next week, retroactive to March and running through the end of 2026, so governments can subsidize fuel and fertilizer costs in the hardest-hit sectors such as farming, fishing, and road transport. At the same time, the Commission is explicitly framing the help as targeted and temporary, precisely because it fears a new round of blunt crisis spending.

The US Department of Energy is deploying one of the most pragmatic tools available for rapidly expanding domestic electricity supply: squeezing more power from nuclear reactors that already exist.

The UPRISE program, announced in March, aims to add 2.5 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2027 and five gigawatts by 2029 through a combination of reactor uprates and facility restarts, effectively delivering the equivalent of five new nuclear plants without the decade-long construction timelines and multi-billion-dollar capital costs that have made new nuclear development prohibitively slow in the United States.

The Trump administration is weighing an extension of the Jones Act waiver that has allowed foreign-flagged vessels to transport fuel and other cargo between US domestic ports since mid-March, a move that would prolong one of the more politically sensitive emergency measures adopted in response to the Gulf conflict’s impact on American energy markets.

The original sixty-day waiver, enacted on March 17, suspended the nearly century-old cabotage law that requires all goods shipped between US ports to be carried on American-built, American-owned, and American-crewed vessels.

China’s sodium-ion push looks like a real technological step forward, but not yet a lithium killer. What is happening is more specific and, in some ways, more interesting: China is beginning to commercialize a battery chemistry that could carve out meaningful roles in lower-cost EVs, cold-weather driving, and grid storage, while also giving manufacturers a hedge against lithium price volatility and supply-chain concentration.

The breakthrough is not that sodium suddenly beats lithium across the board. It is that it is finally becoming good enough for real vehicles and real industrial deployment. The background is that sodium-ion batteries have long been attractive on paper. Sodium is far more abundant than lithium, geographically diversified, and less exposed to the kind of price shocks that have repeatedly rattled battery supply chains.

The immediate effect of the Iran war is clearly bearish for oil demand, but the deeper consequence may be more complicated: the crisis is encouraging a more redundant, security-driven, and therefore less efficient global energy system that could sustain higher oil use in some areas even as it destroys demand in others.

That tension is the heart of the story. On one side, the closure of Hormuz and the resulting supply shock have already forced a sharp drop in consumption. On the other, the policy response to repeated energy shocks may end up entrenching more oil-intensive behavior over time.

China and India are both trying to do something the West has largely stepped back from: force a green hydrogen industry into commercial reality through state support, scale, and industrial coordination. What makes this notable is not just the ambition, but the timing.

Western enthusiasm for green hydrogen has cooled because costs have remained stubbornly high and demand has developed more slowly than hoped. Beijing and New Delhi are moving the other way, betting that scale, subsidies, and directed demand can eventually solve the economics.

The aluminium market is moving beyond a standard supply squeeze into something closer to a systemic industrial shock. It is described as a “black swan” because the disruption is unusually large for a base-metals market: the Middle East accounts for about 7 million metric tons of annual smelting capacity, roughly 9% of expected global supply this year, and the war has impaired output, raw-material flows, and shipping at the same time.

The market faces at least a 2 million ton deficit through year-end, with downside risk if alumina flows through Hormuz do not improve quickly. The background is that aluminium was already vulnerable before this war. Exchange inventories had been drawn down for years, idled Western capacity was difficult to restart because of high power costs, and much of the metal sitting on the LME is Russian material that many Western consumers cannot or will not use.