The ceasefire with Iran looks calm on the surface, but the bigger picture shows the United States moving fast to reshape the global energy map. In the span of a few months, Washington has hit several major targets: damaging key parts of Russia’s oil network, disrupting a large share of China’s imported energy, and tightening control over huge reserves in places like Venezuela, Syria, and Gaza. Put together, these moves point to a push for a new kind of energy‑backed financial order, one that ties global gas flows even more tightly to the US dollar.
Commentators like Richard Medhurst argue that this isn’t chaos or improvisation. They see a deliberate strategy that many people overlook when they assume Donald Trump is stumbling from crisis to crisis. Medhurst lays out the logic behind these actions, but he also tends to treat “the US” as a single, unified actor. That framing misses how many other governments… including some in BRICS… cooperate, enable, or quietly benefit from these shifts. The system isn’t run by one monolith. It’s a network of states and elites whose interests often overlap, even when they pretend to be rivals.
The result is a world where the public sees ceasefires and diplomatic gestures, while the real contest is happening in pipelines, shipping lanes, and energy terminals. The calm is misleading. The struggle over who controls oil and gas, and who controls the currency those resources are traded in, is accelerating, not slowing down.
