The price of conflict: What if the point is the price?

Consider a sequence. In February 2026, tensions escalated across West Asia. In March, they escalated again, and the war between Russia and Ukraine hardened rather than eased. By April, the United States and Iran had signed a ceasefire; by June, a memorandum of understanding to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; and by July, the whole arrangement had collapsed into eleven consecutive nights of strikes, a threatened naval blockade, and talk of hitting fortified nuclear sites. 

Then, almost on cue, the tone softened again: talks continue, a 'massive attack' 'may be unnecessary' even as the United States remains "locked and loaded."

Through every turn of this cycle, one variable moved with unusual reliability: the price of energy. Brent crude ran from the low seventies to above 120 dollars during the spring escalation, subsided as the ceasefire held, and surged past 90 again the moment the strikes resumed. Each act in the drama has been accompanied by a corresponding move in the one number that matters most to every importing economy on earth.

I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of observation that curdles easily into conspiracy. So let me frame it as a question rather than a claim, and follow the logic wherever it leads. Consider my entire stance as exploratory, therefore. 

When price is a purpose of the conflict

I do not assert this. I want to think through this. Suppose, purely as an analytical exercise, that sustained high energy prices were an intended outcome rather than an unfortunate consequence. What would follow? Which of the large, slow-moving shifts already underway in the global financial system would such a policy accelerate? Because if the effects turn out to be coherent, i.e., if they all push in the same direction, then the coincidence deserves at least a second look.

The core mechanism is simple and old. Sustained high energy prices are a wealth transfer from the economies that import energy to the economies that export it. That transfer is still denominated in dollars, but it is increasingly settled outside the dollar system. Everything else follows from a single question: who receives the surplus, and where do they choose to park it?

I trace it through, and force-ranked the consequences by how much each one moves.

First, and largest, is the rotation of reserve assets. For half a century, the recycling loop was dependable: exporters earned dollars, bought United States Treasuries, and financed American deficits. A high-price era in which the dollar has been visibly weaponised breaks that loop. 

Surplus flows instead into gold, commodities, equity stakes, and hard infrastructure. This is the single most consequential shift, because it removes the marginal buyer of American debt at precisely the moment American financing needs are peaking and because central banks, once they begin moving into gold together, reinforce one another. The behaviour is self-sustaining. Nothing else on this list has that property to the same degree.

Second is the forcing of choices onto the importing world. Persistent high energy prices squeeze every import-dependent economy into a fork: accept the conditionality of Western capital or accept the lending and infrastructure of China. The energy shock is the mechanism that makes the choice unavoidable. 

This is not an abstraction for Bangladesh. Our fuel import bill has risen more than 80% this fiscal year. The taka has crossed 123 to the dollar. We run an IMF program and Chinese infrastructure financing side by side, and a sustained shock is exactly the pressure that eventually forces a country to lean one way. Multiply Bangladesh by the hundred or so economies in a similar position, and you are redrawing the map of who clears through whom.

Whether the price of energy is being engineered or is merely the emergent product of aligned interests, the effect on Bangladesh is identical: a current account squeezed from both the import and the export side, a currency under sustained pressure, and a slow, unavoidable drift toward choosing a bloc.

Third is the repricing of duration in the developed markets. High energy ended the regime of the 2010s: low rates, long-duration assets, speculative growth equities priced on cash flows a decade out. 

A high-price world rewards hard assets, short-duration income, commodity producers, defence, and physical infrastructure, and it punishes the speculative end of technology. The much-discussed fragility of the artificial-intelligence trade and the energy story are not two separate risks; they are the same "regime change" arriving from two directions.

Beneath these three sit two slower currents worth naming. The privilege of the dollar as the world's funding currency erodes at the margin. It does not undergo collapse, but displacement, as bilateral energy settlement and alternative clearing arrangements entrench themselves through sheer volume. And military spending, normalised by permanent conflict, normalises industrial policy in turn, which normalises state-directed capital. The comfortable notion that the state merely redistributes what markets create dies quietly in this environment. 

Line these up and the striking thing is their coherence. Every effect pushes in the same direction: away from the dollar-Treasury-tech regime that has organised global capital since the end of the Cold War, and toward hard assets, multipolar settlement, and state direction. If one wished to accelerate that transition, engineered energy prices would be a remarkably efficient instrument.

Limits of this theory

The argument requires either coordination that cannot be proven or a set of actors whose independent interests happen to align. The second is far more plausible than the first, and it is where I come down. Russia, forced off the dollar by sanctions, wants exactly this. China, seeking to price energy in its own currency, wants it. Gulf exporters, hedging their dependence on a single reserve currency, want optionality. 

Elements of the Western financial complex, positioned for an era of asset reflation and reindustrialisation, benefit as well. None of these actors needs to attend a meeting. High energy prices serve all of their interests simultaneously, which is precisely why the pattern looks coordinated, whether or not it is, and precisely why, once established, it is so difficult to reverse.

This is the honest version of the thesis. It is not a conspiracy with a hidden hand, but a convergence in which every major player is rewarded for the same performance. That distinction matters because a convergence needs no script and admits no single villain, and it is therefore both more credible and more durable than any plot.

For a country like ours, the practical conclusion does not depend on resolving the question of intent. Whether the price of energy is being engineered or is merely the emergent product of aligned interests, the effect on Bangladesh is identical: a current account squeezed from both the import and the export side, a currency under sustained pressure, and a slow, unavoidable drift toward choosing a bloc. 

We cannot control the Strait, the strikes, or the settlement currency of the world's oil. We can control how prepared, how diversified, and how clear-eyed we are about the structure of the pressure we are under. The first step is to stop treating each spike as a discrete emergency and start treating the pattern as the thing it may well be: not a series of accidents, but a regime.

Dr Sajid Amit has over 20 years of experience in investments, impact finance, research and academia. He has received awards for his investment research from Morgan Stanley and BlackRock. Opinions expressed in this piece are his only and not attributable to any organisation he is associated with. He can be reached at sh2367@caa.columbia.edu.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.