The political and economic effects of the US-Israel attacks on Iran and Iran’s response seem to be much more about what is not done than what is. The extraordinary truth is that a “war” with grave immediate effects on the political-economy of the planet is taking place with nearly all the world’s states remaining on the sidelines. US allies and US enemies alike, poor and rich, global South and global North, are staying out of it.
This is not because of anti-Trumpism or anti-Americanism — two very different things. Nor is it because of international affection for Iran. At one level, it is because the US has a lengthening record of starting overseas conflicts it does not really win, from Somalia 1992 to Venezuela 2025. Until the current Trump administration, such conflicts had ideological, moral or strategic justifications that clearly meant something to the presidents who were executing them. That has not been at all clear since January 2025. There have been some justifications similar to those of the past, but they fall away when financial gain presents itself, whether in control of Venezuelan oil or a “very big present worth a tremendous amount of money” from Iran. Beyond good financial deals, whether realized or not, the White House’s main foreign-policy motivator has been the spectacle of using force and receiving displays of submission and deference from foreigners.
It’s not a strategy but it does reflect a cast of mind that has been consistent for over a year. The international scene has adjusted. People keep their opinions to themselves, waiting politely until the White House’s attention moves on. World leaders have learning curves too, and they studied the example of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in his notorious meeting with President Trump in February 2025. Global political behavior has traveled a long road from there to the extraordinary self-control of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi as President Trump made jokes about surprise attacks and Pearl Harbor.
The result is that the world order is being remade passively, through non-participation. African states, European states, India, China and others have reacted in about the same way to the US-Israel-Iran conflict, which is to hope not to be asked the question. This is not only about the US (or Israel): Iran is seeing how little its African initiatives are producing in a crisis. Leaders including India’s Narendra Modi and China’s Xi Jinping preferred to focus on things other than the massive conflict threatening their energy supplies. (Iran became a full member of the China-founded Shanghai Cooperation Organization, its ninth, in 2023 after 15 years of hard diplomatic effort.) The BRICS group — Iran has been a member since 2024 — has been stymied. At the same time, the EU’s foreign policy head, Kaja Kallas, said simply, “This is not Europe’s war.” NATO chief Mark Rutte has made a variety of statements that noticeably contradict each other.
And so on. It is important to recognize the non-functioning of the BRICS and SCO alongside that of NATO, the EU and UN bodies. There is no world organization, sub-organization, leader or group of leaders able or willing to impose any kind of order. It is as much a crisis of the global South as of the global North or the West. The global South’s inability to speak up for one of its own is rooted in energy needs at least as much as in any hesitation to upset the White House. The industrialization and digitization of the poorer parts of the world have changed their international politics in so many ways. They have certainly changed the politics of energy.
The main result of the US-Israel-Iran conflict for investors is perhaps that any investment requiring stable electric power, which is of course most investments, has to include an assessment of energy sources and supply redundancies beyond what markets are able to price accurately. In particular, energy diversification away from petroleum — for national markets that lack their own petroleum supplies — is clearly necessary, without any reference at all to carbon-based climate change. The Trump administration made the burial of “green energy” a potent rallying call domestically, but US policies are having the opposite effect internationally. It isn’t simply about cars, trucks and planes. All AI and other Internet-related businesses, for example, require electrical power from some source, as does the manufacture of all their components.
Whatever the White House imagined at first to be the purpose of the Iran conflict, two striking effects have been the exposure of the weakness of all international groupings (Western or not) and the political-economic necessity for most markets of diversifying their energy sources.