‘America’s petro-imperialism in Iran has already hiked US fuel cost by $20 billion’

Jeff D. Colgan is Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das in ET Evoke, he explains the trajectory — and results — of American military strategy in and how the use of have impacted :

Q. Can you tell us about your Energy Cost Tracker Project?

A . We recently launched this to illustrate to American voters and consumers how much the war in Iran is having an economic cost that is coming right out of their pocket. We’re tracking the price change in gasoline and diesel fuel. Those are two very visible products that affect a huge amount of transportation within the .

So far, we’ve found the total amount of increased fuel costs since February 28, when this war began, is over $20 billion — that’s more than $150 per US household.

Many of the products we are not tracking here are also affected, inlcuding jet fuel, fertiliser and natural gas. American consumers may not see it right away but they are paying those extra costs as well. Americans are certainly paying extra fuel costs — people all over Asia, of course, are paying even more, seeing even bigger price rises and bearing an even greater economic burden from this war. We know Asia is being hit harder than — but the United States has caused this war and we wanted to highlight that the US does not stand apart in terms of the economic pain coming from this conflict.

Q. You’ve pointed out how the Iran war was actually preceded by other American attacks in Donald ’s presidency on oil-producing countries — could you elaborate?

A. Since the Trump administration came to power in January 2025, the United States has taken military action against seven countries, namely, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen and Somalia — five of those have been oil-producing countries, which is statistically highly unlikely to be a coincidence. It’s less than 1% likely actually because oil-producing nations are relatively rare in the world. So, the fact that the US has hit five out of seven of them suggests that the global oil industry is very much a generator or, at least, an amplifier of international conflict.

Of course, oil plays a different role in different conflicts. In the US action against Venezuela, we saw one version where the President of the United States said very directly that he wanted to take Venezuelan oil back for American companies and get some of Venezuela’s oil revenues for the United States. That is not the same situation as what we are seeing in the conflict with Iran now — this is a different kind of mechanism, but, nonetheless, oil is a consistent background theme of many of the conflicts the United States is getting into these days.

Q. You’ve written about both ideas — could you please tell us the differences between what you term ‘’ and ‘petro-consumerism’?

A. With petro-imperialism, I outline a world in which the United States thinks might makes right and the US or other great powers should decide who gets to make choices about oil fields around the world. In petro-consumerism, the host country, like Venezuela, Iran or Saudi Arabia, would be making those decisions about oil in their own territories. So, petro-imperialism is to say, no, America, Britain or other great power countries will make those decisions from afar — and if petro-states like Venezuela, Iran, etc., try to have political leaders the United States doesn’t like, the US will remove those leaders.

That, unfortunately, is what is being done in both Venezuela and Iran this year — we’re seeing the removal of their leaders. President Trump said in both cases, more explicitly in the first but also in the second, that the United States should have a say in who the following leader is as well, once they have removed a political person they don’t like.

That does start to look like an imperial relationship where one country is trying to control the internal politics of another entity, whether a nation or territory. This is specifically petro-imperialism because the root motivation for this is control of oil profits.

Q. If the Iran war, as your Energy Cost Tracker illuminates, is making life more expensive for everyday Americans, who is actually benefiting economically from it?

A. Some actors that are benefiting from it include Russia and other oil-producing countries around the world where production is not behind the . Any oil producer that can get its products to market are benefiting from the higher prices we are experiencing. That is also true for the United States and anybody who’s producing oil in Canada, anywhere in North America and Mexico as well. All of those producers are benefiting from higher prices and generating huge profits from it. The story is a little more complicated for some of the big oil companies which are household names in the US — they are benefiting as American oil producers but they are also suffering to a certain extent because they have investments in the Persian Gulf states, like Qatar, United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, which are either being economically hurt, or, in some cases, physically hurt by the conflict with Iran.

Q. You mentioned big oil companies — in the future, could we see a revival of the Seven Sisters-type colonialist company formation in Iran?

A. At this point, many things would have to happen before that happened. But what has changed geopolitics in this regard is that when the Seven Sisters were dominant in the 1950s and ’60s in particular, the United States was the major net oil exporter to the world. It was the main oil supplier around the globe. That gave it a strong interest in intervening in countries that were also exporting oil, so that it could have a dominant position in the market.

Then, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the United States became a net oil importer — hence, its interests changed. It started to behave more like what I’ve called a ‘petro-consumerist’. Here, it wasn’t going to be an imperialist force, it wasn’t going to try to intervene in other countries, in part also because the politics of imperial intervention had changed and become delegitimised around the world. The Global South had very successfully made the point that this was not an acceptable way of running the world. Alongside, US economic interests had also changed.

Now, what we have been seeing in the last eight or nine years is that the US has become a net oil exporter again — and its economic interests have again altered. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has decided that should mean US foreign policy should also get a great deal more aggressive and that has real consequences for people in the Persian Gulf and all around the world as the impacts ripple through global energy markets.

Q. All the major economies in the world, including China, are still huge fossil fuel consumers — what does this imply for the future of renewables?

A. So many countries around the world are actually realising now that while oil and natural gas can be blocked because of geopolitical events like wars or embargoes, sunshine and the wind cannot be blocked and there is a real national security advantage to adopting renewable energy, even if you have relatively little interest in the environmental benefits of doing so. Of course, living in a world going through climate change, we should all have that interest in mind. I think this conflict will only amplify that pre-existing trend.

Views expressed are personal