That is bad.
Repairing the physical damage will take time, I suppose. Industrial facilities can be rebuilt. Infrastructure can be repaired. Production can eventually be restored.
But the bigger damage will not be found in the machinery.
It will be found in trust.
Or perhaps more accurately, in the superstition we have built around energy security.
For decades, the developed world operated on an almost unquestioned assumption: whenever we created another hole in our energy supply, the Persian Gulf would fill it with oil.
Prices might rise.
Markets might panic.
Wars might come and go.
But the oil would keep flowing.
The supply would always be there.
Running out of oil and gas was not an idea we particularly wanted to entertain. So we didn’t.
Instead, we quietly accepted something far more consequential: that we had handed regions thousands of kilometres away an enormous degree of power over our lives.
There was a time when industrial nations understood this rather better.
They did whatever they could to secure their energy and mineral supplies domestically or through territories they directly controlled. Colonialism is obviously not coming back, nor should it.
But the underlying strategic problem has not disappeared simply because the political solution has become unacceptable.
You still need energy.
You still need minerals.
You still need reliable supplies of both.
And developing them at home is uncomfortable.
It requires mines, pipelines, terminals, power plants, refineries and transmission infrastructure. These projects are enormous, expensive and painfully slow. They take years to permit, finance, construct and bring to full operation.
That makes them perfect targets.
There will always be somebody willing to protest them.
And there is now an entire regulatory-industrial complex equipped with an ever-expanding arsenal of procedures, assessments, permits, consultations, conditions and legal mechanisms capable of squeezing money and time out of almost anything that attempts to get built.
Importing is much easier.
Why endure the political fight? Why spend years navigating bureaucracy? Why build something locally when somebody somewhere else is willing to produce it, ship it thousands of kilometres and deliver it to our door?
So we chose convenience.
Again and again.
And for a long time, it appeared to work.
That was the dangerous part.
A system can look efficient for decades while quietly accumulating enormous strategic risk.
We mistook availability for security.
We confused a functioning market with a guaranteed supply.
We assumed that because somebody had always been willing to sell us what we needed, somebody always would.
Now the assumption is being tested.
The damage to industrial facilities can eventually be repaired.
The deeper problem is psychological.
We are discovering that energy security was never a law of nature. It was a condition created by infrastructure, investment, diplomacy, trade and, above all, the willingness to maintain our own capacity to produce what we consider essential.
We outsourced that capacity because it was cheaper.
Or appeared cheaper.
There is always a price for dependency.
You simply do not receive the invoice until the supplier, the shipping route, the geopolitical environment or the market decides to send it.
We are receiving that invoice now.
https://apnews.com/article/saudi-arabia-yemen-houthis-4ad9446f0bb8c096750c84b6e1ba86b8