Who's Paying for the Iran War? | The High Top

Who is absorbing the cost of the U.S.-Iran war, and who is holding global energy markets together? 

In this episode of The High Top, Joseph Majkut, Director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program, joins Jon B. Alterman, Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, to assess the energy and security consequences of the U.S.-Iran war. Their conversation examines who is bearing the economic burden of the conflict, how global energy markets absorbed a disruption that analysts expected to be catastrophic, and what the war has done to the assumptions that have organized Gulf security for four decades. 

The costs of the war are falling unevenly. Emerging markets in Asia and poor consumers worldwide are absorbing the heaviest burden, while the United States, buffered by its own production and export constraints, has been partially shielded. The oil price spike that analysts forecast did not materialize, in significant part because China sharply reduced its seaborne imports and steadied the global market, a stabilizing role Washington has long assumed depended on military presence. Gulf governments, meanwhile, have concluded that the arrangement they relied on no longer protects them, and are working to deepen U.S. economic stakes in the region beyond energy. 

To understand how six months of war have redrawn the map of global energy security, tune in to Jon and Joseph's full conversation. 

This event is made possible through general support to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.