Dr. Christian Cardona | Former President, Council of EU | Former Minister of Economy, Malta |
I want to start with something simple. The price of bread. It seems an odd place to begin an article about missiles, oil tankers, and geopolitical fault lines. But if you want to understand what the war in the Middle East or West Asia is actually doing to the world not in abstract policy terms, but in real human terms, start there. Start with what people pay at the checkout. Start with what factory workers in Turin are told when shifts get cut. Start with what a small hotel owner in Crete sees on her heating bill in February. The war did not stay in the Middle East. It never does.
I have been watching this crisis unfold with a growing sense that most of the commentary around it is either too narrow focused on military movements and ceasefire timelines or too abstract, full of GDP projections and basis points that obscure the human weight of what is happening. So let me try to be both honest and plain about it.
The Chokepoint That Changed Everything
The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. Through that twenty-one miles flows roughly a third of the world’s seaborne oil and a quarter of its liquefied natural gas. When the conflict escalated to the point where that passage became effectively contested, energy markets did not merely shudder but they convulsed. The International Energy Agency described it as the most severe disruption to global oil supply in history. That is not dramatic language for dramatic effect. It is a factual assessment of an extraordinary event.
What follows from a shock like that is not complicated to understand, even if it is painful to live through. Energy prices spike. Everything that depends on energy which is to say, everything gets more expensive. Freight costs rise because ships cost more to run and insurers charge more to cover routes through volatile waters. Factories face higher input costs and pass them on. Consumers find their purchasing power quietly eroded. Governments, particularly those with limited fiscal reserves, face an impossible choice between protecting their people and protecting their balance sheets.
Europe is feeling this acutely. The European Central Bank’s own projections pointed to eurozone inflation rising sharply in the first half of 2026, driven almost entirely by the energy component. Germany which is the continent’s industrial heartbeat raised the alarm in terms that would have seemed alarmist a year ago, warning that the conflict posed a threat not just to fuel bills but to the structural foundations of its economy. That is a significant thing for Germany to say. They do not reach for hyperbole easily.
The Lesson Europe Keeps Not Learning
Here is where I have to be candid, because this is a pattern and not an accident.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe scrambled. It found new LNG suppliers, signed emergency deals, talked urgently about energy independence. There were genuine steps forward. But the underlying dependency on fossil fuels as the dominant source of heat, industrial power, and transport was never fundamentally resolved. It was managed. And managing a dependency is not the same as ending it.
So when this new shock arrived, Europe was better prepared than in 2022 in some narrow technical senses, and still fundamentally exposed in the ways that matter most. Countries like France, with strong nuclear capacity, and Spain, with serious renewables investment, weathered the initial wave with more resilience. Countries like Italy and the United Kingdom, still heavily reliant on gas-fired power, felt the pressure immediately and severely.
The World Bank’s assessment for Europe and Central Asia told the story in numbers: regional growth was expected to slow to around 2.1 percent in 2026. For countries in Central and Eastern Europe many of them still building out the economic buffers that wealthier western neighbours take for granted higher energy costs cut directly into consumption and investment. Ukraine, carrying the unbearable double weight of its own war alongside the commodity shock, saw its outlook worsen further still.
The lesson that Europe keeps being offered and keeps partially learning is this: energy security is not a technical problem with a technical solution. It is a political commitment that requires sustained investment, difficult decisions about infrastructure, and a willingness to absorb short-term costs for long-term resilience. The war in the Middle East is, among other things, a very expensive reminder of that.
What Nobody Is Talking About Enough: The Food Dimension
The oil shock dominates the headlines. It should not be allowed to crowd out something potentially more serious in its human consequences: the fertilizer crisis running quietly alongside it.
Roughly a third of global fertilizer shipments pass through the same Strait of Hormuz that has become contested. These shipments were disrupted at precisely the wrong moment as planting season began across the Northern Hemisphere. When farmers cannot access fertilizer at planting time, they use less of it, or substitute inferior alternatives, or in the worst cases, do not plant at all. The harvest that follows is smaller, and the food prices that follow are higher.
In wealthy countries, higher food prices are painful but survivable. In low-income nations, where families spend close to half their income on food already, they can be catastrophic. We are not yet at catastrophe but we are watching the conditions for it assemble, slowly, in plain sight. This is the part of the crisis that I find most troubling, because it is the most removed from the people making decisions about it, and the most immediately felt by the people with the least power to change it.
Europe’s Diplomatic Paralysis
The European Union’s response to the crisis has been, in the diplomatic sense, correct and, in the practical sense, limited. All twenty-seven EU heads of government gathered in March to condemn the strikes, call for a ceasefire, and demand a moratorium on attacks against energy and water infrastructure. They mobilised humanitarian aid. They engaged with regional partners. They welcomed a brief ceasefire with relief.
And yet. The crisis was shaped by forces that European diplomacy could not control and, if we are honest, could not significantly influence. The EU found itself in a position it has occupied uncomfortably before: morally clear, strategically constrained. An observer with values, rather than a player with leverage.
This is not a criticism unique to the EU. It reflects something true about the current state of the international order that the institutions and alliances built to manage great power competition are straining under conditions they were not designed for. The EU’s own security risk assessments for 2026 placed a hybrid attack on European critical infrastructure at the top of the threat list. Not Russia. Not terrorism. The vulnerability of the infrastructure that modern European life depends on. That tells you something about where the anxiety is concentrated.
The View From Europe
I write this from Malta, a small island in the Mediterranean that sits, geographically and psychologically, between Europe and the Middle East. We are not a major economy. We do not set global energy policy. But we feel these things with particular sharpness. The island imports almost everything. Energy costs hit our businesses and households directly. The disruption to shipping routes through the Mediterranean affects goods that pass through our ports. And the broader instability the sense that the rules-based order is being tested in ways that have no clean resolution is felt here as it is felt across the region.
What I keep coming back to is this: the Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide, but its shadow falls across the entire world. The fire that started in the Middle East has crossed the sea in the form of energy prices, food costs, fractured supply chains, and a security environment that is measurably less stable than it was two years ago.
The question I cannot answer with confidence and I distrust anyone who claims they can is how this ends. Wars have their own logic. Economies adapt in ways that surprise even the experts. But some things seem clear to me. Europe cannot keep learning the same lesson about energy dependency every three years and calling that progress. The international community cannot keep applying the vocabulary of multilateral order to situations where multilateral order has visibly broken down. And the people paying the highest price for this crisis in food costs, in lost harvests, in economic contraction are overwhelmingly the people who had the least say in the decisions that caused it. That is the fire that crossed the sea. It deserves more than we are currently giving it.
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