What could come

And probably will.

I’ve made this post public because it’s far too important to paywall. That being said, subscriptions to From the Forest of Arduinna make up half of my monthly income. And I know things are economically scary (maybe even scarier after you read this), but if you can support me with a paid subscription, that’s really great. For the rest of this month, you can get an annual paid subscription for 30% off:

You’ve probably been in the same situation I’ve been in, struggling to find any deep analysis about the larger impacts of the US’s and Israel’s war on Iran. Honestly, it’s been extremely difficult to find anything, and so I’m going to try to help you out.

Most new sites you’ll find, at best, point to the potential impacts that high oil prices will have on economic growth. But that doesn’t really tell you much, since “economic growth” is quite an abstract concept and is anyway often disconnected from our everyday activities. Besides, an economy can show high levels of growth while simultaneously showing massive job losses, which is actually what’s been happening in the United States. That is, the economy is “expanding” there, while fewer people have jobs.¹

Now, oil prices affect economic growth in quite a few ways. The most obvious one is that increased oil costs translate to higher fuel prices, and that changes individual economic behavior.

Consider: if you need to spend an extra $100 per month on gasoline, that’s $100 less that you can or will spend on other things. You’ll skip out on buying extra stuff like clothes, electronics, restaurants, and a whole host of other things. And when you don’t buy those things, the people who rely on you buying them will start laying off employees, meaning even more people have less money.

That’s the most obvious effect of increased oil prices, but there are many more effects that will cause even greater economic problems, because it isn’t just individuals and families who rely on automobiles.

You can see this best in the matter of food. Every part of the industrial food production process relies on oil, starting with the plowing and planting of crops.² Then, there’s the irrigation trucks, and all the machinery used to harvest and transport crops to processing centers, and then again to transport them to other processors, distribution centers, warehouses, and finally to grocery stores. Increased oil prices affect every part of that chain, adding to the cost at every step. And that cost increases the final price of the products you buy, meaning even less available money for you at the end of every month.

Energy costs for electricity and heating will also increase, even if the sources of that energy are not petroleum. Just like for food, every step of the production process of energy, even “green” or “renewable” energy, requires petroleum, particularly in its infrastructure. It takes oil to mine the raw materials to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and oil to transport them, and oil to produce them and oil to install and maintain them. Natural gas requires oil in the drilling (especially if it’s fracked), purification, and liquification processes. Coal and nuclear, of course, both require oil for extraction and transport. And biodiesel and biogas both require oil especially in their transport to processing centers.

As with food, every increase in cost due to higher oil prices becomes reflected in the price. But equally, a higher price in one energy source increases the price of all other sources, too. This is a simple market rule that’s especially prominent in capitalist societies: when the price of one thing increases, the sellers of its alternatives also raise their prices because of increased demand.

Higher oil prices will affect other parts of the economy in less obvious but just as destructive ways³, and this is particularly scary when it comes to housing. Most cities in the capitalist world are already facing massive housing shortages and really absurd rents and house prices. As with food, every single step of the process of building a new home (a house or an apartment building) requires oil. The building materials all need oil to be produced, the transport of those materials requires oil, the machinery used to move earth and materials run on oil. Even many of the materials in the construction are themselves made from oil.

Increased housing costs are particularly an economic problem in two directions. First of all, an increase in rent or the cost of a new home obviously affects your spending ability. But job losses in construction have a very damaging affect on economic “growth,” since the people working in specialized manual labor can’t just easily find other jobs with comparable incomes. You can’t just spend ten to twenty years of your life building houses and then suddenly retrain as a tech worker; instead, your only real options are to take much lower paid service jobs.

In fact, the situation for skilled manual laborers, or “blue collar workers,” is maybe the most worrisome trend that’s going to really fuck the world, one that’s been slowly building over the last decade. What’s been happening in the United States with them should be pretty obvious by just looking at who is in the White House currently. Hillary Clinton’s spectacular loss in 2016 and Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024 had quite a lot to do with the Democrats refusal to even acknowledge an entire sector of the American work force has been suffering (and don’t get me started on the American left’s dismissal of their suffering as just “white men losing their privilege.”)

In Germany and in the United Kingdom, the same process has been happening and has been similarly dismissed. That’s why in both nations the hard right keeps gaining popularity, as they’re the only ones who’ve acknowledged there’s even a problem at all.

As you know, the solutions the hard right proposes start with the expulsion of immigrants, but this would only be a temporary fix. Immigrants tend to compete for the same kinds of manual jobs (especially construction and manufacture) that those workers are losing, so fewer immigrants would mean less competition for those dwindling jobs. However, the jobs themselves will keep dwindling, even if you get rid of all the immigrants.

Worse, there’s no alternative to these political movements. Capitalist governments have done a damn good of making sure there’s no strong leftist opposition anywhere to be found, especially in the way they’ve helped give prominence to social justice identitarian beliefs in order to suffocate out any anti-capitalist tendencies in the left. ⁴So, there’s no one to offer those workers (or anyone else) another path towards securing their own interests and even their own survival. And the hard right can, of course, point to the left’s protests in support of immigrants and spin it as proof they don’t care about the working class, just about people with the correct identity markers.⁵

So, without a real leftist force (not just sporadic street protests and social media posts, which is all the left really is now) with a real physical presence to offer an alternative, the only option available if you don’t like what the government’s doing is the far right. And here’s where something really scary is certain to happen if this war continues (and it probably will continue).

In the very first sentence of this essay, I used the phrase “the US’s and Israel’s war on Iran.” That might have surprised or even shocked you, as it probably seems quite obvious that the US started this and they’re the primary aggressor. But it seems that’s probably not the case: after all, multiple US leaders have made statements to the contrary. In fact, the general appearance seems to be that Israel decided to attack Iran and told the United States they were going to do so. Then, the United States decided to join Israel, and they then attacked together.

Whether this is what actually happened, this is how it appears. And that means it also appears that Israel actually drew the United States into this, essentially making the decision for the US for them. Sure, Trump’s been quite bloodthirsty lately, and Pete Hegseth probably shoots puppies for fun. And therein’s the problem: the US couldn’t possibly have planned for this war. It was an impetuous decision, and now it’s dawning on everyone what they’ve actually done.

If the war lasts for awhile (and I’m pretty sure it will), the economic damage caused by the disruption to oil production and shipping will accelerate economic chaos throughout the world. Europe, especially, is going to be quite fucked, which is why Macron has unilaterally taken it upon himself to try to re-open the Strait of Hormuz.⁶

Europe’s already been hit hard by the Russia/Ukraine war, especially because the most industrialised country in Europe, Germany, is still reeling from Ukraine’s destruction of the Nordstream pipeline, a natural gas route Germany had been counting on to keep its economy from collapsing in the next few years. The rest of Europe is still behind on securing reliable energy sources that don’t include Russia and Ukraine, and now there’s an oil crisis.

What this means is lots more economic turmoil and hardship for the working classes in Europe, especially the blue collar workers. And there’s no real left to organize them against the capitalists and the state, which means there’s only the hard right.

And here’s where things might get really, really bad.

As much as far right movements in Europe tend to hate Muslims, they tend to hate Jews even more. And if they decide that Israel is the reason that the factories are closing, the reason they cannot afford to drive, the reason that food prices are soaring, and the reason why social benefits⁷ are suddenly disappearing, they won’t just blame Israel, they’ll also blame Jews.

Already, many on the identitarian left have trouble distinguishing between what Israel does and what Jews do, and they at least try to be good at making those distinctions. Imagine how much worse it will be when people who don’t make even that feeble effort start looking for a scapegoat. And I probably don’t need to tell you what happens when a political movement starts telling common people that Jews are the cause of their shitty economic situation.

Yeah, this is all bad. The best we can possibly do is pray to whatever gods will listen that this war doesn’t spiral out even more. But, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure there are gods that hope this gets even worse.

1. 96,000 jobs lost in February, 2026. Also, it’s important to remember the US uses a very weird calculation for unemployment that Europe and other places don’t use. In the US, only people who have no job and are considered “actively” looking for full time jobs are included in the 4.4% unemployment rate. The real number is much higher.

2. This doesn’t even include the sudden crisis in world nitrogen fertilizer costs. 30% of all the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Oh, by the way, there’s going to be a crisis in helium. Sound’s not like a big deal, until you notice that helium is essential to the production of superconductors. 30% of it also passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

4. See my series, “How the Left Got Fucked.”

5. Always when I write these things, I feel the need to remind you I’m an immigrant and I don’t support deportations or ICE. Talking about the material conditions and economic effects of immigration on the working class is something the left once did but has now fully ceded to the far right, and that’s led to a kind of fundamentalist thinking where any analysis of the negative impacts of immigration is seen as “fascist.”

6. See here. Also, Macron announced right at the beginning of the war that France will now be placing its nuclear weapons infrastructure throughout Europe. This is terrifying.

7. Already, even the “socialist” parties in many European countries are advocating reductions in benefits in order to increase military spending.