This week, governments which ignored basics are seeing serious consequences for fantastical thinking.
By Clarice Feldman
American Thinker
March 30, 2026
Math ruins some really enchanting ideas. Things like fossil-free energy and open borders, combined with generous social welfare. This week, governments that ignored the basics are seeing serious consequences for fantastical thinking. By the same token, however, properly applied math can dispel doomster thinking.
Pollster Mark Penn presents a "math camp" this week. It's a refreshing response to offset the hysteria about the economic disruption of Iran's "global terror network."
We use 20 million barrels of oil a day. So if oil prices increased during the war to $110 a barrel that is an extra $1 billion a day in costs. So 60 or 90 days of conflict adds about 60 to 90 billion in costs in a 29 trillion dollar economy. About 70 per cent of that is domestically produced so 70 per cent of it stays in the US economy. It just shifts from one sector to the other. In comparison, Trump took in 260 billion in tariff revenues last year and all of the fears of it were overblown as that amounted to only 1 per cent of the economy. The impact here of even a 4 or 6 month conflict (and there's no indication it will go on that long) are much less than last year's tariffs. Oil was over $100 for 3.5 years of Obam[a]'s term without daily headlines.
[snip] Imagine for a second how much the world will save in military and human costs once the greatest sponsor of global terror falls or is contained. This is a regime that gunned down thousands of unarmed protesters while diverting all its resources to missiles and nuclear weapons and their aims remain regional domination and beyond.
Net net the math shows that once again the impacts, while absolutely real, are way overblown. The Iranians are playing to our fears and only once we realize that the benefit of removing their stranglehold on the Mideast is worth trillions in the long term can we put our fears in perspective. Once we overcome them, Iran's principal remaining source of power on the West collapses.
Ingenuity and structural resilience go far in preventing doomsday predictions from materializing. Major Gulf oil producers are showing how strategic management and resilience are working around the Strait of Hormuz constraints and Iranian attacks.
Iran struck the UAE's Fujairah oil export terminal, which bypasses the Strait twice last week. In response, it raised its export capacity by 57% to 1.9 million barrels a day.
The Saudis have an East-West pipeline that bypasses the Strait and is pumping oil at its full capacity of 7 million barrels a day ( per Bloomberg).
The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar signaled their intent to open the Strait with military force. If they follow through on their pronouncements, traffic through the Strait will be freely flowing in a short time.
Creating a choke point on the Strait was Iran's last hurrah, I think. It's not likely to hold for long. Nevertheless, countries that didn't manage their resources and adopt sensible energy policies, clinging to make-believe green ones, will suffer disproportionately from any disruption.
Jeff Childers offers to my mind the most telling analysis of the global energy crisis.
While gas prices in the U.S. have gone up a little, in the EU, where member states did such stupid things as mandating net-zero policies and shuttering productive and safe nuclear energy plants, average gas prices are up 70%, and it's likely they will continue to rise. And the EU's leaders were asleep at the switch:
The global energy crisis took them all by surprise. The Europeans didn't (and still don't) know the plan. The IEA's chief, Fatih Birol, said the "effect on energy markets of the Iran bombings and the closure of Hormuz strait was not initially understood by world leaders."
Guess which country is best positioned to weather a global energy crisis ? Hands down, it is the United States of America. Thanks to President Trump, and to the shale boom, we are now energy independent. Only a tiny fraction of US oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. We don't need it.
And, since January, we also have oil-rich Venezuela in our pocket. (OilPrice, two days ago: " Venezuela Oil Production Climbs to 1.1 Million Bpd.")
Runners-up for well-positioned countries include China (which has squirreled away a vast petroleum stockpile), Russia (which NATO's neocons sneeringly dismissed as the "gas station with nukes"), and a short list of smaller oil-exporting countries like Mexico, Norway, Brazil, and - believe it or not - Canada.
In practical terms, this means we have great leverage against NATO and those European non-ally allies, since they depend on the Strait, and we don't. President Trump demanded that countries that depended on oil transported through the Strait should send their warships to escort their own oil tankers. They didn't. We're in no hurry to continue to do their work for them.
As for NATO, they've proved themselves to be moochers, relying on our military and material while refusing to pay their share or contribute to this necessary undertaking. The President has publicly ruminated about leaving it.
Childers adds that waiting for Trump's term in office to end will not end U.S. leverage over European energy supplies. A major factor in support of the argument is that Europe has waited too long to deal with its energy problems. It's now worse than pensioners freezing in winter and dying of heat stroke in summer. Even worse than their cratering manufacturing capacity. Tech advances require enormous amounts of energy.
The US is the only power that can reopen the Strait, and it is slow-walking doing so. A global energy crisis has arisen, most acutely in Europe, right at the precise time when energy is the single most important resource for securing a spot in the post-AI world.
AI development is not linear. It is geometrically compounding. Each generation of AI helps build the next generation faster. The models being trained today are being used to design the next chips, optimize the newest code, and accelerate the frontier research for tomorrow's models. If Europe falls just 18 months behind, they're not just 18 months behind - they're 18 months behind something that's accelerating away from them.
It's not a gap, it's a widening chasm.
Whether he meant to or not, Trump's global energy crisis has doomed the Europeans to become second-rate powers. Not just for the next three years until Trump's term is over, or even the next 30 years, but maybe for the next hundred years. Maybe even forever.
In the meantime, domestically, the Democrats are clinging to the issues of interest to only 20% of the country, like refusing to agree to the necessary election regularization set out in SAVE. They seem to be counting on the No Kings protests of geriatric dupes sponsored by the left wing (often using laundered federal funds). These protestors schlep about with pre-printed No King signs against the policies of a president who just wiped out dictators in Iran, Venezuela, and will likely do the same in Cuba.
This article was originally published on American Thinker.