# Go Get Your Own Oil
On March 31, 2026, the President of the United States told countries like the UK to go to the Strait of Hormuz and “just take” fuel. He said Iran had been “essentially, decimated” and the hard part was done. He told allies who “refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran” that America wouldn’t be there to help anymore. Then he offered to sell them jet fuel.
This was posted on Truth Social. Not in a diplomatic cable. Not through back channels. On social media, like it was a product launch.
Five thousand kilometres away, government workers in Thailand were told to take the stairs instead of the elevator to save energy. Vietnam scrapped import duties on petroleum to prevent shortages. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency and moved to a four-day workweek. Myanmar imposed alternating driving days. Petrol stations in Hanoi had queues stretching down the block. In Singapore, Aster Chemicals declared force majeure — meaning they could not honour their contracts because feedstock had stopped arriving.
All of this because the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, 2026, killing the Supreme Leader. Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Tanker traffic dropped 95%. Brent crude hit $126 a barrel. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex was hit by Iranian drones — damage that will take three to five years to repair. The expected global LNG glut that was supposed to ease Asian energy costs for the next decade disappeared overnight.
84% of the crude oil that normally flows through Hormuz is bound for Asia. 83% of the LNG. This was never a Western crisis. It was always an Asian one.
Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said it out loud in an interview with Reuters on March 23. He pointed out that by 2019, America had become a net energy exporter. The strategic calculus from the Carter Doctrine era — when America needed Hormuz open for its own survival — had completely flipped. He then said he suspected Trump’s answer to ASEAN would be: it’s an Asian problem, not an American problem.
A week later, Trump confirmed it on Truth Social.
## The Strait as a Loyalty Test
Iran didn’t just close Hormuz. It opened it selectively.
On March 26, Iran announced that ships from five nations — China, Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan — would be allowed to transit. Malaysia and Thailand negotiated their own access separately. According to Lloyd’s List, the IRGC was assessing transit payments in Chinese yuan.
Think about what that means. Iran is deciding who gets energy and who doesn’t. And the toll is being collected in a currency that isn’t the US dollar, through a chokepoint the US no longer depends on, by a military force the US just tried to destroy but couldn’t eliminate.
The IRGC is a 47-year-old parallel state controlling roughly half of Iran’s economy. It doesn’t dissolve because a Supreme Leader dies. It adapts. And right now it’s adapting by turning a shipping lane into a geopolitical sorting mechanism.
China isn’t just getting through. It’s getting through on terms that build an alternative financial architecture, one transit at a time.
## ASEAN Has No Good Options
Southeast Asia’s energy vulnerability isn’t new. What’s new is how completely it’s been exposed.
ASEAN countries are overwhelmingly price-takers in global energy markets. Japan and South Korea spent decades locking in long-term LNG contracts and building strategic reserves. Southeast Asia relied on spot purchasing — buying on the open market, paying whatever the price was that day. When Hormuz closed, they weren’t competing for supply. They were competing for scraps.
Singapore refines roughly 1.1 million barrels of crude per day across three major facilities. That’s a massive operation. It’s also completely useless without feedstock. Singapore produces almost no oil of its own. When crude stops arriving, the refineries don’t slow down — they stop.
And the irony is thick. ASEAN countries are sitting on hydrocarbon reserves in the South China Sea — oil and gas deposits that could reduce their dependency on Middle Eastern supply. But they can’t jointly develop those resources because they can’t agree on who owns what. Maritime sovereignty disputes have frozen cooperation for decades. And the country that’s blocking resolution — China — just negotiated its own access through Hormuz.
The resources are underneath them. The politics won’t let them reach.
Indonesia’s President Prabowo announced plans to build 100 gigawatts of solar “as quickly as possible.” The Philippines boosted coal generation. South Korea ordered minimizing LNG use and pushed nuclear and renewables higher in the priority stack. These are emergency responses, not strategies. They buy weeks, maybe months. They don’t replace the structural dependency that got them here.
## Singapore’s Trusted Optionality Under Maximum Stress
Singapore’s entire national model is built on being useful to everyone and aligned exclusively with no one. It sits between great powers, offers neutral infrastructure, enforces rules-based systems, and makes itself indispensable. It’s the Switzerland of Asia, except it actually works.
That model depends on there being a rules-based space to occupy. When Iran decides who transits a strait and who doesn’t, when China negotiates bilateral access while the US tells allies to fend for themselves, the neutral space collapses. There’s nothing to be neutral between. There are just two systems — and Singapore has to figure out which queue to stand in.
PM Lawrence Wong cited Australia as a reliable alternative LNG supplier. That helps keep the lights on. It doesn’t save the refining hub. Australian LNG and Middle Eastern crude serve different functions in different infrastructure. You can’t swap one for the other any more than you can run jet fuel through a gas pipeline.
Balakrishnan’s saving grace argument was fiscal buffers and sovereign wealth fund returns. While most countries spend up to 3% of GDP servicing debt, Singapore earns dividends on its reserves. That’s real. That buys time.
But time for what? That’s the question nobody in government is answering yet. Because the honest answer is: time to figure out a new model. And nobody wants to say the old one is breaking.
China has already suspended fuel exports to prioritise domestic supply. The IRGC is charging yuan tolls. The US is selling the idea of American energy to countries whose currencies are weakening against the dollar. Singapore’s role as a USD-denominated trading hub becomes structurally weaker every day this continues. Not because anyone is targeting Singapore. Because the architecture Singapore depends on is being rearranged by people who don’t think about Singapore at all.
## The Harvest
Here is the part that sounds like conspiracy but probably isn’t. Probably.
The United States struck Iran. The strike closed Hormuz. The closure devastated Asian economies. Asian currencies weakened. Energy prices surged — priced in dollars, the currency those weakened economies now struggle to hold. The US, a net energy exporter, is now positioned to sell replacement supply to desperate buyers at elevated prices on long-term contracts.
The US didn’t need to plan this. It just needed to not depend on Hormuz anymore — which it achieved by 2019. Have an exportable energy surplus — which it has. Not care about downstream effects on 700 million people in ASEAN — which it’s demonstrating in real time. And then let gravity do the rest.
This pattern has a precedent. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis wasn’t engineered by Washington. But the IMF structural adjustment programs that followed forced open Asian capital markets, fire-sold assets at distressed prices, and locked in dollar dependency for a generation. Nobody planned the harvest. The harvest happened anyway.
That’s the thing about structural advantage combined with indifference. The outcome looks designed. It doesn’t need to be. The US profits whether Trump thought three moves ahead or zero. American LNG export infrastructure is already operating near capacity — so it can’t even replace the supply it helped destroy. But it doesn’t need to. It just needs prices high enough to profit from what it does export, and buyers desperate enough to sign long-term contracts for future capacity.
The crisis is temporary. The contracts won’t be.
The uncomfortable question isn’t whether this was calculated. It’s that it doesn’t matter. Calculated, indifferent, or somewhere in the deliberately blurred space between — the outcome is identical. ASEAN economies weaken, sign expensive dollar-denominated energy contracts, and lock in a new dependency that will outlast whatever peace deal eventually reopens the strait.
Trump telling countries to “go get your own oil” isn’t a mastermind revealing his plan. It’s someone who doesn’t think about second-order effects on people he’s never met, and doesn’t need to, because America profits either way.
## What’s Left
Nobody knows how this ends. Balakrishnan said he couldn’t find a single modern example where overwhelming military force resolved a political crisis. That’s not hedging — that’s a foreign minister telling you, as clearly as he can without blowing up a bilateral relationship, that there is no playbook.
The helium disruption from the Gulf is already hitting semiconductor production. Fertilizer prices are up 50%. The northern hemisphere is entering planting season with constrained supply. This isn’t just an energy crisis anymore. It’s a food security crisis, a manufacturing crisis, and a currency crisis wearing an energy crisis as a mask.
And the guy who started it is on social media telling people to come and take what they need.
What kind of world is this? The kind where the biggest player breaks something, walks away, and sends you the invoice. The kind where 700 million people in Southeast Asia ration electricity while the resources beneath their feet stay locked up by sovereignty disputes. The kind where a 47-year-old revolutionary guard collects tolls in yuan from a strait America doesn’t need anymore.
The kind where you’re told the hard part is done, and you know it hasn’t even started.
Comments