Juan Cole 10/05/2026
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The depth of despair in Doha, the gleaming capital of Qatar, over the prospect of an early end to hostilities in the Gulf can be measured by the announcement by state-owned QatarEnergy that it will not be able to fulfill its contracts with a number of customers until at least early December. According to Charles Kennedy at Oilprice, these customers include Pakistan, Bangladesh, a firm in India, and Edison in Italy. In legal terms, Qatar declared “force majeure,” French for “superior force.” It is a provision in a contract that holds the supplier harmless if some big event like a war or a cyclone interferes with deliveries.
The 2026 oil crisis is only one of the dire fall-outs of the Israel-US war on Iran. Fossil gas is another problem. The small Gulf state of Qatar is one of the world’s major producers of Liquefied Natural Gas, which can be shipped as a super-cooled liquid by sea. Some 20% of LNG was exported through the Strait of Hormuz before February 28.
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Although Qatar occasionally manages to send an LNG tanker through the Strait, the volume of its exports is a fraction of what it had been before the war on Iran broke out. Reuters reported that in March through August, Qatar managed to send 18 tankers through the Strait. During those months in 2025, the number had been 509 tankers.
Moreover, 17% of Qatar’s LNG production capacity was knocked out by Iranian strikes, and it will take three to five years to repair the facility at Ras Laffan.
Qatar had correct relations with Iran and did not deserve to be attacked like that. The Ras Laffan strike illustrated Tehran’s new policy of taking its neighbors hostage to guarantee its own security. It is all Netanyahu-Trump’s fault for launching an illegal war of aggression that has harmed American allies.
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The Economist estimates the shortfall in Qatari deliveries at 39 million tons so far, about 9% of the total global supply in 2025. Fossil gas prices have soared by 140% in Asia since February.
The Economist says that European fossil gas reserves are remarkably low, and that politicians have not scrambled to replace Qatari LNG, allowing Asian nations to snap up available supplies from elsewhere. European leaders are wagering that El Niño will produce a mild winter. El Niño years are typically hotter than normal, and this year’s El Niño promises to be especially hot. Such climate effects, however, are erratic and hard to predict. El Niño can send atmospheric energy waves into the Arctic stratosphere and disrupt the winds that circle the Arctic, allowing extreme cold to spill south, in what is termed a polar vortex. We’ve been having them occasionally in Michigan and they are cold as the far side of Pluto. Europeans call them an “Arctic blast.” If one hits when the fossil gas reservoirs are low on the Continent, it could produce a dire situation.
Doha, Qatar. © Juan Cole, 2018.
If the Iran War continues into the winter, which seems likely, and if Europe suffers from polar vortexes, The Economist says one Singaporean energy expert warned it that “there may be no ceiling to the price” of fossil gas. At that point Europeans would jump on the market and compete with Asia for a much diminished supply. It could be a frigid, expensive winter if things go wrong. And they easily could go wrong.
Nor is the Strait of Hormuz likely to become less strategically important any time soon, contrary to the wild pronouncements of US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He predicted that in two years pipelines would make the Strait unimportant. Qatari officials, who have no pipelines planned, slapped him down on the issue. And soon after his foolish speech, Iraqi Shiite militias took out the East-West pipeline in Saudi Arabia, demonstrating that pipelines are just as vulnerable as shipping lanes. Qatari officials pointed out that in any case 90% of international trade is seaborne, and it isn’t likely to change. It is much cheaper to ship commodities by sea than to transport them overland.
Pakistan did manage to get a shipment of LNG from Qatar through the Gulf a couple of weeks ago, after it negotiated safe passage with Iran. This episode illustrates the continued leverage Iran has on Gulf shipping, and Trump administration officials who wish it away are just, as usual, living in la la land.
This war, and this energy crisis, won’t end unless the Trump administration finds a way to do a deal with Iran that recognizes its new centrality to global energy security, that indemnifies it for the illegal war waged on it, and that gives it guarantees against being treated like a big Gaza. In the meantime, many innocents are going to be hurt. Not only may it be a cold, expensive winter, but fertilizer shortages will affect crop yields worldwide, producing hunger and malnutrition.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan. He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Bluesky at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page