RT

By Murad Sadygzade, President of the Middle East Studies Center, Visiting Lecturer, HSE University (Moscow).

19-March-2026

Facing a struggle for survival, Iran is making world’s entire energy economy its battleground

By March 19, 2026, the pattern is unmistakable. What began as a war centered on Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and the waters around the Strait of Hormuz has now spilled decisively into the infrastructure heart of the Gulf monarchies.

The most firmly established Iranian strike on Gulf energy infrastructure so far is the missile attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial complex, the largest LNG hub on earth, carried out after Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field. At the same time, earlier Iranian retaliatory waves had already hit or endangered critical nodes across the wider Gulf arc, including the Saudi oil center at Ras Tanura, port and fuel infrastructure in the UAE at Jebel Ali, Zayed Port, and Fujairah, as well as military and fuel-related sites in Bahrain. Other targets publicly named by Iran or discussed in market reporting, such as Jubail, Samref, Al Hosn, and the Red Sea export route through Yanbu, belong to a second category where threats, interceptions, and partial reporting often run ahead of full independent verification. Yet even in that fog, the strategic message is crystal clear. Iran is no longer merely threatening the energy order of the Gulf. It is testing how far it can break it.

The logic of these strikes is brutally simple. The Gulf monarchies are rich, technologically sophisticated, and heavily armed, but much of their economic life remains concentrated in coastal infrastructure that is difficult to hide, difficult to harden completely, and even harder to restore quickly under fire. Refineries, loading terminals, gas separation plants, desalination systems, export jetties, storage farms, and power networks are not abstract assets on a spreadsheet. They are the circulatory system of the region. Damage them and you do not merely lower output – you threaten electricity, water, transport, state revenues, insurance markets, shipping schedules, and domestic confidence all at once. That is why the strike on Ras Laffan mattered so much more than a single explosion on a map. It was a signal that the war had crossed into the one domain Gulf rulers fear most, the domain where geopolitical conflict turns into systemic economic paralysis. Reuters and other reporting also show how even intercepted drones and missiles have caused fires and disruption in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, demonstrating that in this kind of war, a partial interception is not the same thing as security.

Ras Laffan is not just another industrial site. It is the crown jewel of Qatar’s energy model and one of the pillars of the global gas trade. Damage there reverberates far beyond Doha. It reaches power utilities in Asia, gas buyers in Europe, tanker routes, spot prices, inflation expectations, and the strategic calculations of every government that hoped the Gulf would remain the last reliable ballast in a disordered energy world. The same is true in a different way for Saudi facilities such as Ras Tanura and for UAE export nodes along the Gulf of Oman. In a regional war, the distinction between local damage and global consequence vanishes quickly.

Continued at link below:

https://www.rt.com/news/635540-israel-iran-chain-reaction/