经济周刊：伊朗、能源和全球权力的新规则

William Blair As Bessent mentions, and as the NSS report is also quiteexplicit in highlighting, economic policy has now mergedwith national security policy. This is a major transition ingovernment policy that cannot be overemphasized, butit was not started by President Trump. The strategy wasalso pursued by the Biden administration with its “smallyard, high fence”—i.e., restricting Chinese access to criti- War has erupted in the Middle East once again. To under-stand why this is happening (beyond the obvious removalof the nuclear threat from a dodgy player), one needs totake a step back and look at the situation above the fogof war. What we see from this vantage point is the erup-tion of a kinetic hot war, in what has been an ongoing cold war for many years now between the U.S., China, and tosome degree Russia. From this perspective, Iran seems to be more of a skirmish in the global fight for control of theflow of energy, the domination of technology, and na-tional security.In thisEconomics Weekly, we attempt to The traditional tools of economic policy, such as monetaryand fiscal policy, which are normally used independently ofeach other to achieve the goals of growth, stability, and em-ployment, are still very much in use; however, they are nowsubsumed into a broader strategic framework—statecraft. Perhaps the single best starting point for contextualizingthe current conflict is to simply read the slim 29-pageNovember 2025National Security Strategy(NSS) paper Previously, economic policy would have been used asthe guiding hand behind directionally nudging cyclicaleconomic growth and free trade with like-minded na-tions. Now, the view is that to achieve structural eco- The document highlights the U.S. economic and securitypriorities, which include rebuilding industrial capacityand reclaiming strategic dominance in areas such as de-fense, energy, critical materials, pharmaceuticals, manu- nomic growth—which includes low and stable prices,industrial capacity, technological dominance, and nationalsecurity—full statecraft is required. Or, as the NSS states,“[a]chieving these goals requires marshaling every re- We continue to refer to a quote from Treasury SecretaryBessent during his April 2025interviewwith TuckerCarlson, where he captures the administration’s strategic We see this already playing out in several ways: •Decisions to take government stakes in strategic So, I think that this is the beginning of a process.We’re going to reindustrialize. We’ve gone to ahighly financialized economy. We’ve stopped mak-ing things—especially a lot of things that are rel-evant for national security. I think one of the fewgood outcomes from COVID was we had a beta testfor what maybe a kinetic war with a large adver-sary could look like. And it turned out that thesehighly efficient supply chains were not strategi-cally secure. So we don’t make our own medicines. •Encouraging greater foreign dependence on U.S. forcritical supplies—e.g., the EU gets 25% of its LNG fromthe U.S., up from 0% before the Ukraine invasion; •Control of the flow of energy, either directly by control-ling the producers (e.g., Venezuela) or indirectly viaareas that might represent choke holds for transporta- •Control of monetary policy, by attempting to control •A drive to further entrench dollar dominance viathe greater integration of stablecoins into the global William Blair As stated in the NSS, the goal with regard to existinggovernance in the region no longer seems to be to seek regime change, but rather to drop “America’s misguidedexperiment with hectoring these nations—especially the With the emergence of U.S. energy independence andfollowing the June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, theU.S. felt it could downgrade the Middle East from whatused to be a central arena for U.S. strategy to one that just Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions andhistoric forms of government. We should encourage and ap-plaud reform when and where it emerges organically, with-out trying to impose it from without. The key to successful For half a century at least, American foreign policyhas prioritized the Middle East above all other re-gions. The reasons are obvious: the Middle East wasfor decades the world’s most important supplier ofenergy, was a prime theater of superpower competi- Up to now, this seemed to have meant tolerating theexisting Iranian regime as long as it played ball. Yet, itappears that this is no longer the case, and Iran’s status Conflict remains the Middle East’s most trouble-some dynamic, but there is today less to thisproblem than headlines might lead one to believe.Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actionssince October 7, 2023, and President Trump’sJune 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, whichsignificantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.… Iran’s strategic importance has been relatively wellknown, but it has become even clearer this week with the While Iran produces