Long time readers here will appreciate the role that Insurers are playing in delineating climate risks.
Similar analysis shows that the true damages of the current war go beyond what bombs and mines alone can achieve.
Dubai is done. No one is going to be pouring billions into that oligarch playground in the foreseeable future. Enormous damage being done to the economic infrastructure that underpins the fossil fuel industry in the Middle East – and it will last long after the smoke clears.
BREAKING: QatarEnergy just declared Force Majeure.
Three words that mean: we cannot deliver, and legally, we do not have to.
This is no longer a supply disruption. This is a contract collapse.
Force Majeure is not a precaution. It is a formal legal declaration that an unforeseeable event beyond QatarEnergy’s control has made fulfillment impossible. Every affected buyer just had their contract voided. The gas they were counting on is gone, and they have no legal recourse to get it back.
82% of Qatar’s LNG goes to Asia.
China relies on Qatar for 30% of its LNG imports. India 42 to 52%. South Korea 14 to 19%. Taiwan 25%. Japan is already rationing to spot markets.
Asian benchmark prices jumped 39% the day production stopped.
Force Majeure just made that permanent until further notice.
Indian companies have already cut gas supplies to industry by 10 to 30%. That is not a market adjustment. That is factories running at reduced capacity today, across the world’s most populous continent, because Iran sent drones into Ras Laffan.
Here is the number the market still has not fully absorbed.
Two weeks to restart a liquefaction train after a full cold shutdown. Then two more weeks to reach full capacity. That is a minimum of four weeks at zero, assuming no further strikes, no security complications, no inspection delays.
The war is still running.
There is no security guarantee. There is no restart timeline. There is no floor.
Every LNG contract in Asia just became a spot market problem. Every spot market problem just became an inflation problem. Every inflation problem just became a central bank problem.
This started as a war in the Middle East.
It is now inside every factory, every power plant, and every gas bill across Asia.
Price that chain.
Shanaka Anslem Perera Substack:
You are pricing a military campaign. Four to five weeks, President Trump says. Brent at seventy-nine dollars reflects that assumption. Your models show a temporary supply disruption, a brief spike, and mean reversion by Q2. Your equity book is positioned for the dip-buying playbook that has worked after every geopolitical shock since the Gulf War. You are structurally mispriced. Not about the war. About what closed the Strait.
On March 1, 2026, Vortexa satellite tracking recorded four supertanker transits through the Strait of Hormuz. The day before, twenty-two had passed. By the time you read this, the number may be zero. Not because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps mined the channel. Not because the United States Navy blockaded the waterway. Not because any sovereign authority declared the Strait closed. The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately twenty million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products flow every day, representing roughly one-fifth of global consumption, shut down because seven insurance companies filed paperwork.
Between March 1 and March 2, seven of the twelve clubs belonging to the International Group of Protection and Indemnity Clubs issued seventy-two-hour cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and all Iranian territorial waters. Gard AS, NorthStandard, Steamship Mutual, Assuranceforeningen Skuld, the American Club, the Swedish Club, and the London P&I Club collectively insure approximately ninety percent of the world’s ocean-going commercial tonnage. When they withdraw, ships do not sail. Not because they cannot. Because they must not. No P&I cover means no port will accept them, no cargo owner will load them, no bank will finance the voyage, no charterer will contract them. The vessel becomes a commercially unviable object adrift in a system that runs entirely on institutional trust.
Lloyd’s List AIS tracking data confirms what the insurance circulars implied: Hormuz transits have collapsed approximately eighty percent from roughly one hundred and thirty-eight vessels per day to approximately twenty-eight. At least forty very large crude carriers, each carrying roughly two million barrels of oil, sit idle within the Gulf according to Kpler tracking data. Thirteen empty LNG tankers have diverted away from Hormuz entirely per Bloomberg ship-tracking analysis. The world’s most important energy chokepoint is not closed by force. It is closed by spreadsheet.
This distinction is not semantic. It is the entire thesis. Because a military blockade ends when the military operation ends. An actuarial blockade ends when the insurance market decides it has ended. Those are two fundamentally different timelines operating on fundamentally different logics. The market is pricing the first. The alpha is in the second.
Brent crude at seventy-nine to eighty-two dollars per barrel is consistent with a four-to-eight-week disruption followed by normalization. This pricing embeds the assumption that when the bombs stop falling, the oil starts flowing. It is the same framework that priced every Middle Eastern conflict since Desert Storm. The framework is correct for kinetic blockades. It is structurally mispriced for what is happening now.
Inside this analysis: the mechanism that makes an insurance withdrawal structurally stickier than a minefield, the specific timeline mismatch between what the market expects and what the evidence supports, the eight cascading vulnerabilities that compound the initial disruption into a systemic crisis, the institutional positioning that is most exposed, and the precise conditions under which this thesis is wrong. The positions are already being built by those who understand the difference between a military timeline and an actuarial one.