When the cycle turns
The energy market in the summer of 2026 is not experiencing a price spike. It is experiencing a structural reorientation. The framework that kept global commodity markets stable for the better part of four decades, a US-enforced maritime order, dollar-denominated trade, and cheap capital flowing toward technology, is fracturing along its seams.
Writing via InternationalMan.com, contrarian analyst Chris MacIntosh argues that the rotation from technology to energy has already begun, and that this cycle is structurally larger than those of the past two decades. The key mechanism is geopolitical: the United States and China have divided the material world between them. China dominates critical minerals, rare earths and the supply chains that feed the energy transition; the US controls hydrocarbons, food and the financial infrastructure of global trade. When China restricted exports of rare earth elements and magnets in April 2025, the fragility of Western manufacturing was immediately exposed. The parallel with oil is exact: decades of efficiency gains have stripped out discretionary consumption, leaving only essential uses. You cannot substitute away from what remains.
The postwar security order, whereby the US Navy protected global shipping in exchange for dollar primacy, is unwinding, not because any administration chose to end it, but because the fiscal arithmetic of maintaining it has broken down. Defence now ranks fourth in the US federal budget, behind Medicare and Social Security and rising interest costs. The Hormuz crisis of 2026 is the most visible consequence: a chokepoint disruption that the US no longer has an unconditional incentive to absorb on behalf of its trading partners. For any business planning energy procurement over a multi-year horizon, the relevant question is not whether prices will normalise, they will, but what the next baseline looks like when the old security architecture no longer operates as it once did.