The Gulf war is the latest, most expensive proof of that logic, and it will not be the last.

On 19 March, Iranian missiles struck the Qatari gas complex of Ras Laffan, causing severe damage to two of its fourteen gas liquefaction trains. Both will be out of service for a few years, bringing down Qatar's liquefied natural gas (LNG) capacity by a sixth. The entire complex is anyway shut down due to the Gulf conflict.

In addition, operations at the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) Habshan gas processing complex too came to a grinding halt. And to top that, Iraq stopped oil production because it ran out of storage space after the Strait of Hormuz was blocked.

Gallows humour for the day was that the loss of LNG supply from the Persian Gulf didn't matter because the shortages would be covered up by America. Yet, what began as an internet joke swiftly became a point for deep contemplation with deeper energy-based geopolitical implications. It merits in-depth analysis.

In 2024, 544 billion cubic metres (bcm) of LNG was traded globally. Sixty per cent of this trade is dominated by three exporters in near-equal proportions: Australia, Qatar, and in pole position, America. Eighty per cent of this LNG is imported by just five regions: Europe, China, Japan, South Korea, and India.

By 2030, global LNG demand is expected to rise by 40 per cent to around 750 bcm. Much of this demand growth will come from Asia. The International Energy Agency says that two prime movers of demand will be gas-powered heavy vehicles in China, and vastly expanding city gas distribution networks in India.

In the same period, America will have enhanced its LNG export capacity by 300 per cent through a number of projects presently under execution. Qatar would double its export capacity by then. Australia is projected to maintain current export levels to 2030 before entering a long decade of terminal decline.

As a result, we see that by 2030, America would have close to half the market share, Qatar about a quarter, and Australia a tad under a sixth. That adds up to nearly 90 per cent of projected global LNG demand at the end of this decade, or much more if that 40 per cent demand growth figure falters.

Additionally, Canada is firmly aiming for 10 per cent of market share by 2030, with two projects well under way. With Canada in as a member of the America-led LNG bloc, along with Australia and Qatar, this group could essentially meet all global LNG demand by this decade's end.

American exports are becoming increasingly dominated in a comprehensive manner by hydrocarbons, and this rising trend is only going to be sustained as manufacturing in Asia, led by India, cuts a new arc. The inference is stark: America needs to ensure that its market share keeps growing in step with its LNG export capacity because the domestic investments are too big to fail; they amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.

This dependency on hydrocarbon exports has grave consequences because, just as a continuous effort has been made since the Obama years to try and keep a sizeable volume of oil off the market so as to accommodate American oil exports, a fresh effort will have to be made to ensure that LNG from diverse regions does not enter the world market to sour America's LNG dreams. And the only real way to do that is by force.

To clearly understand what that means, let us compare proved reserves of natural gas for a country that is not landlocked with its share of the current global LNG export pie.

The starkness of the anomaly is self-evident. Russia has the world's largest reserves of natural gas, approximately equal to the reserves of America, Australia, and Qatar combined. And yet, it commands only 8 per cent of the global LNG market share while the other three have over 60 per cent.

America's dreams of global LNG dominance are primarily predicated upon the end of Russian hydrocarbon exports to Europe. As per officially stated plans, Europe should stop importing all Russian gas within two years, both piped and LNG.

Since 2022, when the West sanctioned Russia over the Ukraine conflict (a move made by Russia to safeguard its strategic security, and to prevent Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO, the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation which still formally sees Russia as its principal threat, decades after the Cold War ended), Russian exports of gas to Europe have declined from 39 per cent to 20 per cent.

In the same period, American LNG exports to Europe reached 17 per cent. This figure is set to first double by 2027, and then rise further. We see clearly that America would have replaced Russia as Europe's primary supplier of energy, exactly at the time when Europe stops energy imports from Russia. The cost of this swap will be borne wholly by Europe since American LNG is two to five times more expensive than piped gas from Russia. And that cost will be levied in the form of inflation and unemployment.

Now look at Iran. It has nearly as much gas reserves as Russia, but has zero share of the global LNG pie. India, one of the world's largest markets, sits just three to four days' sailing time away. With this in mind, Russia and Iran signed a $40 billion agreement in 2022 to build LNG terminals in Iran, and suitably exploit Iran's supergiant gas fields like the North Pars. What befell that project? A third Gulf war.

Iran and Russia are not lone sufferers of this market anomaly. There are others, like Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, all with huge gas reserves, but with zero share in the LNG export sector.

The bulk of Venezuela's gas reserves are located offshore, adjacent to, or in a few cases overlapping, the maritime border with Trinidad and Tobago. This West Indian island nation, with one-hundredth of Russia or Iran's gas reserves, has a 2 per cent LNG market share. And now that America controls all the hydrocarbon resources of Venezuela, Western oil companies have been granted permission by America to develop hitherto-stranded Venezuelan gas fields by hooking them to the adjacent Trinidadian offshore gas production pipelines.

This is how the LNG game is being played.

To stress the point, compare the R/P ratio of Iraq and America in the table below. It is a whopping 336 years for Iraq and just 14 for America. (The R/P ratio, or reserves-to-production ratio, is the number of years for which gas can be extracted at current production levels.)

To briefly recap, readers may note the argumentation at this juncture: in the past two decades, America has discovered that the single most powerful lever employable to boost its economy is increasing production and export of oil and gas from shales.

In the process, their export of hydrocarbons has become the single largest component of everything they export, and the most potent tool they possess to reduce their trade deficit with the world.

As a result, they need to keep increasing market share of both oil and LNG to new markets, which they have, by edging out traditional, established suppliers through any and all means, including conflict, violent regime change, and destabilising colour revolutions.

What does this mean for nations that may wish to become major players in the LNG export market? Very simply put, their wishes mean nothing without approval from the powers that be. Wishes attract sanctions. Wishes attract conflict. Dream your lovely LNG dreams at your own risk because, while all dreams are equal, some dreams are more equal than others.

The 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, signed with America, Britain, Russia, Germany, and China, was ostensibly intended to defuse Iran's nuclear ambitions and to rehabilitate it into the global comity of nations. Yet, the rehabilitation of Iran is, in fact, the last thing the energy markets ever needed because a friendly, peaceful Iran would also mean vast volumes of Iranian oil and gas formally entering the global market.

How on earth could that be ever countenanced precisely when other rising exporters were hastily scrambling for market share in the midst of an oversupply glut? You cannot fault the Iranians for thinking that decades of sanctions were imposed purely to prevent Iranian energy from having unrestricted access to global trade.

It was an irreconcilable contradiction, meaning that for all practical purposes, the Iran nuclear deal was actually a dead letter from the start. This is very similar to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's admission that the Minsk agreements of 2014-15 were signed with Russia only to buy time to arm Ukraine and, therefore, not in good faith. First Russia, and now Iran, have fallen prey to the same gameplan. Who will be next?

Mozambique? Oh wait, no. They immediately discovered Islamist terrorism two years after they discovered vast reserves of gas in 2015, bringing work on an Indo-French LNG terminal to a halt. Yemen? No, been there, done that; they discovered the Houthi uprising, bringing exports from their French-led LNG terminal to a halt in 2015.

What does this mean for importers?

The good news is that with America's rapid capacity enhancement, LNG shortages will become a thing of the past quite soon. Volatility and risk of supply, especially from tension-prone regions like the Persian Gulf, will abate. And that is about it, because America's entire LNG play is based on two metrics: edging the competition out of the market, and a mid-term forecast for healthy LNG demand growth.

But this is precisely where reality could bite, hard. Subsurface geological subjectivities and economic vagaries are tough to capture in a forecast because many assumptions have to be made. Some rarely hold.

Look at Egypt, which went from being an exporter of LNG to an importer within the past five years simply because its supergiant Zohr gas field in the Mediterranean Sea, constituting 30 per cent of production, collapsed dramatically between 2020 and 2022, barely two years after coming on stream, due to unexpected water breakthrough in its wells.

Look at Europe. Being abruptly forced off Russian gas created such an economic upheaval in 2022-23 that gas demand slumped. In 2024, Western Europe reported a record 190,449 corporate insolvencies. It has also sparked concerns about permanent deindustrialisation in sectors like fertilisers and steel. The International Energy Agency formally states that half of the industrial gas demand lost during 2022-23 is not expected to recover due to a combination of permanent plant closures and energy efficiency gains.

Under these circumstances, what is the probability that Europe will meekly continue to import expensive American LNG in lieu of cheap Russian gas available next door? The colonisers have become the colonised, and when things get out of hand, they will indubitably rebel. They will have to, because they will simply not be able to afford to obediently suffer a painful, unilaterally imposed status quo which benefits them not one bit, and instead bleeds their wallets. Quelle ironie.

And speaking of the French, how many billions of dollars have they lost because their LNG terminal in Yemen was forcibly closed by a designer conflict, and how many more because of the decade-long delay in bringing their LNG terminal in Mozambique on stream? At some point soon, they too will stop caring for the trans-Atlantic alliance, and finally, formally recognise the fact that Russia poses no threat to them.

China imports one-fifth of the world's LNG, half of which is sourced primarily from Australia and Qatar. It is already furious that America now has control over Iran and Venezuela, two nations from which China traditionally imported large volumes of oil. It is certainly not going to silently suffer the evolution of a scenario where the bulk of its LNG has to be sourced from the American bloc. Especially not in an era when America and China view each other as serious adversaries.

Luckily, China has options to avoid getting ensnared by this looming dependency: more piped gas and LNG from Russia, plus rapid increase in domestic gas production (already up by 30 per cent since 2020).

India is as India will, and more so in the next five years, as a number of strategic moves carefully laid out in the preceding decade finally bear fruit. By 2030, our LNG demand is projected to double to around 60 bcm. We can expect that slightly less than 20 per cent will be from the UAE, which is doubling its export capacity, and with whom we have excellent relations. Qatar would have been weaned off by half to around 20 per cent by then. A quarter would probably be sourced from North America. Ten per cent would be from Mozambique whether America likes that or not. And the rest will come from diverse suppliers including Russia. We will be okay.

But what about the opening internet joke that appears anything but funny now?

The brutal manner in which America imposed its military will upon Iran, without a care for the severe energy trade disruptions that followed globally, or for the destructive consequences Iran imposed in retaliation upon the Arab countries of the Middle East, is a sobering lesson for the ages.

No doubt, under Donald Trump, Joe Biden's failed gamble to boost the American economy by becoming Europe's principal energy supplier has finally come to pass. But it is doubtful if Europe will be able to weather the cost of that "success" for much longer. Deindustrialisation looms. And that will herald a dissonance which America may not be able to control.

This mercenary approach to garnering market share could be America's undoing. A last, flailing, desperate knee-jerk effort to stave off the terminal decline of a centuries-old colonial era. It will not work because it is unsustainable. Yet, as a result of the path America has chosen, more conflicts beckon. The age of the Gas Wars is here, and it will be bloody.

For India, though, its passage through this troubled age will be defined by the words of the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides:

"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power."