Authored by Cyril Widdershoven via OilPrice.com,
The Iran war and Hormuz disruption have turbocharged U.S. LNG exports, giving Washington a major short-term energy dominance boost as Asia and Europe scramble for alternative supply.
China, however, enters the crisis from a position of greater energy resilience after years of investment in domestic production.
The U.S. still has a major long-term opportunity, but sustaining dominance will require turning crisis-driven demand into lasting partnerships.
The Iran war has handed the United States a rare opportunity: a new dawn of energy dominance in an increasingly fractured world. With coordinated US-Israeli strikes disrupting the Strait of Hormuz from late February, roughly 20% of global LNG supply has been stripped from the market since early March. Prices have surged across Asia and Europe. And into that vacuum, American gas has flowed.
The numbers speak for themselves. US LNG exports to Asia jumped sharply in April, with nearly a quarter of all American cargoes heading to a region that simply cannot afford to go dark. Deals are being signed, pipelines planned, and $100 billion in private investment is pouring into liquefaction plants and terminals, putting the US on a trajectory toward 220 MTPA of export capacity within five years. The administration's energy dominance agenda, backed by promises to streamline permitting, has given producers a powerful political tailwind and reassured global buyers seeking reliability. Washington's case for American LNG has never been easier to make.
But dominance built on a crisis is not the same as dominance built on trust. And there is a competitor watching this moment very carefully.
China entered this crisis in a structurally different position. Two decades of sustained investment in domestic energy production, spanning generation, storage, and distribution, have left Beijing considerably less exposed to the supply shocks rattling Western and Asian markets alike. Its economy has not been immune, but it has been buffered. That resilience has not gone unnoticed by governments scrambling to explain surging energy bills to their populations. While the US capitalises on the immediate demand surge, China is quietly accumulating something more durable: the perception of strategic foresight.
Yet beneath the boom lies a fault line. The conflict has been a short-term windfall for American producers; cash is flowing and the geopolitical case for US LNG writes itself. But the longer the crisis persists, the more urgently governments around the world will prioritise the same fundamental objective: never being held hostage to a single chokepoint again. The Hormuz disruption has concentrated minds in a way that years of energy dialogues have never quite managed. Countries across Asia and Europe are now accelerating plans to diversify supply sources, build strategic reserves, and develop domestic generation capacity across every available technology. The goal is insulation from the kind of shock this war has delivered, and that shift in priorities will outlast the conflict itself, because the memory of this vulnerability will not fade quickly.
This does not mean the window for American gas has closed. The transition to more resilient, independent energy systems will take decades, and reliable LNG from a powerful economy is precisely what energy-hungry Asian economies need throughout that journey. The US has the reserves, the infrastructure, the financial markets, and the geopolitical credibility that no other supplier can currently match. But Washington cannot afford to mistake a crisis-driven demand surge for a permanent structural advantage, because what buyers are ultimately building toward is a system in which no single disruption, whether in the Strait of Hormuz or anywhere else, can send their economies into shock again. The US needs to be architected into that system as an indispensable partner, not treated as an emergency option.
That requires more than competitive pricing and export capacity. It requires the kind of long-term supply relationships, infrastructure partnerships, and government-to-government commitments that turn a transaction into a dependency, the good kind, built on reliability rather than vulnerability. It requires Washington to show up as a strategic partner invested in the energy security of its buyers. And it requires the Iran conflict to reach a resolution that restores stability to global flows, because sustained disruption ultimately accelerates the very diversification strategies that could reduce the world's reliance on any single fuel source.
That is why forums like Gastech matter far beyond the conference floor. At Gastech 2025 in Milan, a high-profile US delegation led by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum used the event to demonstrate Washington's commitment to the global market and deepen long-term partnerships with European buyers. This September, the same strategic imperative shifts to Asia, as Gastech convenes ministers, industry CEOs, and technology leaders in Bangkok around the urgent supply security and resilience priorities now defining the global energy agenda. Bangkok demands the same level of engagement, but with even greater stakes. Positioned at the heart of the world's fastest-growing demand region, it is where the contracts signed today will shape the architecture of energy relationships for the next decade. It is where the US can arrive not only as the world's largest LNG exporter, but as the partner that helped Asia build the resilient, diversified, and secure energy systems its economies need, with American technology, American capital, and American gas at the centre of that architecture.
The use of energy as a diplomatic instrument, as a foundation for alliances and a signal of long-term intent, has already demonstrated its capacity to stabilise relationships and strengthen the position of reliable partners. But leverage only holds if buyers believe the relationship will endure beyond the current emergency. And that is ultimately what is being decided right now: whether the world organises its energy future around American reliability, or looks elsewhere for the security guarantees it needs.
American energy dominance is real, and the Iran war has made that case powerfully. But dominance has to be earned continuously, through the infrastructure being built, the contracts being signed, and the diplomatic relationships being deepened, conference room by conference room, deal by deal. The window is open. What matters now is how Washington chooses to use it.
Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2026 - 14:00The U.S. committed nearly its entire stockpile of stealthy JASSM-ER cruise missiles to the military campaign against Iran and has fired at least 1,000 of these long-range, stealthy, precision cruise missiles to hit high-value IRGC targets.
One of the unavoidable risks of deploying advanced weapons, such as the JASSM-ER, is that unexploded or partially intact systems can fall into enemy hands, allowing adversaries to study U.S. technology, refine countermeasures, and accelerate the development of copycat versions.
A new report from Army Recognition, citing defense journalist Babak Taghvaee, claims Iran has recovered wreckage from a JASSM-ER near Arak, potentially giving Tehran access to fragments of the missile.
"The recovered debris reportedly includes composite airframe sections, structural components, propulsion fragments, and possible avionics elements that could reveal insights into stealth construction, fuel-efficient propulsion, and survivability design," according to the military blog.
Army Recognition cited images posted on X by Taghvaee showing what is described as badly damaged JASSM-ER wreckage recovered in Iran. The missile appears largely intact and possibly unexploded, which, if confirmed, would give Tehran higher-value intelligence on the advanced missile.
The number of AGM-158B JASSM-ER stand-off weapons (stealth cruise missiles) employed by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy during the recent war in Iran was enormous. These missiles were used so extensively that debris and remains of them can now be found across various parts of… pic.twitter.com/NKzhR453mK
— Babak Taghvaee - The Crisis Watch (@BabakTaghvaee1) May 27, 2026This incident is reminiscent of a similar one in 2011, when Iran captured a U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel stealth spy drone and claimed to have reverse-engineered the aircraft. Tehran later displayed and tested drones modeled on the RQ-170, including the Shahed-171/Simorgh and Shahed-191/Saegheh families.
Reuters reported in 2014 that Iran claimed a domestically built copy of the RQ-170 had flown.
Today, Iran is one of the leading manufacturers of suicide Shahed drones (besides Russia and Ukraine), which have wreaked havoc on U.S. military bases and allied countries. The U.S. is also ramping up its version of these drones called "Lucas."
Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2026 - 13:25Authored by Natasha Bannan via Common Dreams,
Yves here. I wish I had the time to research and unpack more clearly is the set of legal theories the US is abusing to prosecute Nicholas Maduro and his wife and now to justify the arrest of Raul Castro and the conquest of Cuba. The US seriously takes the position that we can impose strained invocations of US rules against terrorism and engage in extrajudicial seizures, as in kidnapping.
The article below describes how we are now putting a lot of weight on the thin reed of enforcing Batista-era property rights.
These days, most of Havana's streets are fairly empty of cars, but full of people walking or riding bicycles, electric bikes, electric "tricycles," or scooters. Trash has piled up on most corners where regular pick-up has become impossible given that the garbage trucks have no gasoline. The average conversation starts off with comparing who's gone the longest without electricity.
The sympathy flows, as you exchange stories of what else you are going without: water, gas, food, medicine, transportation. People list the family members they haven't been able to see and the medical appointments they've missed. Inevitably, someone will say better days are coming - "because they have to" - and to keep moving forward.
This week alone, the US Department of Justice indicted Raul Castro, the former head of state, who's now 94 years old and largely out of public life. In addition, the Supreme Court gave a green light to Cuban-American-owned companies with property claims in Cuba from 67 years ago to sue tourist industry actors who "profited" from that land.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to grow more and more publicly agitated with Cuba's refusal to bow to his demands, and Trump's consistent incoherence shows an absolute lack of any clear policy position towards Cuba, aside from one that may economically benefit him and/or his family.
The indictment of Castro is a page taken from Trump's playbook on Venezuela from earlier this year. There, the administration indicted a sitting head of state, Nicolas Maduro, as a legal pretext for a military intervention, which was labelled an "emergency" and thus not an act of war that would require Congressional approval.
The administration staged a geopolitical coup d'etat involving international kidnapping, acts of war in plain violation of international law and the U.N. Charter, and then imprisoned that leader as a message to the world of what happens to those who defy US interests. Such indictments serve as purportedly fixed legal fictions for shifting political pretexts.
In Venezuela it was supposedly the state's support for criminal enterprises and gangs, which was the justification for the Trump administration's stated reason for the extrajudicial killing of nearly 200 civilians in piracy actions in the Caribbean. Once Maduro was kidnapped and jailed, the administration has stopped talking gangs and narcotrafficking rings.
In Cuba, the Justice Department's indictment of Raul Castro is a clear response to the political forces that commanded it. As the island nation is not complying rapidly enough to the changes demanded by Washington, the administration has escalated its threats, military preparations, and legal actions, albeit largely symbolic in nature.
Rubio's Escalation Of Threats As Campaign MessagingFor decades, Marco Rubio has pushed for privately what the Cuban-American community in south Florida has not achieved in nearly 70 years: to run Cuba's political and economic system remotely from Miami and Washington.
These remote "owners" of Cuba have driven and financed Rubio's political career, leading to this moment where he is adamantly though unsuccessfully trying to sell the American public that Cuba is a national security threat while simultaneously telling Cubans that their government is too weak to protect them.
That inherent contradiction and incoherence, long the basis of US policy towards Cuba, have never been more dangerous than at this moment when Rubio's rage and blind ambition to cause widespread destruction is bolstered by Trump's monarchical goals.
The contradictory discourse is present in nearly every aspect of Cuba policy. Just this week, Rubio issued an Orwellian statement in response to the ICE arrest of Adys Lastres Morera, the sister of the head of GAESA, a Cuban entity that is connected to large swaths of the Cuban economy. Rubio was right to point out that "[f]or far too long, the family members of terrorist organizations, repressive anti-American regimes and other bad actors . . . have been given a free pass to enjoy the privileges of living in the United States," but the United States also has a long tradition of granting sanctuary to terrorists, dictators, and war criminals.
In particular, Latin American leaders, generals, and intelligence operatives that have long done the US bidding in propping up violent regimes have been granted refuge in south Florida, the home of Rubio and other elected officials who have promoted violence over diplomacy.
Yet what makes international cooperation, collaboration, and survival possible is not just insisting upon respect for international law and human rights by all governments, but strengthening their ability to do so through dialogue and diplomacy. The Trump-Rubio administration has clearly not been serious about using diplomacy to solve global conflicts, and that holds true in Cuba as well.
The administration has tried to identify potential "opposition" in Cuba or political leaders it can "work with" like Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. Real US diplomacy looks quite different. Twelve years ago, it brought to Cuba a boom of economic activity, a thriving private sector, better financed public institutions, and riveting cultural exchanges for over a million US residents who found in Cuba a rich cultural, musical, artistic, and academic partner.
Trump and Rubio, though they might articulate the same goals, have different ulterior motives. Their goal is not, and has never been, economic opportunity for Cubans. Instead, they want an economic boon for Cuban-Americans aching to exert political and economic control over a land many have never even visited.
Although Florida no longer plays a significant electoral role in US-Cuba policy, Rubio's recent video talking to the Cuban people - and his messaging in general in escalating threats and aggression towards Cuba - is clearly intended to rally his base. What has caused widespread anxiety and fear among millions in Cuba has nevertheless excited his political base in south Florida.
Inside CubaThese days in Havana, Cubans are experiencing a duality that has existed for generations who have lived under the threat of US military aggression and the daily reality of economic warfare. Cubans are exhausted. They are increasingly anxious and have reached the bottom of the well of hope. There is a saying that the last thing you lose is hope, meaning it is what you hold on to until the very end. Cubans are at the very end of their ability to see a hopeful future.
I get asked questions daily. Should I take my kids to a shelter? Will the United States bomb Havana? Where is it safe to go? Why don't US citizens stop their government?
Cubans are experts at survival, and that's exactly what they continue to do. As US Southern Command sends the aircraft carrier Nimitz into Caribbean waters, Cubans continue to carry on with daily life like they have done decade after decade. Most days, those around me look for an electric tricycle to take them to work or their child to school or have added a child seat to their bicycles. Cars that run on gasoline have become what one of my friends calls "garage adornments."
Given the daily threat of military intervention and the four-month long oil blockade, activities like sleep have become a luxury. Many families cook or wash clothes at 3:00 a.m. when they get 1-2 hours of electricity. My friend sleeps on the floor with her son near the front door where air drafts can keep them cool in the sweltering heat and humidity. Most of us go without water for days at a time because lack of electricity makes pumping and distributing water impossible.
Another dear friend went 35 days with no water while she, her mother, and her toddler spent weeks traveling from house to house bathing and washing clothes. Cooking and cleaning become infinitely more difficult with no water, gas, or electricity. Some daycare centers use coal to cook lunch for undernourished children.
While we live under the perpetual threat of US military aggression, children continue to play in the street with sticks and deflated balls, families continue to find ways to get to work and buy food, and the deep spiritual and religious traditions that sustain many Cubans are turned to over and over again. War has a name and a face.
It's not just a vague "government." Here there are millions of people who owe the United States nothing and instead have only demanded to live in peace, in their homeland, however flawed it may be.
Originally published at .
Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2026 - 12:50