Global Impact · March 2026
No Butter Chicken, Shorter Showers, Pricier Homes: How the Iran War Is Hitting Everyone, Everywhere
A war in the Middle East sounds like someone else’s problem — until the cooking gas runs out, the airfare doubles, the cancer drug doesn’t arrive, and a gas line forms in Texas. Here is what the Iran-US-Israel conflict is actually doing to the rest of the world.
Wars have always had consequences beyond their borders. But in a world wired tightly by trade, shipping lanes, and supply chains, a conflict in one region doesn’t stay there. It travels — through fuel prices and freight routes, through cancelled flights and disrupted harvests, through the price of a tracksuit and the cost of a cancer drug — until it lands, quietly and uninvited, in the daily life of someone who had nothing to do with starting it.
The war between the United States, Israel, and Iran — now in its fourth week — is doing exactly this.
I. Food and the Kitchen
Butter chicken and dosa have disappeared from some Indian restaurant menus. These dishes depend on cooking gas. India imports most of its LPG from the Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz closure has made supplies scarce enough that commercial kitchens have been rationed or shut.
Australian farmers are planting less wheat — and farmers in many other countries are watching their input costs climb. About a third of the world’s fertiliser is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. When that route closes, fertiliser prices rise, and planting decisions change. Smaller harvests could follow within a season or two.
Sugar from Brazil could get more expensive. Brazil is the world’s largest sugar producer. As energy prices spike globally, Brazilian sugar mills are finding it more profitable to convert their cane into biofuel rather than sugar. Less sugar on global markets means higher prices — everywhere.
II. Energy and the Household
South Koreans were asked to take shorter showers. Much of the energy South Korea uses to heat water comes from Middle Eastern gas imports. With supply disrupted and prices surging, the government has moved to public conservation appeals.
Thailand’s prime minister wore short-sleeved shirts to work and asked others to do the same. Government offices have been ordered to cap air-conditioning use.
The Philippines asked civil servants to take the stairs instead of elevators. Egypt cut shopping mall operating hours five days a week. Both countries are trying to reduce electricity demand as energy costs climb.
Sri Lanka declared Wednesdays a public holiday. The intention is to reduce daily commuting and conserve fuel. Laos adopted a three-day school week for the same reason.
Gas lines are back in Texas. In San Antonio, drivers queued for up to 30 minutes at a Costco fuel station, worried about a price spike. The irony of an American oil state experiencing fuel anxiety because of a war its government is fighting has not been lost on observers.
III. Travel and Transport
Tens of thousands of flights have been cancelled. With parts of Middle Eastern airspace closed, carriers have had to suspend routes, reroute around conflict zones, and absorb higher fuel costs — all of which are filtering through to ticket prices.
Airfares are rising globally. Airlines pay more for jet fuel. They pass the cost to passengers. There is no opt-out for anyone who needs to fly.
Formula 1 cancelled races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. With missiles targeting Gulf nations, competitions scheduled in both countries were scratched from the calendar.
Zara clothes piled up at airports in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the world’s largest garment exporters. The cancelled and disrupted flights have blocked textile exports from leaving the country, with finished garments sitting in airport cargo holds with nowhere to go.
IV. Health and Medicine
Cancer drugs might not reach patients on time. Dubai and Doha are major cargo transit hubs for temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals — medicines that must be kept refrigerated at all times. Shutdowns in both cities have disrupted the cold-chain logistics that keep these drugs viable from manufacturer to patient.
This is, in purely clinical terms, a life-or-death supply chain failure. It receives far less attention than the price of petrol.
V. The Unexpected Ones
Party balloons may be harder to find. Qatar produces a third of the world’s helium — a byproduct of natural gas production. As Qatari production and export slow, balloon suppliers globally are running low. It is a small thing. It is also a precise illustration of how deep global supply chains go, and how far a disruption in one place travels.
Tracksuits could get more expensive. The polyester in athletic wear is made from petrochemicals — oil and gas derivatives. Rising energy prices increase the cost of the raw material, which increases the cost of the finished product.
Ceramics factories in India stopped firing their kilns. Kilns run on natural gas or propane. Both are now scarce. Ceramic tiles — used in construction, in kitchens, in bathrooms — have joined the list of things that cannot currently be made at the rate they are needed.
Gold has fallen. This is counterintuitive — gold is traditionally a safe-haven asset that rises in times of crisis. The fall is attributed partly to speculative investors cashing out gold positions to cover losses elsewhere, a sign that the financial stress of the conflict is spreading across asset classes in unpredictable directions.
A chess grandmaster withdrew from a major competition in Cyprus over safety concerns after a drone struck a British military base on the island early in the war. Even the chess calendar is not immune.
Shakira and Christina Aguilera postponed concerts in the region. Cultural events — the things that make cities feel alive and economies feel connected — are, like everything else, contingent on the war not spreading further.
VI. Winners and Odd Developments
Russia is getting a little richer. Surging energy prices are a direct revenue boost to an economy built on oil and gas exports. Every dollar added to the global oil price is a dollar more for Russia’s budget, which is currently funding an ongoing war in Ukraine.
Ukraine may run short on Patriot missiles. The conflict has depleted US stocks of the interceptors that Kyiv relies on to defend against Russian air attacks. The same war that is boosting Russia’s revenue is simultaneously straining the military supply chains that Ukraine depends on.
Venezuela has been allowed to export fertiliser again. The Trump administration loosened sanctions specifically to help American farmers access fertiliser supplies disrupted by the Hormuz closure. A country sanctioned for democratic backsliding is being unlocked as a fertiliser supplier because a war has made the alternative too expensive.
The full list, laid out this way, is both absurd and clarifying. A war between three countries is cancelling concerts and reducing shower lengths and delaying cancer drugs and making tracksuits cost more and forming gas lines in Texas and emptying butter chicken off Indian menus and pushing a chess grandmaster off his competition schedule. The connections are real. The supply chains are real. The consequences are real — and they are landing on people who had no vote in the decisions that started this.
That, perhaps, is the most useful thing a list like this can do: make visible the fact that in a genuinely interconnected world, the cost of war is not contained by national borders or military perimeters. It distributes itself — silently, through prices and shortages and small inconveniences and large medical emergencies — across the entire human network. The war is not over there. It is in the price of the fuel, the absence of the drug, the cancelled flight, and the empty balloon aisle at the party supplies store. It is already here.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.