For Americans, a distant war arrives through prices

For much of modern American history, war announced itself loudly, painfully, and collectively. There were draft notices, casualty lists, and rationing, as the full weight of the conflict pressed down on civilian life in ways that were impossible to ignore. Today, the United States remains locked in a conflict with Iran, but for most American households, it is through a different mechanism: prices.

As tensions continue to disrupt global energy markets, Americans are confronting the domestic economic consequences of instability around the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow maritime corridor through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil passes. According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, developed through the Climate Solutions Lab and the Costs of War project at the Watson Institute, the conflict has already imposed an estimated $47.7 billion in additional energy costs on the U.S. economy.

On a household level, the tracker estimates that the average American family has paid roughly $364 in additional gasoline and diesel costs since late February, as U.S. gasoline prices climbed from approximately $3 per gallon at the start of the conflict to nearly $4.50 by the end of May. That is no insignificant expense. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture food budget estimates, the figure is roughly what many American families spend on groceries in a week.

The economic toll, however, does not diminish the far more devastating costs borne by those living inside the war zones. Since the September 11 attacks, conflicts linked to US-involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran have produced enormous civilian casualties, displacement crises, and long-term physical destruction across the Middle East. American soldiers and military families have also directly carried the burden of those wars through combat deployments, injuries, trauma, and loss.

But in the United States, where the country has remained comparatively insulated from the large-scale destruction during the post-9/11 era, the costs of war often become politically tangible through economic pressure instead. Prices, not violence, have brought the war home.

The economic experience of distant war

Wars carry multiple costs, and many of them can stay hidden for years. Established in 2010, the Costs of War project has spent fifteen years documenting exactly that: the human, economic, political, and environmental consequences of post-9/11 U.S. wars, from civilian casualties and displacement to veterans’ care, military spending, public health impacts, and the long-term domestic consequences of prolonged conflict.

Much of what it tracks, however, accrues slowly, arriving over decades and diffuse enough that most people never feel them directly.

Energy costs are different. Speaking to The Beiruter, Jeff Colgan, Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University, explained that one of the project’s goals was to distinguish between the long-term fiscal costs of war and the immediate economic pressures consumers experience in daily life.

“The energy costs and the price increases that people are seeing at the fuel pumps are direct, immediate, and something consumers relate to very viscerally,” Colgan said.

Part of that immediacy is rooted in the geographic importance of an (in)famous strait situated at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. As roughly 20 percent of the world's oil passes through Horzmuz’s narrow corridor, even limited instability can reverberate rapidly through energy markets and global shipping networks.

Those pressures spread far beyond gasoline alone. Higher crude prices affect diesel, jet fuel, petrochemicals, freight transportation, manufacturing, and shipping costs. Colgan noted that the project intentionally focused on both gasoline and diesel because they reach consumers through different pathways. While gasoline prices affect households directly at the pump, diesel costs filter through trucking, rail transportation, logistics systems, and the broader movement of goods across the economy.

Gasoline, though, carries a unique political charge. It's the one consumers encounter personally, publicly, and repeatedly. And its price is impossible to miss. As Colgan put it,

That makes all of the gasoline prices that are posted on very visible signs on the side of the road almost billboards for an extra cost of this war.

Energy prices and political backlash

Energy price shocks have a long track record of destabilizing governments.

Political scientists and historians have observed that rising fuel costs often erode public confidence in governments regardless of ideology or political system. Unlike debates over military procurement or foreign policy doctrine, energy inflation affects daily life in immediate and highly visible ways.

“The idea that consumers do not like higher energy prices, and that this tends to erode support for incumbents, is a pretty well-established political science phenomenon,” Colgan said.
The almost iron law of politics is that higher energy prices make government incumbents unpopular.

That pattern has appeared repeatedly across modern American political history.

According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the 1973 Arab oil embargo sent crude oil prices surging from roughly $3 per barrel to nearly $12 within months. The shock triggered fuel shortages, long gasoline lines, and inflation that climbed above 8 percent in the United States by 1974, according to Federal Reserve historical data. The crisis intensified public distrust during the final phase of Richard Nixon’s presidency and helped turn energy security into one of the defining political anxieties of the decade.

The pressure deepened after the Iranian Revolution disrupted global oil production in 1979. International Energy Agency estimates show oil prices more than doubled between 1978 and 1980, while U.S. inflation surpassed 13 percent. Gasoline shortages returned, recession fears intensified, and Jimmy Carter’s approval ratings deteriorated sharply as economic frustration increasingly consumed his presidency.

Two decades later during the Iraq War years, average U.S. gasoline prices rose from roughly $1.50 per gallon in early 2002 to more than $4 by mid-2008, according to fuel price data from the American Automobile Association and the EIA, while crude oil prices climbed toward nearly $150 per barrel. While multiple global pressures contributed to those increases, including rising Chinese demand and financial speculation, fuel prices became one of the clearest domestic expressions of geopolitical instability for American consumers.

By September 2005, after Hurricane Katrina briefly pushed gasoline prices above $3 per gallon nationwide, George W. Bush’s approval rating had fallen to roughly 40 percent and never recovered. Republicans later lost both the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections amid mounting frustration over the war and the economy.

More recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent Brent crude prices briefly above $130 per barrel in 2022, while AAA reported average U.S. gasoline prices surpassing $5 per gallon for the first time in history. Across both Europe and North America, energy inflation quickly became one of the dominant political pressures confronting governments. The pump, it turned out, was a more reliable political barometer than any approval poll.

The politics of modern conflict

The political implications of those patterns extend beyond energy markets alone. In an interconnected global economy, wars no longer need to reach American soil in order to produce meaningful domestic consequences.

That does not lessen the devastation experienced inside active war zones. The civilian destruction associated with conflict remains immeasurably more severe than the economic pressures experienced in distant countries insulated from the battlefield.

But for populations geographically removed from direct violence, economic exposure may increasingly become one of the primary ways societies register the costs of prolonged conflict. As globalization continues integrating commodity markets and trade networks, instability in strategically important regions can impose immediate domestic costs on populations thousands of miles away. The economic boundaries separating civilian life from distant warfare are becoming far thinner.

For American voters, the war might be far away, but its price is right there.