The coming collapse of critical infrastructure
Industrial complexity has made modernity fragile
In the past two weeks, the war with Iran has not been fought in the way most people still instinctively imagine war. There have been strikes, of course, but not in the direction of cities or armies as primary targets. The focus has been narrower and, in its way, more consequential. Gas fields, LNG terminals, export hubs, shipping routes. Systems rather than symbols.
South Pars was hit. That matters because it is not just another energy asset, but the largest gas field in the world and a load-bearing part of regional and global supply. Iran’s response followed the same logic. Ras Laffan in Qatar, one of the central nodes of global LNG export, was struck hard enough to remove a significant portion of capacity. Around it, the pattern has filled in quickly. Tankers are getting harassed or redirected. Insurance markets are tightening. The Strait of Hormuz is no longer a neutral conduit but a variable one.
None of this is accidental. The infrastructure is not collateral damage. It is the target.
What these events make visible is something that is otherwise easy to miss when systems are working as they should. Modern societies do not rest on stockpiles so much as on movement. Energy moves. Goods move. Data moves. Capital moves. People move (unfortunately). The appearance of stability arises because these movements are sufficiently continuous to feel like a given. When they begin to stutter, even slightly, the underlying structure starts to show.
Industrialisation did more than increase output. It reorganised life around throughput. Energy-dense fuels allowed production to scale, but that scale required coordination across distance. Globalisation extended that coordination outward, so that inputs, components, and finished goods are now routinely separated by oceans. Centralisation then narrowed the number of places where key processes occur. Fewer refineries were doing more work. Fewer ports were handling more volume. Fewer facilities were producing what entire regions depend on.
And all of it was made possible by the global policeman role of the US Navy.
That combination works exceptionally well under stable conditions. It is fast, efficient, and in normal times surprisingly resilient to small, local disruptions. But it has a particular weakness that becomes obvious once pressure is applied across more than one part of the system at the same time. It does not have much slack.
I can remember my grandparents talking about how their parents had a goat, chooks, and a veggie garden in the backyard. My grandparents had decorative plants. My parents had a pool. At our place, we’re back to chooks and a permaculture garden.
The point is, earlier societies lived much closer to their points of production. They were exposed to scarcity in ways modern populations would find intolerable, but their systems were also less tightly bound together. A failed harvest was devastating, but it did not usually propagate through an entire civilisation at speed. Famines were localised. Disruption travelled slowly and usually petered out, unless it was a global catastrophe event.
Modern systems do not behave that way. They are integrated by design. Fuel underwrites transport. Transport underwrites food distribution. Electricity underwrites water, communications, refrigeration, and payments. Data systems coordinate all of it. When one layer is strained, others begin to tighten. When several are strained together, the system does not absorb the shock so much as transmit it.
This is what “critical infrastructure” really means in practice. Not just important assets, but the narrow set of systems through which everything else has to pass: energy fields and refineries; LNG terminals; major ports and shipping lanes; substations, fibre networks, data centres; and financial clearing systems. They are efficient precisely because they are concentrated. That concentration is also what makes them difficult to replace and slow to repair.
Once you see the system in those terms, the recent pattern of attacks no longer seems baffling or bizarre. War is no longer only, or even primarily, about seizing territory. It is about interfering with function. You do not need to occupy a country to make it hard to live in. You need to make its systems unreliable to apply pressure to the elite you are trying to destroy.
The United States spent the better part of the past two decades demonstrating this in various forms. Sanctions that reach into the plumbing of global finance. Targeting of energy infrastructure. Cyber operations against industrial systems. Control of shipping and insurance regimes. The lesson, whether intended or not, was clear. Modern power can be exercised by shaping the flows a society depends on.
Others have absorbed that lesson. They do not need to reproduce it perfectly or in coordination for it to have an effect. Pressure on shipping routes, energy production, key industrial nodes, and the digital systems that coordinate them can accumulate even when applied from different directions. The system does not care whether the strain is centrally planned. It only registers that it is there.
What follows is not an immediate collapse in the cinematic sense. Systems tend to degrade before they fail. Deliveries arrive late, then irregularly. Prices move first, then availability. Workarounds are found, but they are less efficient and put pressure elsewhere. Firms begin to prioritise, households begin to adjust, and governments begin to reassure. The system continues to function, but with increasing friction, and with a growing difficulty in predicting how it will behave from one week to the next.
There is also a tendency among political and managerial classes to misread this phase. A system that is still functioning is taken as evidence of resilience. But systems designed for efficiency under stable conditions often have very little margin once those conditions change. Redundancy was removed because it appeared uneconomic. Now that US hegemony is waning, it is showing that inefficiency was resilience.
The question this raises is not simply who can strike harder, but who can continue to function under sustained pressure on their infrastructure. Industrial civilisation has traded a great deal for its speed and scale. It has traded storage for flow, locality for reach, and redundancy for efficiency. Those were rational trades in a world where the underlying conditions were assumed to be stable.
The events of the past fortnight suggest that those conditions can no longer be taken for granted. The infrastructure that made modern life possible is now also the most direct way to disrupt it. That is not a temporary feature of this particular conflict. It is a property of the system itself.
Collapse, when it comes, is unlikely to announce itself with a single decisive break. It will present first as irregularity. Systems that work, but not quite as they did. Gaps where there used to be continuity. A growing sense that the machinery is still running, but no longer under control. And then, at some point that is difficult to time in advance, the transition from strain to failure.
It is the strategy of the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea, and I’m sure they’re all coordinating this, to leverage our fragility against us to maximum devastating effect.
Trump now has a choice. He can either retreat or invade Iran. There are really no other options.
A retreat would signal the end of US hegemony globally. The Eurasian powers seeking to end the Pax Americana would smell blood. There would be regional warfare around Eurasia very quickly, i.e. World War III.
An invasion would be a bloodbath for American troops. Jimmy Carter tried to use Delta Force to rescue the embassy hostages in 1979, and it was a disaster. A larger, overt attack to capture the processing facilities in the Persian Gulf would be a catastrophe. Mission creep would kick in, and even if the soldiers could take the facilities, more troops would have to then go in to capture the entire oil and gas production systems. America would bleed out, the Eurasian powers would pounce on the weakness, and there would be regional warfare everywhere soon after. World War III again.
Trump’s handlers clearly wanted a catastrophic war, likely a nuclear war, and now they’ll get one. As I’ve written before, I believe they are motivated by eschatology.
Trump is doomed if he doesn’t and doomed if he does. And so is our critical infrastructure.