The oil and gas price spikes that followed the start of the U.S.-Iran war are reshaping energy politics across the global south. They are doing what decades of climate diplomacy struggled to achieve: making dependence on imported fossil fuels look politically dangerous to leaders in power.

In the first month after the war disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, at least 60 governments adopted nearly 200 emergency energy measures, from fuel conservation orders and consumer subsidies to scrambles for alternative supplies. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency in March, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. invoking executive power as worker strikes paralyzed Manila and other cities. In Bangladesh, fuel shortages forced garment factories, which generate roughly 84 percent of the country’s exports, to operate at 50 to 60 percent of capacity. In Kenya, protests against fuel prices led to the deaths of four people and injured dozens of others in mid-May. In Pakistan, a March price hike of 55 rupees per liter shut down Lahore’s streets, while an International Monetary Fund program left the government with no fiscal room to cushion the blow. An internal World Bank document reviewed by Reuters showed that 27 countries had moved to secure rapid access to crisis financing within weeks of the war’s start.

Beneath these protests and emergency measures lies a more durable shift. For fossil fuel importers, clean energy is no longer principally a strategy to reduce emissions or even a long-term economic development play. It is becoming a hedge against street unrest, depleted reserves, and political collapse. Solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and grid efficiency offer leaders something that climate diplomacy rarely could: protection against the next fuel riot or revolution.

Economics have already been moving the world toward green solutions. Global clean energy investment reached a record $2.2 trillion in 2025, twice the flow into fossil fuels. In 2024, 91 percent of newly commissioned utility-scale renewable projects produced electricity more cheaply than the cheapest new fossil fuel alternative, and battery storage costs have fallen 93 percent since 2010, allowing utilities to use batteries to store solar and wind power even when the weather is uncooperative. In 2025, fossil fuel electricity generation fell in both China and India for the first time in decades, helping to keep global fossil fuel generation roughly flat even as electricity demand rose.

Before the Iran war, this green transition was also spreading beyond wealthy markets. In 2024, Chinese solar exports to developing economies surpassed shipments to advanced economies. Pakistan imported approximately 17 gigawatts of Chinese solar modules that year, equivalent to almost half of its grid-connected capacity. In Indonesia, Thailand, and Mexico, the cheapest Chinese-made EVs have reached price parity with the cheapest internal combustion options.

But fossil fuels were not retreating uniformly before the Iran war. China and India together approved 88 GW of new coal capacity in 2025, the most in nearly a decade. And economic advantage alone had not overcome the political and financial barriers facing clean energy. Africa, home to about a fifth of the world’s population, received only 2 percent of global clean energy investment last year; the annual cost of capital for clean energy projects in Africa is over three times higher than the cost of similar financing in developed nations. Many governments of developing countries remained locked in fuel subsidy commitments, long-term contracts for LNG and coal, and import patronage networks. Before the war threatened to drive costs higher, Indonesia alone budgeted roughly $12.3 billion for energy subsidies in 2026.

The cost of the Iran war for developing countries is now beginning to overcome these past structural barriers. In its State of Energy Policy 2026 report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that, while most immediate responses focused on emergency relief, many countries are doubling down on policies to reduce dependence on imported oil and gas, curb exposure to price volatility, and accelerate low-emissions alternatives. In March, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that the war would likely push countries toward renewables to mitigate geopolitical risk.

The early evidence is visible in Southeast and South Asia. At an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit on May 7, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto told fellow political leaders that energy dependence amid Middle East volatility was “no longer a long-term problem, but an urgent one.” Days earlier, his state utility had launched a tender for 1,225 megawatts of utility-scale solar, the first round under a new national target of 100 GW, while Jakarta has begun to consider a $30 billion subsea cable to export Indonesian solar energy across the Singapore Strait. Bangladesh’s Power Development Board issued tenders for 495 MW of grid-tied solar in April. In the Philippines, TotalEnergies and Nextnorth reached financial close on a 440 MW solar project. In India, regulators adopted tariffs for 2,000 MW of solar. In Vietnam, Vingroup proposed scrapping a planned LNG plant in favor of renewables.

These projects were not invented in the weeks after the Iran war began. Large energy investments require years of preparation. But the crisis is changing their political meaning and speeding approvals. Tenders and financial closes once buoyed by climate measures or cheap electricity plays can now be advanced as national security measures—a way to reduce exposure to foreign conflict and domestic instability.

The same logic is appearing in transport. Chile opened preferential credit for taxi drivers buying EVs; Cambodia cut import taxes on EVs; Laos lowered fuel excise duties. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged citizens and public institutions to cut petrol and diesel use, visibly reduced the size of his own motorcade, and announced expanded biogas and renewables, while Hindustan Unilever accelerated EV adoption across its supply chains. Electrification no longer promises only lower emissions over time. It also promises immediate relief from oil price spikes and coercion.

The response is not uniformly clean. Some governments have leaned temporarily on coal as LNG supplies tightened, and dozens have cut fuel taxes or expanded subsidies to contain public anger. But analysis by Ember, summarized by Carbon Brief, found that even a worst-case return to coal would raise global coal-fired generation by no more than 1.8 percent in 2026 relative to a no-crisis baseline, and global coal generation could still fall this year. Leaning on fossil fuels is a short-term blip or coping mechanism. The structurally significant response is likely to come from investments over the next few years that permanently reduce reliance on imported fuel.

Leaders have ample reason to take fuel riots and other security risks seriously. In 2022, Sri Lanka depleted foreign reserves, which left the country unable to pay for fuel and other essential imports, and that precipitated the collapse of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government. In 1998, fuel-subsidy reform in Indonesia ignited the protests that ended President Suharto’s three-decade rule. Today, analysts have noted that Prabowo “is especially unlikely to risk mass unrest over the cost of living,” partly because Suharto was his father-in-law. In Kenya, President William Ruto reversed course on fuel tax increases after May’s deadly protests, which is particularly significant with the 2027 election in view. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has publicly blamed the price shock on U.S. President Donald Trump to redirect the anger of the Brazilian people away from Lula’s administration.

All this shows the emerging regime-survival case for clean energy. For decades, climate diplomacy asked leaders of developing countries to incur near-term political and fiscal costs for long-term global benefits. The Iran war has reversed part of that logic. Leaders who depend on imported fuel increasingly see solar, batteries, electric transport, and efficiency not as political burdens but as tools for containing the price shocks that drive their citizens into the streets. For the first time in the climate era, public interest in cheap, secure clean power and political interest in regime continuity point in the same direction.

Three consequences will matter for global politics.

First, solar deployment is likely to accelerate further. Even before the war, the solar electricity added globally in 2025 exceeded the electricity that could have been generated from all the LNG that moved through the Strait of Hormuz that year. The crisis has given import-dependent governments a powerful reason to deploy solar and other technologies that were already economical. The 2026 figures for solar will almost certainly outpace 2025.

Second, the strategic influence of fossil fuel exporters will gradually erode. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Qatar, and the United States will remain consequential energy powers for years. But in a world where free passage on the high seas can no longer be assumed—a function of both Iranian behavior and the Trump administration’s disregard for legal norms, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—importers have a strong national security reason to reduce fuel import exposure. Petrostate power will remain real, but it now appears to be time-limited. At the same time, China’s dominance in solar panels, batteries, and EVs is consolidating its position into what analysts have called an “electrostate”: a country whose strategic weight derives from control of clean energy supply chains rather than hydrocarbon reserves.

Third, climate diplomacy (although not necessarily in the U.N. world) will become more directly about reducing the use of fossil fuels. In April, around 60 countries gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first international meeting dedicated to transitioning away from fossil fuels. That agenda is no longer only a demand from vulnerable states or climate advocates. It is increasingly aligned with the self-interest of countries that want cheaper, more secure, and less politically explosive energy systems.

This does not eliminate the need for climate finance. Developing economies will still require affordable capital, stronger grids, storage, and international support to make the transition fast and equitable. But it changes the bargain. The central question is no longer whether many developing countries want to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. It is how quickly they can do so and who will help finance the technologies that now serve their economic security and political stability.

The Iran war will eventually end. The lesson that it has delivered to energy-importing governments will be harder to reverse or forget: Fossil fuels are no longer merely expensive and polluting. They are a vital national security risk.