The war has always been unpopular in this country. Close to sixty per cent of American adults surveyed by Pew believe that the U.S. made the “wrong decision” in attacking Iran. In May, Pentagon officials estimated the war had already cost U.S. taxpayers some twenty-nine billion dollars. Around the same time, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. had used up much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors, expending more of these munitions in defense of Israeli territory than Israeli forces had themselves. In April, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, noted that the sums being spent by the U.S. on its “reckless war” could fund the U.N.’s “plan to save eighty-seven million lives” in dire humanitarian need around the world.

Whatever hardships Americans may have endured—including higher gas prices and creeping inflation—far greater ones have been felt elsewhere. The downstream impact of the conflict has been acute in Asia, Europe, and Africa, where there is far greater reliance on fossil fuels coming from the Persian Gulf, and greater vulnerability to the soaring costs of energy, fertilizers, and industrial chemicals exported from the region. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said in April that the combined oil-and-gas crisis was more grave than the oil shocks of the nineteen-seventies, and that “the world has never experienced a disruption to energy supply of such magnitude.”

To deal with surging prices and diminishing reserves, some countries have implemented policies to ration cooking gas and gasoline. Others, such as Pakistan and the Philippines, have shuttered businesses and schools and tried to mandate working from home. Supply chains for plastics, fertilizers, and other vital supplies have also been blocked. The resulting costs to productivity will take a while to gauge. But, earlier this month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which is made up of thirty-eight advanced economies around the world, forecast that global growth is now expected to slow from 3.4 per cent in 2025 to 2.8 per cent in 2026, a contraction caused primarily by the effects of the war. An analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a nonpartisan think tank headquartered in Sydney, forecast that a resumption of hostilities with Iran could cost the global economy some $2.2 trillion. The U.N. warned that spiking costs could drive forty-five million people around the world into acute hunger if the war continues through June.

The reopening of the strait, moreover, won’t provide an immediate panacea. The International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents many of the sailors who are stuck aboard ships stalled in the Persian Gulf, said that “the backlog of stranded vessels and the need for crew changes and rest, mean a realistic return to normal shipping patterns is weeks, if not months, away.” In a memo this month, analysts at the Dutch multinational firm I.N.G. described the impact on fertilizer and food markets as “a tragedy unfolding in slow motion.” They acknowledged that a truce could lead to a resumption in flows of some goods, but warned that “the outlook is likely to remain fragile as a more permanent deal could be challenging to secure.” The markets have to price in the unpredictability and the volatility that have characterized Trump’s approach so far.

The chaos has compounded existing difficulties for poorer or developing economies, many of which were already wracked by public-debt crises that deepened in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. “The global economy is not falling off of a cliff, but it has downshifted sharply and many developing economies are entering this shock with thinner buffers and fewer shock absorbers,” Ayhan Kose, the World Bank’s deputy chief economist, said last week. David Miliband, the head of the International Rescue Committee (I.R.C.), describes “shock absorbers” as the sorts of groups in civil society, in addition to state institutions, “that catch people when they fall.” They could be “a health service that’s able to isolate you if you’ve got Ebola” or “a cash-support scheme in Lebanon that’s able to support you for more than a month for a war that’s gone on for three months,” he told me. But there are fewer such services now, not least because many of the wealthiest nations have slashed their commitments to international aid; Oxfam calculated that the G-7 countries alone cut their aid budgets by a collective forty-eight billion dollars between 2024 and 2025—the largest reduction of its kind in history. Most of this drop was caused by the Trump Administration’s destruction of U.S.A.I.D., under DOGE, but other nations didn’t try to fill that void; instead, they quietly followed suit.

Trump’s move dislodged what Miliband called “an anchor” in the global humanitarian system. “If you pull up the anchor in choppy seas, the boat rocks backward and forward, and the passengers get seasick,” he said. “That’s the situation we’re in.” In a recent report, the I.R.C. noted that many of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, including the tragedy in Sudan, “have only intensified” since the Iran war began, “while the systems meant to contain them are breaking down.” As Miliband put it, “The Iran war couldn’t have happened at a worse time, and it set off a chain of events that’s very damaging.”

That turmoil did not seem to be weighing on the man most responsible for unleashing it. On Wednesday, at the G-7 summit, Trump entered a meeting room late and, while taking a seat alongside other world leaders, announced, to their laughter, “I’m the boss.” ♦