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The geopolitical implications of $200-a-barrel oil are not any better from an American perspective. The country that would benefit most from a prolonged oil crisis is Russia. Unlike in the U.S., the Russian state directly controls most of its country’s immense oil resources, meaning that the spike in prices would produce a huge windfall for President Vladimir Putin’s government. That money could be used to dampen the impact of Western economic sanctions or directly fund the war effort in Ukraine. The fact that so many countries would be desperate for oil would also give Putin added leverage in negotiations over the outcome of that war, O’Sullivan said. Already, Donald Trump has temporarily waived some sanctions on the sale of Russian oil, and his administration is considering lifting more of them.

What about America’s greatest geopolitical adversary? In the short term, China would find itself in a more precarious position. It is the world’s largest importer of oil and buys more than half of its supply from the Middle East. That makes it extremely vulnerable to a global supply crisis. But in the long run, China has two big things going for it. The first is that it has accumulated the world’s largest excess reserve of oil—about 1.2 billion barrels, equivalent to nearly four months of seaborne imports—in anticipation of a moment like this one. The second is that it has spent the past three decades developing alternative energy sources. As Jason Bordoff, the founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, points out in a Foreign Policy essay, more than half of the cars sold in China today are electric, it is home to nearly half of the nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, and almost all of the country’s growth in electricity demand has been met with green-energy sources.

For this reason, several experts told me, a prolonged oil crisis could ultimately strengthen China’s geopolitical position. A seismic shock to the global energy system would push world leaders to rethink their own dependence on foreign oil imports. Fear about energy security could accomplish what fear of climate change never could. “If oil remains on this roller coaster, folks will absolutely look for alternatives,” Bob McNally, the president of Rapidan Energy Group, a leading energy consultancy, told me. “The main selling point for oil has always been that it is stable. But it isn’t looking so stable right now.”

That kind of shift would make other nations more reliant on China. The country produces more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines, more than 70 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles, more than 80 percent of the world’s solar panels, and about 90 percent of the processed rare-earth minerals that are essential inputs to those technologies. Europe and Canada have long considered the prospect of depending on China for those resources to pose an unacceptable risk. An extended oil crisis caused by an American-led war might change that calculus. “I don’t think it would be crazy after all of this for countries to start viewing China as the least bad option in a menu of lots of bad options,” Bordoff told me.