Gustavo de Arístegui,
September 9, 2026
I. INTRODUCTION
The events of September 8th leave five distinct marks which, taken together, starkly illustrate the state of the world in this autumn of 2026. In the Gulf, the war that Washington stubbornly refuses to call a war has once again spilled over its borders: Houthi terrorists attacked four cities in southern Saudi Arabia, injuring seventy-three people, including women and children, and the US Central Command responded to Tehran by destroying five oil tankers belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These two symmetrical actions confirm what this report has been arguing since February: the conflict has degenerated into a war of fluctuating intensity, with no plan for the aftermath and no defined political horizon.
On the European front, transactional diplomacy has once again run up against the Kremlin’s brick wall. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv resulted in an hour-long phone call between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, of which, significantly, only the Russian version of events is known. While peace talks were underway, Kyiv buried five more dead.
The report concludes with an issue that many will dismiss as domestic news, but which this analyst considers strictly geopolitical: the results of the PISA 2025 report, published Tuesday by the OECD, which place Spain at its worst ever in all three assessed competencies. Human capital is a nation’s primary strategic resource. Those who allow it to deteriorate for twenty years are not just losing a battle in education: they are losing weight, presence, and influence in the world.
There is also a fifth element, less conspicuous but no less revealing: the rollercoaster ride oil has been on for the last forty-eight hours, between a semblance of a truce and a new belligerent blow. This Scottish shower—negotiation, failure; tension, hostilities, reaction; back to square one—lines the pockets of speculators in London, Geneva, or Singapore and empties those of tens of millions of families in the developing world, for whom the price of bottled or compressed gas is not a number on a Bloomberg screen, but the difference between lighting the stove or starting the auto-rickshaw this very afternoon.
II. THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE LAST 24 HOURS
1. Houthi terrorists attack four Saudi cities: Tehran extends the war to the southern flank of the Arabian Peninsula
Facts
Houthi terrorists, armed, financed, and trained by Tehran, attacked four cities in southern Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, September 8, with drones and missiles, marking a major expansion of the war that began on February 28. The targets were a Saudi air base in Khamis Mushayt and assets belonging to the state-owned Saudi Aramco company in Abha, Najran (on the border with Yemen), and Jizan, a major Red Sea port that houses a refinery capable of processing some 400,000 barrels per day and a power plant.
Saudi authorities reported 73 wounded, including women and children, and described fires at the affected facilities. It is one of the largest attacks suffered by the Kingdom since the start of the war.
— NASA satellite images showed a thick plume of black smoke rising above the Yizan refinery and a white plume rising from an Aramco distribution center in Abha. There were no confirmed images from the ground: information is tightly controlled.
The Houthis boastfully claimed responsibility for a “broad operation” deep into Saudi territory. Media outlets under their control later reported Saudi airstrikes in the Jubah district, east of Sana’a, and in Taiz province.
Brent crude reached $99.46 per barrel, its highest level since July 24; WTI crude hit its highest level since June 8. The International Organization for Migration estimates that some 18,500 people have been displaced by the renewed fighting in Taiz and Hodeida.
The military context is equally relevant: Yemeni forces of the recognized government, supported by Riyadh, have launched a multi-pronged offensive on Houthi-held areas after the terrorists attempted to advance on government positions. The government, ousted from the capital twelve years ago, now claims its aim is to recapture all the occupied territory.
Implications
Let’s start by calling things by their names, because soft language is terrorism’s greatest ally. The Houthis are not a militia, nor a non-state actor, nor an insurgent movement, nor any of the semantic pretexts with which certain diplomats and academics have been masking the obvious for years: they are a terrorist organization that deliberately bombs refineries, power plants, and cities, that has wounded seventy-three people, including women and children, that starves its own people, and that fires on civilian traffic in the Red Sea. The same can be said, without nuance or distinction, of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the pro-Iranian terrorist organizations in Iraq. They are terrorists. To call them otherwise is not diplomatic prudence: it is intellectual complicity.
That said, yesterday’s events were not a Yemeni skirmish. It was an Iranian operation carried out by a proxy, a terrorist agent in Tehran’s service. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraqi terrorist groups are the four pillars of the external terror apparatus that Tehran’s jihadist oligarchy has painstakingly built over four decades, financed by the oil that is now burning in the Gulf of Oman. Their function is precisely this: to allow the regime to kill without signing a contract, to impose costs without assuming responsibility for the response, and to negotiate through extortion, with the certainty that the West will eventually distinguish between the one who pulls the trigger and the one who pays the price. That the attack comes on the same day that Mohsen Rezaei announces a maritime “exclusion zone” in the Gulf is not a coincidence; it is choreographed. That Rezaei is also named in Interpol’s red notice for the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires is not a biographical detail either: it is the precise definition of the nature of the regime with which the West believes it is negotiating.
The choice of targets reveals a cold logic and deliberate brutality. Jizan and Abha are not in the Strait of Hormuz, but on the Red Sea coast and in the southern interior. Tehran is thus sending an unequivocal message: if Washington stifles its crude oil exports, the price will be exacted on the energy infrastructure—and the civilian population—of the United States’ Arab allies, outside the perimeter that the Fifth Fleet can effectively monitor. It is horizontal escalation in its purest form, and it is also yet another demonstration that the ayatollahs’ regime does not distinguish between military and civilian targets because it has never intended to do so.
The market effect is the objective, not the collateral damage. With Brent crude nearing $100 a gallon and the midterm elections set for November 3, every dollar added to the price of American gasoline is a political blow to the White House. President Trump has publicly promised gasoline at $3 a gallon “when we win the war.” Tehran has read that promise with the same attention the Pentagon reads damage reports, and has decided to turn the American election calendar into another front in its war.
Perspectives and scenarios
— Most likely scenario (55%): continuation of the graduated extortion. Houthi terrorists maintain intermittent attacks against Saudi infrastructure, Riyadh responds with airstrikes on Sana’a and Taiz, and the conflict stabilizes at a high but contained intensity. The price of oil fluctuates between $95 and $105 per barrel.
— Worsening scenario (30%): The blockade announced by the Houthi terrorists on Saudi maritime traffic materializes at Bab el-Mandeb. In this case, the crisis ceases to be regional: the simultaneous closure of the Red Sea and Hormuz amounts to an amputation of global energy trade, with a direct impact on southern Europe and, most notably, on Spain, which lacks strategic reserves and naval projection capabilities to influence the outcome.
— Decompression scenario (15%): The Yemeni government’s ground offensive, supported by Riyadh, forces the Houthi terrorists to refocus resources on their own territorial survival. This would be the only favorable outcome, and it depends less on Washington than on Saudi Arabia’s willingness to sustain a prolonged ground effort that has already cost them a decade.
2. US Navy retaliation: CENTCOM destroys five oil tankers belonging to the Iranian terrorist regime
Facts
The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) announced on Tuesday, September 8, the destruction of five Iranian oil tankers linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in retaliation for two attempted ballistic missile attacks against a US warship in the last 48 hours.
The ships hit were the M/T Kaviz, M/T Charminar, M/T Horizon 1, and M/T Riesco in the Gulf of Oman, and the M/T Derya near Jarg Island. According to CENTCOM, U.S. forces ordered the crews to abandon ship before attacking.
The US warship evaded both attacks and continued patrolling; there were no American casualties. Central Command maintains that the tankers were part of a multi-billion-dollar “shadow network” that finances the Revolutionary Guard and the terrorist organizations it sponsors in the region, and added a calculatedly harsh warning: Iran lacks the means to defend those vessels.
— The action follows that of September 5, when US forces sank the M/T Kylo and permanently disabled two other oil tankers after an Iranian ballistic missile attack on an aircraft carrier and a destroyer. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of CENTCOM, had warned at the time that Washington would impose “an even greater economic cost” by striking a “limited and vulnerable” oil tanker fleet.
The Iranian response was swift. State media reported the launch of ballistic missiles against a major US base in Jordan. The Revolutionary Guard Navy, in a statement released by the Fars news agency, warned crews of oil tankers anchored or docked in Kuwaiti and Bahraini ports to evacuate their vessels as they were potential targets. The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemned the attacks as a war crime.
— In parallel, Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, announced a “maritime exclusion zone” in the Persian Gulf up to the perimeter of the blockade and asserted that the operational posture against US ships and bases had been “fundamentally recalibrated.” He also claimed responsibility for the use of the Qassem Basir missile, presented by Tehran as an improved maneuverability weapon with electronic warfare-resistant guidance. The Speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, threatened energy infrastructure linked to the United States. Washington has ordered the deployment of additional fighter jets to the region.
Implications
The “tanker-for-tanker” policy approved by President Trump has impeccable military logic but a fundamental political problem. The logic: the Iranian regime doesn’t understand gestures, it understands costs, and crude oil is both its cash cow and its vulnerability. Hitting the phantom fleet that finances the Revolutionary Guard is hitting the coffers of terrorism, not the Iranian civilian economy. Anyone familiar with the regime’s financial architecture knows that this distinction exists and is relevant.
The problem lies elsewhere, and this report has been insistently pointing this out since the first day of Operation Epic Fury: tactical and military-strategic success is countered by an unmitigated geopolitical failure, and this failure has a structural, not a circumstantial, root. Washington’s initial calculation rested on a prediction that has proven wrong: that military and economic pressure would, sooner or later, cause the regime to implode. Seven months later, the nuclear program has not been verifiably dismantled, Iran has not stopped attacking its neighbors, and there is not the slightest indication that this implosion will occur. Therein lies the true failure: a structural and geostrategic one, not a tactical one. There was never a genuine Plan B, and what is more serious, that Plan B was lacking in both directions simultaneously. There was no serious plan for the day after the regime’s fall; But there was also no plan—and this is what is crucial today—for the day after the now undeniable evidence that the regime has not fallen and that the war drags on with no foreseeable outcome. Attacks continue, ships are sunk, escalations are announced, and improvisation persists because no one planned in advance what to do if the initial premise proved false. The absence of a political plan for both scenarios is not a technical detail: it is the difference between winning a campaign and winning a war.
One fact deserves to be emphasized with absolute clarity. The one announcing the escalation is not President Pezeshkian, a declared supporter of a negotiated solution, but Rezaei, who is subject to an Interpol red notice for the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. This detail explains the conflict better than any analysis of intentions: the hostilities continue not despite the power of the Revolutionary Guard, but because of it. For Rezaei and General Ahmed Vahidi, the war is the instrument for consolidating their own internal power against a weakened president. As long as the war lasts, they are in charge.
Perspectives and scenarios
— Most likely scenario (60%): The cycle of symmetrical retaliation continues. Iran attacks ships and bases, the United States sinks oil tankers, and neither side crosses the threshold that would force the other into a disproportionate response. It is a maritime war of attrition, lethal for trade and fruitless for both.
— Breakdown scenario (25%): An Iranian attack effectively hits a US warship or causes casualties at the Jordanian base. The response would then be on Iranian territory and against command targets, reactivating the intense phase of the campaign.
— Diplomatic opening scenario (15%): Economic strangulation and the material loss of the fleet force Tehran to reopen the Omani canal. It would be the rational solution; the problem is that rationality does not govern in Tehran, the Guardians do.
— Warning about the threat to Kuwait and Bahrain: if the Houthi terrorists or the Guardians actually attack oil tankers anchored in ports of third countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the crisis would go from bilateral to multilateral, with legal and military consequences of the first order.
3. Witkoff-Kushner mediation and the Trump-Putin call: one hour of conversation and not an inch of truce
Facts
President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a one-hour telephone conversation on Tuesday, September 8, according to the Kremlin, following the diplomatic shuttle by special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow and kyiv over the weekend.
Witkoff and Kushner met with Putin at the Kremlin on Saturday, September 5, for about three hours, followed by dinner. The next day they traveled overland to Kyiv—their first visit to Ukraine—to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin ordered a three-day pause in the attacks on the Ukrainian capital to allow for the trip.
Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov recounted that Putin insisted to the envoys on the need to eliminate “all the root causes” of the conflict, Moscow’s usual phrase for describing its maximalist demands: Ukrainian neutrality, a reduction of its armed forces, and withdrawal from NATO. Zelensky, after the meeting, was explicit: “We expect the war to continue.”
— Only the Russian version of Tuesday’s call is known. Ushakov described it as constructive, frank, and confidential, and asserted that Trump conveyed that an early end to the conflict would open “impressive and far-reaching” prospects for the full restoration of bilateral relations, especially trade. Putin, for his part, offered an “objective and detailed” analysis of the front line and its anticipated advances, denied any aggressive plans toward Europe, and maintained that “myths about the Russian threat” serve to justify more aid to Ukraine and increased European military spending. The White House had not yet released its own version when the Kremlin’s account was already circulating worldwide.
— After the break, Russia bombed kyiv during the night, causing five deaths and twenty-five injuries.
Implications
There is an asymmetry in this sequence that no serious analyst can ignore. Moscow controls the narrative because it is the only one disseminating it. When one side broadcasts its version and the other remains silent, the disseminated version becomes the accepted fact. Putin has been winning this information battle for four and a half years with an ease that speaks volumes about the professionalism of the American negotiating team.
The underlying issue is even more worrying. The offer that, according to the Kremlin, Trump put on the table is essentially commercial: end the war and we will restore economic relations. To reduce to a business transaction an aggression that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed the foundational principle of the European order—that borders cannot be altered by force—is a grave error. Putin did not invade Ukraine for economic reasons and he will not withdraw for economic reasons. This report wholeheartedly supports President Trump’s pragmatic foreign policy when he acts prudently and on the advice of Secretary Rubio; it cannot support it when intuition and impulsiveness replace strategy. This is one of those instances.
Putin’s statement about the “myths of the Russian threat” deserves its own chapter. It’s a textbook operation: the aim is to defuse European rearmament from within, feeding that cohort of complacent analysts—abundant in Spain as well—who have spent years spreading misinformation and finding justifications for the unjustifiable. The problem, of course, is that Europe is doing their bidding. A continent that, twenty years after deciding to take its defense seriously, is still arguing over percentages, timetables, and industrial allocation doesn’t need Russian propaganda to disarm: it can manage on its own. Europe’s inability to take responsibility for its own security, its own defense, and ultimately, its own destiny is the underlying strategic vulnerability of this whole affair, and it will remain so as long as the continent’s political class confuses governing with short-term management.
Perspectives and scenarios
— Most likely scenario (60%): Mediation continues without substantive results. Moscow prolongs the channel because it serves to buy time on the front and to present itself as a reasonable party, while consolidating its position before winter.
— Partial agreement scenario (25%): A limited moratorium on attacks on energy infrastructure is reached, reversible and without independent verification. It would be useful for Ukrainians heading into winter and politically advantageous for the White House before November 3, but it would not constitute peace.
— Breakdown scenario (15%): Washington concludes that Putin is not negotiating in good faith and tightens sanctions and supplies. The probability increases if the Kremlin overplays its hand or if a particularly serious attack on civilians makes the US position untenable.
— A variable to watch: the resignation of the Ukrainian prosecutor general following a corruption investigation within his own office. The internal erosion of Ukrainian institutions is, today, as serious a risk to Kyiv as Russian military pressure, and Moscow knows it.
4. PISA 2025: the worst result in Spain’s history and a strategic thirty-year mortgage
Facts
The OECD published the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 2025 on Tuesday, September 8th. This is the largest edition to date, with some 760,000 fifteen-year-old students assessed in 91 countries and economies. Spain recorded its worst result in the nine editions in which it has participated since 2000 , and for the first time, all three core competencies simultaneously fell to historic lows.
— Reading comprehension: 451 points, twenty-three less than in 2022 and below the previous historical low of 2006 (461). The cumulative decline since 2015 amounts to forty-five points.
— Mathematics: 457 points, sixteen less than in 2022 and six below the OECD average (463). Japan (525), South Korea (522), Estonia (508) and Switzerland (499) outperform Spain by the equivalent of between two and three academic years.
— Sciences: 477 points, eight less than in 2022 and below the previous minimum, set in 2018 (483).
Using the OECD’s own equivalency system—twenty points roughly equivalent to one school year—Spain’s decline since 2015 exceeds one year of lost learning in mathematics and approaches two in reading. This is the first edition evaluated entirely on students educated under the LOMLOE curriculum.
— The decline is international, and it’s important to say this to avoid parochialism: PISA 2025 recorded the worst OECD average ever measured in all three subjects. Reading fell by 28 points between 2015 and 2025, and mathematics by 22; science remained stable between 2022 and 2025 after a previous gradual decline. One in five 15-year-old students in the OECD is now a low performer in all three subjects, compared to 16% in 2022. But Spain’s decline is greater than the average for Spain and it falls below the OECD and European Union averages in all three areas.
The government’s reaction has been to dismiss any self-criticism. The Minister of Education, Vocational Training, and Sports, Milagros Tolón, denied that the Celaá Law was related to the results and pointed out that it was this law that established the competency-based approach. The Secretary of State, Abelardo de la Rosa, admitted that the data “are not good” and attributed the decline to its widespread nature and the effect of screen time. The Minister highlighted, as a counterpoint, that Spanish students score well in curiosity to learn and sense of belonging to the school, and pointed to the autonomous communities for the low implementation of reinforcement programs. Unions and regional governments have demanded structural reforms.
Implications
A geopolitical intelligence report doesn’t focus on PISA out of a purely educational interest. It focuses on it because human capital is a nation’s primary strategic resource, and because educational indicators are the only reasonably reliable predictor of a country’s relative power thirty years from now. No other variable—not the quarterly GDP, nor the risk premium, nor the number of tourists—reveals as much about what Spain will be like in 2050 as the fact that a third of its fifteen-year-old students cannot understand a long text.
The consequences are perfectly identifiable, and they all point in the same direction. First: productivity. An economy that cannot accurately interpret data or reason quantitatively cannot access the upper echelons of the value chain, is forced to specialize in low-margin services, and is structurally condemned to compete on price. Second: technological sovereignty. The gap with Japan, Korea, Estonia, or Switzerland in mathematics and science is the gap between those who design artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and batteries and those who buy them. Third, and for a diplomat the most painful: influence. A country’s international weight is, in the long term, the sum of its economic capacity, its technological strength, and the quality of its elites. Spain has been deteriorating all three simultaneously.
This decline also has an immediate impact on the tables where Europe’s future is decided. This report has repeatedly pointed out Spain’s exclusion from the informal bodies that currently govern continental security. No one invites a partner from whom they expect no intellectual, technical, or military contribution. Irrelevance isn’t decreed from Berlin or Paris: it’s slowly cultivated from within, PISA results after results, while those in charge explain that the problem is global and that our students, admittedly, are very eager to learn.
Regarding the causes, it’s important to be honest and avoid reductionism. The decline is international, and the impact of screens, the compulsive consumption of short-form content, and a still-unresolved relationship with artificial intelligence affects all education systems in the developed world. But when a country’s decline exceeds the average, the global explanation ceases to be an explanation and becomes an excuse. A country that has changed its education law eight times in forty-five years, that has systematically lowered standards in the name of equity, and that has turned education into ammunition for partisan battles, cannot hide behind the OECD. Yes to equal opportunities; no to a race to the bottom, which is exactly the opposite and which primarily harms students without a library at home. The fact that Madrid is leading the national rankings in mathematics and science for the first time while the rest of the country is plummeting demonstrates, precisely, that fate is not inevitable.
Perspectives and scenarios
— Most likely scenario (65%): The controversy fizzles out after three weeks of recriminations between the Ministry and the communities, without any structural reform. The effects will accumulate silently until the 2028 edition.
— Partial reaction scenario (25%): The Sectoral Conference on Education agrees to reinforcement programs in reading comprehension and mathematics and some limitations on the use of devices in the classroom. Useful but insufficient measures without curriculum review and without a serious reform of teacher selection and training.
— State pact scenario (10%): a stable educational agreement independent of political alternation, with external evaluation, high standards, and school autonomy. This is what the countries that are ahead of us today did; it is also what would require a level of commitment from our political class that, quite simply, is lacking today.
— An indicator to monitor in the medium term: the evolution of the gap between autonomous communities. If it consolidates, Spain will have gone from having one education system to having seventeen, with obvious consequences for equality of opportunity and for national cohesion itself.
5. The Scottish shower of oil: the volatility of the last 48 hours enriches speculation and impoverishes the developing world
Facts
International crude oil markets have experienced a rollercoaster ride over the past week, and particularly in the last 48 hours, accurately reflecting the pulse of the Gulf War. Brent crude fell to multi-day lows, around $94.65—WTI near $89.30—fueled by expectations of a safe passage corridor mediated by Oman in the Strait of Hormuz. The truce was short-lived: after the exchange of blows between Washington and Tehran over the weekend, Brent rebounded to $97.89 on Monday, September 7, and on Tuesday the 8th, following the Houthi attack on four Saudi cities and the destruction of five Iranian oil tankers by CENTCOM, it climbed to $99.46, its highest level since July 24. This Wednesday, September 9, it is trading very close to the psychological barrier of $100.
— Since the start of the price war on February 28, crude oil has risen by nearly 30%; in the last month alone, WTI has gained 13% and Brent 11%. In the United States, gasoline surpassed four dollars a gallon on Labor Day, a record high for that time of year.
— Goldman Sachs this week raised its Brent and WTI forecasts for December 2026 to $85 and $80 respectively, and warned that Brent could exceed $120 in 2027 if Gulf production remains four million barrels per day below pre-war levels.
The United Nations Development Programme estimates that global fossil fuel subsidies will reach $1.1 trillion in 2026—some $410 billion more than in 2025—if the price of oil averages $88.60 per barrel; in a more severe scenario, with crude at $110, these subsidies could reach $1.43 trillion. Its administrator, Alexander De Croo, has summarized the problem with a phrase that this report echoes: the money that should be building schools, hospitals, and clean energy systems is simply being used to keep economies afloat.
The International Monetary Fund has lowered its growth forecast for oil-importing countries in the MENAP region, with cumulative declines of 1.1 percentage points in Egypt, 0.6 in Pakistan, and 0.8 in Tunisia for the period 2026-2027. The bill is not limited to the Middle East: Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India are heavily dependent on Gulf crude, and in East Africa, Kenya and Tanzania suffer from a similarly severe reliance on imported petroleum products.
The case of India starkly illustrates this phenomenon. Nearly 90% of the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG, “bottled gas”) that reaches the country transits the Strait of Hormuz, and imported crude oil covers around 88-90% of its consumption. Successive price hikes for commercial LPG cylinders—including one of almost 1,000 rupees in a single price adjustment last May—have directly impacted the informal street food economy: tea stalls, shawarma stands, momo stands, and snack vendors that operate on minimal margins and feed tens of millions of people daily in Indian cities. CNG (compressed natural gas), on which taxis, motorcycle taxis, and much of the urban public transport system depend, follows the same upward trend whenever the Strait of Hormuz becomes strained.
Implications
It’s important to call this dynamic by its name, because the name matters: it’s a Scottish shower, a back-and-forth of negotiation and failure, of tension, hostilities, and reaction, repeating itself with the regularity of a metronome since the war began. Every attempt at mediation—Oman yesterday, Witkoff and Kushner on another stage—pushes the price down; every Houthi attack, every sunken oil tanker, every threat of a new exclusion zone pushes it up. The economic literature on this conflict is conclusive on one point: this volatility is not an unwanted side effect; it is, in itself, a source of profit. Available studies confirm that the instability of the Middle East increases oil volatility precisely through market speculation, the risk premium, and supply disruption. To put it bluntly: the war has lined the pockets of a legion of speculators in the world’s financial markets, who collect commissions on both the rise and the fall.
While this is happening, the real cost of volatility is being shifted, with brutal asymmetry, to those least able to absorb it. Rich countries cushion the blow with subsidies—at the expense, the UNDP rightly warns, of schools, hospitals, and the energy transition that go unfunded—; middle- and low-income countries, without this fiscal buffer, pass the international price directly on to the pump, the gas cylinder, or the electricity bill, and they do so under worse conditions, because crude oil is paid for in dollars and their currencies tend to depreciate precisely when geopolitical tensions rise. This is not an abstract energy crisis: it is a regressive tax of planetary scope that hits the poorest hardest.
The Indian case deserves to be highlighted because it dismantles any purely macroeconomic interpretation of the problem. For New Delhi, the Strait of Hormuz is not merely a line on a geopolitical risk map: it is the physical conduit through which flows the gas used to cook the food of hundreds of millions of people and the fuel that powers much of the subcontinent’s urban transport. When that conduit narrows due to a Houthi attack or a CENTCOM reprisal, it is not only the Brent benchmark price that rises on a screen in London: the price of the gas cylinder that fuels a tea stall in Delhi or the toll paid by an auto-rickshaw driver in Lucknow also increases, albeit with a delay of days. Twenty-first-century energy security is no longer measured solely by industrialized economies’ access to crude oil for their heavy industry; it is also measured by whether a street vendor can afford to open their stall this afternoon. Seen in this light, the volatility of the Gulf is, quite literally, a tax on the world’s poor.
Perspectives and scenarios
— Most likely scenario (55%): High volatility continues throughout the autumn, with Brent fluctuating between $90 and $105 in response to each incident in Hormuz or the Red Sea, and with the corresponding impact, a few days later, on energy bills in South Asia and East Africa.
— Worsening scenario (30%): The effective materialization of the Houthi blockade or the “exclusion zone” announced by Rezaei pushes Brent above $105-120, with a certain risk of balance of payments tensions in several middle-income economies in the Middle East, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, in line with the most severe scenario already contemplated by the World Bank and the IMF.
— Relief scenario (15%): A sustained increase in Chinese purchases of Gulf crude—already rising in August—and a possible extension of diplomatic mediation from the Ukrainian front to the Gulf front would allow for a gradual easing of prices towards the $80-$85 range. Nothing in the sequence of the last forty-eight hours points, for now, in that direction.
— A key factor to watch: the fiscal response of major Asian importers — including India — to an energy subsidy bill that, if current prices are maintained, will put pressure on their public finances at precisely the worst possible time, with global growth already weakened by the war itself.
Only coverage verified in the last 24-48 hours on the five issues analyzed is included. News items from the reference list that have not covered these topics within that timeframe are not listed, in order to avoid attributing undocumented positions.
III. MEDIA RACK
International agencies
Reuters sets the agenda on all three fronts: it reports on the expansion of the war into southern Saudi Arabia, as well as on Iranian threats of a no-fly zone and new missiles, with the economic angle—Brent crude at its highest level since July—placed front and center. The Associated Press reports on the Houthi attack and the CENTCOM briefing on the five oil tankers; its tally of casualties in Pentagon operations abroad also introduces an uncomfortable detail for the official narrative. AFP fuels European coverage of the Trump-Putin call following Ushakov’s appearance.
Anglo-Saxon press and North American television
CNN leads with the tanker war and underscores the risk of a new cycle of retaliation. NBC News details the CENTCOM statement and reports the Revolutionary Guard’s warning to crews anchored in Kuwait and Bahrain. CBS News maintains live coverage, focusing on energy prices and the Pentagon’s casualty figures. ABC News has been following the story since September 5 and incorporates the controversy over whether the conflict deserves to be called a war. Fox News provides operational details of the attacks near Jarg and Jask and explicitly links the price of crude oil to the November elections. NPR elaborates on the concept of a shadow fleet and the funding of the Revolutionary Guard. Axios and The Hill follow the Witkoff-Kushner mediation. Coverage of the Houthi attack also extends to major public networks outside the United States: Australia’s ABC and Canada’s CBC broadcast the report with NASA satellite imagery.
Arab world and Israel
Al Jazeera dedicates an in-depth analysis to the tanker war and gives a platform to Hassan Ghashghavi, spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee, who describes the confrontation as an “existential war” with America and maintains that the US naval blockade should never have been imposed. Israel National News reports on the threat of “economic warfare” and the exclusion zone announced by Rezaei. The Gulf press follows the attack on Jizan, Abha, Najran, and Khamis Mushayt with the informational restraint imposed by the government’s control of information in the Kingdom: the absence of confirmed images from the ground is, in itself, a significant detail.
Ukrainian and Eastern European press
The Kyiv Independent and the Kyiv Post offer the most accurate coverage of the Trump-Putin call, emphasizing a crucial point: the White House had not yet released its own version of events when Ushakov’s account was already circulating globally. Both newspapers also highlight that Zelensky took the continuation of the war for granted after the visit of the American envoys, and link this news to the nighttime bombing of Kyiv that left five dead and twenty-five wounded as the three-day pause expired.
Spanish press
The PISA collapse dominates national headlines. El Español headlines about the worst results in history after the full implementation of the education reform; Vozpopuli breaks down the decline by competency and compares it with Asian powers; Público highlights the international drop and the effect of the socioeconomic index on the comparison between public and private schools; Infobae reports the government’s admission that the data “are not good” alongside its outright rejection of self-criticism; The Objective and Libertad Digital focus on the ministerial exoneration of the LOMLOE (Organic Law for the Modification of the Organic Law on Education) and the contrast between the results and the official insistence on students’ curiosity to learn. The regional reaction—with the Xunta (Galician government) openly speaking of the law’s failure and the CSIF (Independent Union of Civil Servants) demanding structural reforms—confirms that the issue is once again mired in partisan politics rather than technical analysis.
Organizations and primary documents
The primary source for the fourth issue is the OECD itself, which has published the press release and Volume I of PISA 2025, including methodological details and historical data. The US Central Command released a statement and recording of the operation against the five oil tankers. The International Organization for Migration provides figures on displaced persons in Taiz and Hodeida. For the fifth issue, the primary references are the Goldman Sachs report cited by CNBC, the UNDP report on the fiscal cost of the escalation in the Middle East, the IMF’s regional analysis for the Middle East and Central Asia, and the World Bank’s commodity outlook report. It is recommended to consult these primary documents directly rather than secondhand versions.
Economic resources and coverage of the developing world
CNBC and Trading Economics offer the most detailed tracking of intraday Brent and WTI prices, including Goldman Sachs’ report raising its 2026 forecast and warning of the risk of Brent exceeding $120 in 2027. Reuters, via Investing.com , confirmed on Wednesday that Brent was trading near $100. Economics Observatory documents, using its own series, the unusual width of the crude oil price fluctuation band during this price war and details the differentiated exposure of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Kenya, and Tanzania. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) quantifies the impact on the Indian crude oil basket and the cost of a domestic LPG cylinder. Gulf News and several specialized Indian media outlets—including Outlook India and Indian PSU—describe in detail the effect of successive increases in commercial LPG prices on street food service and small industries across the subcontinent. The UNDP, the IMF and the World Bank respectively signed the report on the fiscal cost of escalation for developing countries, the MENAP regional analysis and the Commodity Markets Outlook.
IV. RISK TRAFFIC LIGHT
| Area of risk | Level | Today’s reading |
|---|---|---|
| Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz | ● Critic | A daily cycle of retaliation between CENTCOM and the Revolutionary Guard. Five oil tankers destroyed in a single day, missiles fired at a base in Jordan, and threats against ships anchored in Kuwait and Bahrain. |
| Southern Arabian Peninsula / Red Sea | ● Critic | Houthi terrorist attack on four Saudi cities leaves 73 wounded, including women and children, and fires at Aramco facilities. There is a real risk of a maritime blockade of Saudi traffic at Bab el-Mandeb. |
| Energy markets | ● High | Brent crude is at $99.46, its highest level since July 24. The combination of the blocked Strait of Hormuz and the threatened Red Sea is putting upward pressure on prices, with a direct impact on southern Europe. |
| Ukraine War | ● High | Active mediation without results. Russian maximalist positions remain unchanged; bombing of Kyiv leaves five dead as the pause expires. Internal institutional erosion in Ukraine is an additional factor. |
| Iranian internal stability | ● High | Rezaei and Vahidi consolidate power by prolonging hostilities, to the detriment of President Pezeshkian. There is no Western plan for the aftermath. |
| European cohesion and defense | ● Medium-high | Moscow openly exploits the narrative of the “myths of the Russian threat.” Europe continues to fail to translate its pronouncements into real capabilities. |
| Spain’s strategic position | ● High | Record lows in PISA across all three competencies, with no government self-criticism. Erosion of human capital with a direct, medium- and long-term impact on productivity, technological sovereignty, and external influence. |
| Energy volatility and the developing world | ● High | Brent crude is heading towards $100 after a fluctuation from $94.65 to $99.46 in forty-eight hours. This represents a rising tax burden for importing countries (MENAP, South Asia, East Africa), leading to a direct shift to LPG and CNG in India. |
| Yemen (humanitarian situation) | ● Critic | Some 18,500 displaced people in Taiz and Hodeida according to the IOM, in a forgotten conflict that reappears every time it serves Tehran’s interests. |
| Electoral risk in the United States | ● Medium-high | Fuel prices and the unpopular war less than two months before the November 3 midterm elections. A determining factor in the White House’s behavior. |
● Critical ● High ● Medium-high ● Low or improving
V. EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
There are days when current events sort themselves out. Today is one of them, and what it sorts out is an uncomfortable lesson about the difference between potential and power.
The United States has demonstrated in the Gulf that it retains overwhelming military superiority. It sinks oil tankers at will, evades ballistic missiles, orders enemy crews to abandon their ships before destroying them, and shamelessly announces that Tehran lacks the means to defend itself. All true, all effective, all insufficient. Seven months after the start of Operation Epic Fury, the Iranian nuclear program has not been verifiably dismantled, the regime has neither yielded nor imploded, its terrorist organizations remain fully operational—yesterday’s Houthi attack, with seventy-three wounded, proves it—and the Strait of Hormuz continues to be a tollbooth. Military superiority without political planning produces this: a war that is neither lost nor won, sustained indefinitely because no one has decided what its purpose is. This vacuum was once called Iraq, then Afghanistan, and today it is once again called Iran. It is hard to believe that we have learned nothing.
On the Russian front, the diagnosis is different and no less severe. There, it is not a lack of military power, but a lack of clarity of purpose. When the offer to the aggressor consists of restoring access to global trade in exchange for ceasing aggression, it implicitly accepts that aggression was a legitimate negotiating position. It was not. This report wholeheartedly defends President Trump’s pragmatic and realistic foreign policy when he acts prudently and on the advice of Secretary Rubio, and acknowledges his undeniable diplomatic successes in less than a year. Precisely for this reason, it can say that in the Russian case, intuition has replaced strategy and impulsiveness has replaced method. A negotiator who publishes his version while the other remains silent is not negotiating: he is dictating. Putin has been dictating for months.
Spain remains, and it remains in the most painful way. While the world reorders itself with missiles and tariffs, here we’ve received the news that our fifteen-year-olds read, calculate, and reason worse than ever before since comparable measurements have been available, and the official response has been to explain that the problem is global, that screens are to blame, that the law has nothing to do with it, and that, in any case, Spanish students show a commendable curiosity for learning. No irony could possibly improve on that statement.
It’s important to understand what’s at stake, because this isn’t a school debate. The Spanish Transition was an unrepeatable historical success precisely because an entire generation—with King Juan Carlos I as its architect and leaders of a stature that now embarrasses us to recall—understood that building a country is a task of decades, not legislative terms. That generation built, in fifteen years, the most prosperous, freest, and most respected Spain in our contemporary history. The 21st-century political class, mediocre and short-sighted in Madrid as in Brussels, in Paris as in Berlin, has reversed that equation: it manages the present at the expense of the future, and calls governing winning the evening news cycle.
The outcome is predictable and already evident. A country that fails to properly educate its youth doesn’t produce what it consumes, doesn’t design what it buys, doesn’t defend what it possesses, and, sooner or later, doesn’t make decisions that affect it. No one will ask for its opinion on the Strait of Hormuz, on Ukraine, or on the European security order, because it will have nothing to contribute. No enemy power will have had to exert any effort: the dismantling will have been entirely domestic, gradual, consensual, and perfectly documented in reports that are discussed for forty-eight hours every year and then filed away.
Finally, there remains one point that no one brings up in the public debate, and which brings this day full circle with a bitter irony: each of the preceding episodes—the Houthi missile, the sunken oil tanker, the phone call that brings no peace—has a price, and that price is not paid by those who cause it. It is paid by the tea vendor in Delhi who sees the price of a gas cylinder rise, the auto-rickshaw driver in Lucknow, the small farmer in Kenya or Tanzania. The geopolitics of the great powers and the domestic economy of the world’s poor, which we usually analyze in separate compartments, are in reality the same phenomenon seen on two different scales. Anyone who believes that the Gulf War is a matter unrelated to the dinner table of a humble family in the Indian subcontinent has not yet grasped how the world works in 2026.
This analyst argues that there is still time, and that the example of the Community of Madrid topping the national rankings in mathematics and science for the first time demonstrates that decline is not a destiny but a choice. A national pact for education is needed, independent of political shifts, with rigorous standards, external evaluation, school autonomy, and a profound reform of teacher selection and training. The countries that now outperform us in mathematics did exactly that, and they did it when they were worse off than us. The question is not whether we know what needs to be done. The question is whether anyone is willing to do it without first asking how many votes it will cost.