THE stark divergence between profit and pain has become a dominant feature of a new phase of globalization since the beginning of this decade: crises that make common people suffer worldwide turn into commodities for the top one percent to benefit from.
There is a systemic shift that incentivizes the commercialization of fear and the extraction of both natural ecosystems and human narratives. It focuses on the strategic manipulation of supply chains and strong trade-security interdependence—a clear deviation from the first phase, in which peace, productivity and economic liberalism were the primary drivers of growth.
During the first month of the US–Iran war, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies including Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and ExxonMobil, banked more than $30 million every hour in unearned profit, according to The Guardian. The economic fallout of the same war, however, threatens to push over 32 million people worldwide into poverty, due to what the UNDP describes as a triple shock—rising energy costs, food insecurity and weakening economic growth. The same pattern surfaced when the Russia–Ukraine War collided with the post-pandemic recovery period, pushing oil prices to their highest mark. The largest fossil fuel giants—BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total Energies—earned over $200 billion, more profit than at any point in the industry’s history.
Meanwhile, the defense sector mirrors the same logic: structurally aligned with crisis, its gains are embedded in expectation and long-term state spending, even when short-term market signals fluctuate. The financial cost of the Iran war has roughly been estimated at “$2 billion a day in short-term expenditure—only the tip of the iceberg,” in the words of Prof. Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard Kennedy School. In the first four days of the conflict, more Patriot missiles were fired than were supplied to Ukraine over the past four years. Each THAAD interceptor costs about $12.7 million and each Patriot PAC-3 interceptor roughly $3.7 million.
Moreover, the US has signed multi-billion-dollar weapon supply arrangements with its allies in the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East. In FY2024, the total value of transferred defense articles and services and security cooperation activities under the US Foreign Military Sales system recorded a 45.7% increase in just one year—the highest annual total ever. The huge flows of capital from these wars ultimately boost the accounts of major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and L3Harris Technologies. In a similar direction, transatlantic tensions between Europe and the USA have pushed many European countries to announce the sharpest increases in their defense budgets since the end of the Cold War.
The global giants enjoy these gains in a world where nearly two billion people still lack access to safe drinking water, around 750 million remain without electricity and close to 839 million continue to live in extreme poverty—figures drawn from the most recent global estimates of the World Bank, IEA, WHO and the UNDP. Millions face acute hunger and displacement in Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and other fragile parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia. The United Nations repeatedly warns of severe funding gaps in humanitarian response. In many developing economies like Egypt, Pakistan and India, households struggle under rising fuel prices, inflation, fertilizer shortages and disrupted energy supply chains.
Across the Middle East—from Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and Gaza—consecutive wars have left behind a generation of unemployed youth, trapped between poverty and a deep sense of alienation. A joint assessment by the European Union and the United Nations indicates that the war in Gaza alone has forced around 728,000 children out of school and displaced approximately 1.6 million people. What emerges is not only a humanitarian emergency in these countries but a fracture in human capital itself—exclusion, hatred and deprivation create fertile ground for future extremist recruitment—with little incentive to treat humanity as a single whole or to become participants in its collective social progress.
Amid all this chaos, human development discourse on poverty, clean water, health, food security and basic education is increasingly sidelined. Climate resilience is one of them. The same beneficiaries of the emerging crisis economy, in which capital aligns with fossils and weapons, often resist meaningful climate action, even as glacier melt accelerates, water shortages intensify and droughts deepen. Recent climate negotiations have struggled to deliver any meaningful breakthrough or consensus on the transition toward renewable energy.
Prof. Mariana Mazzucato, the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, has recently observed that humanity could not nationalize the COVID-19 pandemic; it could not nationalize climate change; by the same logic, it cannot contain the negative impacts of this new phase of globalization within borders. They are shared, cumulative and borne by the entire planet. Yet the global elite continues to behave as if these crises can be localized or strategically managed.
Christina Koch—a member of the Artemis II mission crew—has described how viewing Earth strips away every illusion of division, the planet appearing as a fragile lifeboat suspended in vast darkness, carrying all of humanity as one shared crew. From that vantage point, borders dissolve, conflicts shrink and a quiet but unsettling truth emerges: this is not a collection of competing nations, but a single system of life, entirely dependent on its own balance—one that the current order continues to strain.
—The author is a regular columnist and commentator on global affairs, serving on the panels of the UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
