There was some kind of international energy order in play after 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed and the US ascended to the world supremo throne. The US helped establish an international energy order, which was loose and informal and yet—to a great extent—effective. Organisations such as OPEC and the IEA flourished. Most international intergovernmental organisations, too, incorporated energy into their thinking. Resultantly, the world energy landscape remained by and large reasonably stable.
The first major fault line surfaced two decades ago, when Western climate politicians and thinkers started blaming fossil fuels squarely for the rising threat of global warming. Some even went beyond and started demonising fossil fuels, particularly oil, ignoring the hard fact the world still runs mainly on oil, gas and coal. This campaign reached its crescendo during the administration of US President Joe Biden.
Renewables, during the Biden era, emerged as the most talked about source of energy, fascinating millions—even leading many to naively believe the age of coal, oil and gas was now all over and the solar and wind energies alone could meet the energy needs of all of 8b women, men and children on the planet. The war in Ukraine, however, came as a shock, forcing the world—particularly Western Europe—to go back, check and embrace reality. Oil returned as king. The shout “drill, baby, drill” resonated across most parts of the world, thanks to Trump 2.0.
Trump’s US has, however, gone beyond Biden in deploying energy as a ‘weapon of mass disruption’ (WMD) against any and every country that dares to disagree with it—sanctioning Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan entities, imposing punitive tariffs against buyers of Russian oil, targeting aged oil tankers and so on. The EU has gone steps ahead, using energy as a WMD even more aggressively, thoughtlessly and mercilessly, ignoring the fact it could lead to serious foundational challenges for European economies, especially in terms of the cost of energy for rejuvenating manufacturing.
The IEA, a body created for the energy security of the rich countries, has also of late acted rather strangely. It has been, on several occasions, biased against fossil fuels, particularly oil, in terms of its reports, which in turn have been used by Western powers to arm twist weaker countries of the Global South to accept their narratives on climate change and green energy.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is a simmering anger across the Global South, including in India and China, against the West’s use of energy as a weapon to forge ahead with its geopolitical agendas, with the sole objective of resisting any change or reform in the global power order.
A multipolar order
The US-led unipolar world is collapsing rapidly. China has risen. India is rising. The transition of the world from a unipolar to a multipolar may not be smooth, thanks to the West’s resistance, but it is certain to happen—say, by 2045, with Brussels, Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi joining Washington DC as the key poles of the emerged multipolar world. This has already begun to manifest in the Emerging International Energy Order (EIEO).
The US and the Western Europe, despite their inner conflicts and contradictions, are still the most powerful bloc in the EIEO, while Moscow is busy building its own bloc, as is China. India is asserting its strategic autonomy and assembling its own bloc based on the principles of multi-alignment and multipolarity. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Brazil have their own ideas in terms of constructing their spheres of influence in the EIEO. Thanks to formidable intergovernmental groups such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the EIEO is assured to be collaborative, democratic and multipolar. There are 4b energy-poor people on the planet. Those who use energy as a WMD should realise it is the poorest in a remote village in Indonesia or Congo—who cannot even place Ukraine on a map—who pay the most when the price of oil or electricity suddenly goes up due to sanctions and punitive tariffs and so on.
Energy needs to be depoliticised and de-weaponised. The 1.4b of the Global North should know that, for the 6.6b in the Global South, energy is often the matter of life and death, not convenience or comfort.
The world can no longer afford an international energy order dictated by any one country or bloc. The world needs a new international energy order, which is based on the principles of multipolarity, collaboration, energy justice and affordable energy for one and all.
The world also needs an intergovernmental world organisation for energy. Expanding the IEA to that status—as the West may insist—would not work because it is in the DNA of the IEA to serve only the rich. This new world energy organisation should be lean and agile, focussed on pursuing an open and market-based approach, but with its heart designed for compassion and justice for the energy-poor. More importantly, its headquarters should be located in Asia, the newly emerged global energy gravity centre of the world.
Narendra Taneja is a well-known global thought leader on energy policy and geopolitics. He is chairman of the Independent Energy Policy Institute in New Delhi and a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Views are personal. This article is taken from our Outlook 2026 report. To read Outlook 2026 in full, click here.
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