Trump’s show of force has triggered the deepest global disruption in decades

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran lasted just 40 days. Its consequences will last years.

What ended with a fragile ceasefire on April 8 has already become the most economically disruptive war in half a century. Not since the oil shocks of the 1970s has a conflict simultaneously ruptured energy supply, disrupted trade arteries, strained food systems and tightened global financial conditions.

What distinguishes this war is not just its scale, but its breadth: It hit multiple pillars of the global economy at once, and in ways that cannot be quickly reversed.

U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office promising to end “stupid wars.” Instead, he delivered one of the most strategically self-defeating conflicts. While U.S. and Israeli forces degraded Iran’s military capabilities, the war revealed a harsher truth: Overwhelming force cannot compel favorable outcomes against a resilient adversary capable of imposing systemic costs by widening the battlefield beyond its borders. The result was power without resolution.

Like the 1956 Suez Crisis that exposed the limits of British power, this war has prompted a growing question: Did Trump just engineer America’s own Suez moment?

What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign quickly metastasized into the largest energy-supply disruption in history. Energy infrastructure across Iran and the Gulf was damaged or disabled. Supply routes fractured. And most critically, the Strait of Hormuz became effectively unusable.

Unlike past crises, there was no workaround. Oil and gas output fell sharply. Shipping insurance premiums in the Gulf surged more than fourfold.

Even after the ceasefire, a permanent risk premium has been embedded into global energy markets, as investors and shippers now assume that instability in the Gulf is no longer episodic but enduring.

In effect, Trump became the first leader in modern history to trigger a global energy crisis through direct military action.

For Asia, particularly India, Japan and South Korea, the shock has been severe. Along with China, these economies depended heavily on Gulf energy flows. But while Beijing has accelerated its pivot toward overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, Tokyo, Seoul and New Delhi remain structurally exposed, with no viable alternative to vulnerable sea lanes.

Because energy underpins every stage of modern production, the global shock does not stop at fuel. It is already cascading into the world food system.

Modern agriculture runs on energy. Natural gas is essential for fertilizer production; oil powers irrigation, transport and mechanization. When energy systems fracture, food systems follow.

The Gulf is a key supplier of fertilizers such as urea and ammonia. Disruptions sent prices soaring, just as the Northern Hemisphere entered its spring planting season. Reduced fertilizer use is now locked in for the 2026 harvest.

The consequences are unfolding in stages: first an input shock, then a production shortfall, and finally a consumption crisis marked by rising food prices.

By next year, analysts expect significant increases in the cost of grains, vegetable oils and meat. Corn — central to global feed systems — is particularly vulnerable, raising the prospect of a “protein shock.”

A sign displayed at a Thai gas station announces that diesel fuel has run out. Photo: AP

Government responses are compounding the problem. High oil prices have made biofuels more attractive, prompting countries to divert more crops into fuel production. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: Higher energy prices tighten food supply, pushing prices even higher.

The war also exposed a rarely acknowledged vulnerability: the Gulf’s heavy dependence on desalination.

After a desalination facility on Iran’s Qeshm island was struck, reprisal attacks on desalination plants in Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE triggered a cascading water-energy crisis. Desalination facilities are highly energy-intensive and indispensable. Damaging them forced governments to divert enormous resources simply to maintain potable water supplies.

In the world’s most freshwater-scarce region, water itself became a weapon of war.

While the war-triggered crisis is global, its burden is not.

In advanced economies, the crisis manifests as inflation and industrial strain. Households face higher costs, while central banks delay rate cuts. But these countries retain buffers.

The Global South does not. Many developing economies rely heavily on imported energy, particularly from the Gulf. Rising prices have ballooned import bills, weakened currencies and increased debt burdens, especially where liabilities are dollar-denominated.

Capital is flowing out of these economies into perceived safe havens, tightening financial conditions further. The result is a vicious cycle: higher costs, weaker currencies and shrinking fiscal space. For some countries, the risks are existential.

Compounding the crisis is a sharp drop in remittances. Millions of workers from developing countries are employed in Gulf economies. War-related disruptions have reduced remittance flows significantly. At the household level, families are losing financial lifelines just as food and energy prices surge. At the national level, governments are losing critical foreign exchange, undermining their ability to stabilize economies.

Globally, what makes this moment especially dangerous is not any single disruption, but their convergence.

Energy systems are fractured. Food systems are under strain. Financial flows are shifting. Trade routes are costlier and more uncertain. The Strait of Hormuz, once a reliable artery of global commerce, is now a contested chokepoint, with lasting implications for how energy moves and power is exercised.

The era of cheap energy, secure transit and frictionless globalization is giving way to something more fragmented, more politicized and more volatile. Even if the ceasefire holds, this will not quickly reverse.

Damaged energy infrastructure will take several years to rebuild. Confidence in Gulf transit has been eroded to the extent that the costs — in terms of prices, insurance and strategy — are now locked into the system.

The irony is stark. A war intended to assert American supremacy has instead imposed global costs that the world will continue to bear even after Trump leaves office.

Global growth will likely remain constrained. Energy markets will stay tight. Food systems will absorb delayed shocks. And U.S. credibility will continue to erode.

The war’s true legacy is not the 40 days it lasted but the systemic crisis it set in motion. And that bill is only beginning to come due.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

Brahma Chellaney, Special to The Globe and Mail

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran crossed a dangerous threshold that few have yet fully grasped. It was not just one more Middle Eastern conflict defined by missiles, drones, bunker-busting bombs and cyberwarfare. It marked the normalization of something far more insidious: the deliberate targeting of water facilities.

Water itself became a weapon of war in a region already defined by extreme scarcity of the world’s most vital resource. 

This weaponization was not incidental: it was deliberate, reciprocal and escalating, with implications far beyond the Persian Gulf.

The Middle East is the most water-stressed region in the world, with over 80 per cent of its population living under conditions of extreme scarcity.

Within this region, the Persian Gulf stands out for its acute water scarcity, with per capita renewable freshwater availability falling well below the “absolute” scarcity threshold of 500 cubic meters per year in most countries. Contrast that with between 80,000 and 100,000 cubic meters per capita availability in Canada, which, along with Brazil and Russia, ranks among the richest in freshwater resources. 

The Gulf Arab countries and Iran’s coastal areas and islands rely heavily on desalination rather than renewable internal water resources, which are less than 100 cubic meters per capita in all the Gulf sheikhdoms other than Oman. 

In such an environment, water infrastructure is not just civilian; it is existential.

What the war revealed was a profound transformation in how such infrastructure is perceived. Desalination plants, water treatment systems and electrical grids that sustain them were no longer treated as protected civilian assets; they became targets.

Early in the conflict, damage to desalination facilities in Kuwait and the UAE was dismissed as collateral — an unfortunate byproduct of strikes on nearby military installations. That illusion did not last. Within days, the logic of retaliation took hold.

On March 7, a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island was struck, cutting off water to dozens of villages. The very next day, an Iranian drone targeted a desalination facility in Bahrain, disrupting supply to civilian areas.

A taboo had been broken. Water-for-water retaliation had entered the battlefield.

The anatomy of vulnerability

Nowhere is such escalation more dangerous than in the energy-rich Gulf Arab nations. These petro-states are, more precisely, “saltwater kingdoms,” surviving by converting seawater into potable water through desalination.

Yet this highly energy-intensive technological solution, long seen as a triumph of engineering over geography, revealed itself as a strategic weakness in wartime because of the plants’ vulnerability to attack.

In some Gulf states, up to 90 per cent of drinking water comes from desalination. These supplies are produced by a small number of massive, highly visible coastal facilities that are nearly impossible to fully defend. 

Most states maintain only three to seven days of potable water reserves, although some are now working to expand them. A successful strike on a major plant could leave millions without water in less than a week.

In other words, modern Gulf cities — from Dubaito Doha toRiyadh — are never more than a few days away from a total water blackout.

Iran, for its part, faces a different but equally severe water crisis. It is not dependent on desalination to the same degree, but population and economic growth and resource mismanagement have pushed it into virtual “water bankruptcy,” with consumption exceeding natural replenishment. Aquifers have been depleted, rivers diminished and ecosystems like Lake Urmia nearly disappeared.

Even before recent U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on critical infrastructure compounded these pressures, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian had proposed relocating the capital to a wetter area, warning that Tehran’s deepening water crisis could render the city “uninhabitable.”

The infrastructure asymmetry between the Gulf states and Iran creates a volatile dynamic. The Gulf states are technologically resilient but physically exposed. Iran is structurally fragile but less vulnerable to single-point infrastructural collapse.

War turned these vulnerabilities into targets.

What distinguished this conflict was not simply that water infrastructure was hit, but that it was targeted as part of a deliberate strategy.

The logic is straightforward: modern societies depend on tightly integrated systems — electricity powers water infrastructure, and water sustains public health, industry, agriculture and social stability. Disrupt one node, and the entire system begins to unravel.

The U.S. understands this well. During the 1991 Gulf War, it systematically destroyed Iraq’s electrical grid, disabling water purification systems. The consequences were catastrophic: contaminated water supplies, collapsing hospitals, surging waterborne diseases and rising child mortality.

A subsequent study analyzing declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents concluded that the destruction of electricity and water-treatment infrastructure effectively functioned as a “biological weapon in slow motion.” One cited DIA document, “Iraq’s Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” detailed how sanctions combined with electrical-grid destruction would produce “incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.”

In the Iran war, that logic — using electricity and water systems as instruments against civilian populations — was being reapplied.

Threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to destroy Iran’s electricity and desalination plants and broader energy infrastructure underscored how deeply that approach was embedded in thinking. Iran’s response was to mirror that logic in its own retaliatory approach.

Civilian lifelines were recast as instruments of coercion. The result was an emerging doctrine of “hydro-warfare,” one that threatened to intensify an already acute regional water crisis.

There was also an “invisible front” in this hydro-warfare: cyberattacks.

The war began with one of the largest cyberattacks in history, disrupting Iran’s digital infrastructure and crippling the automated systems that manage water distribution. A prolonged near-total internet blackout followed. In response, Iranian-linked cyber groups targeted industrial control systems associated with water and wastewater facilities across the region.

Such attacks aimed not to destroy infrastructure physically, but to manipulate its “digital brain” — to disrupt flow, degrade supply or trigger system-wide failures.

Unlike conventional strikes, cyber operations offer deniability and scalability. They blur the line between war and sabotage, making attribution difficult and escalation harder to control.

But their effects are no less real. A malfunctioning water system can be as devastating as a bombed one.

The collapse of legal restraints

International humanitarian law is unequivocal. The Geneva Conventions, reinforced by Additional Protocol I, explicitly prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival — water facilities foremost among them.

Yet the Iran war suggests that these norms are rapidly eroding. Mr. Trump, while mocking international law, threatened to return Iran to the Stone Age and destroy a “whole civilization.”

Each side accused the other of initiating the escalation. Each strike was framed as retaliation. Each violation became justification for the next.

This is how norms collapse, not through formal repudiation, but through gradual normalization.

Had this trajectory continued, the consequences would have extended far beyond this war. The targeting of water infrastructure risked becoming an accepted instrument of statecraft — a precedent waiting to be replicated elsewhere.

In a warming world where water scarcity is intensifying, that is a profoundly destabilizing prospect.

The humanitarian and environmental consequences of hydro-warfare are stark.

Water scarcity unleashes cascading impacts. Hospitals are among the first to fail. Sanitation systems collapse, increasing the risk of disease outbreaks. Industrial sectors, from petrochemicals to data centers, grind to a halt, amplifying economic disruption.

The environmental risks are no less grave. Damage to desalination plants can release toxic chemicals into the Persian Gulf, while disruptions to brine discharge systems can create localized ecological “dead zones.” In a narrow, semi-enclosed body of water already under stress, such contamination could have long-term consequences for marine life — and for the seawater on which desalination depends.

Hydro-warfare also carries profound political implications. In the Gulf monarchies, state legitimacy rests on an implicit social contract: political acquiescence in exchange for stability and provision. Water is central to that bargain. If governments cannot guarantee basic supply — even under the umbrella of U.S. security protection — that contract begins to fray.

Iran appeared acutely aware of this dynamic. By targeting Gulf infrastructure, it sought not only to retaliate against U.S. and Israeli actions, but to drive a wedge between Gulf Arab states, which all host American military bases, and their Western patrons.

In short, the weaponization of water is self-destructive, even for those who imagine they gain short‑term leverage. It degrades the shared ecological foundation on which all communities depend.

Normalizing the unthinkable

What made the Iran war particularly dangerous was the convergence of three forces: deepening water stress, technological dependence and geopolitical confrontation.

Rising temperatures and erratic rainfall are intensifying water scarcity across the Middle East. At the same time, technological solutions like desalination have created new forms of dependency — systems that are efficient, even if costly, but fragile, centralized and exposed. War exploits that fragility.

The Iran conflict demonstrated how quickly these systems can be weaponized — and how difficult they are to restore once broken.

The targeting of water infrastructure marks a profound shift in warfare, extending conflict from the battlefield into the biological core of civilian life. What is at stake is not just the legality of certain tactics, but the survival of a foundational principle: that even in war, some things remain off-limits. That principle is no longer under strain; it is being dismantled.

If water can be weaponized with impunity, the distinction between combatant and civilian collapses. War ceases to be a contest between militaries and becomes an assault on the conditions of life itself.

TheUnited States and Israel may see these tactics as instruments of coercion, and Iran as tools of deterrence and retaliation. But all sides have participated in a dangerous experiment whose consequences will outlast the war.

The Middle East has long been a region defined by the politics of oil. It may now be entering an era shaped by the geopolitics of water. And unlike oil, water has no substitute. It is irreplaceable.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of two award-winning books on water: Water: Asia’s New Battleground and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

When President Trump launched his war on Iran, attention fixed on missiles, drones and the risks of escalation. The real story lay elsewhere: a grandiose and ultimately reckless vision of American “energy dominance” that helped propel Washington into war.

This was not simply a security decision, but an economic and ideological gamble rooted in Trump’s long-held belief that U.S. control over international energy flows would translate into global geopolitical supremacy and arrest America’s relative decline.

In his second term, that belief hardened into doctrine. But in Iran, it collided with reality.

For years, Trump has openly flirted with the idea that the U.S. should “take” or otherwise control the oil resources of states too weak to impose retaliatory costs. That impulse, once dismissed as rhetorical excess, became operational policy under the banner of “energy dominance” — maximize U.S. and allied fossil-fuel output and then wield global supply and pricing as a strategic weapon against adversaries and even friendly states.

By last year, the U.S. had indeed become the world’s largest oil and gas producer, flooding global markets with shale output and liquefied natural gas. This surge created a dangerous illusion in Washington — that America had insulated itself from the geopolitical risks of energy disruption. If the U.S. no longer depended on Middle Eastern oil, the thinking went, it could act militarily in the Persian Gulf without suffering serious economic consequences at home.

That misperception proved decisive. Trump’s advisers argued that any Iranian retaliation — whether through attacks on Gulf infrastructure or disruption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz — could be offset by U.S. and allied production. Last June’s limited U.S. strikes on Iran had triggered only temporary price spikes, reinforcing the belief that markets could be managed.

Energy dominance, in this reading, was not just an economic strategy; it was a license for geopolitical coercion.

It removed a constraint that had shaped decades of U.S. policy. Where previous presidents hesitated — fearing that war with Iran would send oil prices soaring and damage the global economy — Trump saw an opportunity. If supply could be controlled, then conflict could be contained.

But this logic rested on a profound miscalculation that energy systems are linear, predictable and ultimately subordinate to American power. They are not.

Once the conflict escalated and the Strait of Hormuz was effectively compromised, the consequences rippled far beyond what Washington had anticipated. Prices surged, volatility spiked and the shock spread through every layer of the global economy.

Energy is not just another commodity. It is the foundation of modern economic life. When energy prices rise sharply, food prices follow. Natural gas is essential for fertilizer production, while oil powers agricultural machinery, irrigation and transport. The result is a cascading effect: an energy shock becomes a food shock and, for many societies, a political shock, hitting the most vulnerable countries hardest.

This is the real legacy of Trump’s war: not battlefield outcomes, but systemic disruption.

The energy logic that helped drive the conflict was never confined to Iran. Just eight weeks earlier, the Trump administration had demonstrated its willingness to operationalize resource control in Venezuela, where U.S. military intervention resulted in the capture of President Nicolas Maduro and the installation of a more pliable regime. Vice President JD Vance was explicit about the rationale: control over one of the world’s largest oil reserves.

Iran represented the same logic, scaled up.

Together, Iran and Venezuela account for almost one-third of global proven oil reserves.

The prospect of bringing both into Washington’s strategic orbit would amount to an unprecedented lever over global energy markets, allowing the U.S. not just to influence prices, but to shape the economic trajectories of rivals and partners alike. It is difficult to overstate how radical this vision was.

It marked a return to a resource-centric foreign policy reminiscent of earlier eras, when access to oil routinely drove foreign intervention, regime change and covert operations — from the 1953 CIA-assisted coup in Iran to Cold War-era resource conflicts. The difference today is the scale of ambition: not merely securing supply, but globally dominating it.

Dominance, however, has proven illusory. Far from demonstrating control, the Iran war has exposed the fragility of the global energy system — and the limits of American power within it. With markets interconnected, geopolitical shocks cannot be neatly contained. And even a country as energy-rich as the U.S. remains deeply vulnerable to global systemic shocks.

The irony is stark. A strategy designed to give Washington greater freedom of action has instead produced global constraint — slowing growth, fueling inflation and amplifying financial instability across continents.

If anything, the Iran war underscored the opposite of what its architects intended: that energy interdependence remains a structural reality, not a vulnerability that can be engineered away.

In the end, Trump’s pursuit of energy dominance did not merely enable the war on Iran; it made it conceivable for the first time. By convincing itself that the economic risks of conflict could be managed, the administration crossed a threshold earlier leaders had resisted. What followed was not the calibrated use of American power, but an unleashing of forces far beyond Washington’s control.

The costs mounted swiftly, at home and abroad. The bill was global — paid for one man’s delusion.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

The world ignored warnings about the Three Gorges Dam until it became an environmental nightmare. It cannot afford to repeat that mistake with China’s super-dam near the Indian border — a project whose ecological fallout will ripple globally.

Brahma Chellaney, Special to The Globe and Mail

Last month, China officially acknowledged that it is constructing the world’s largest dam, on the Yarlung Zangbo River (better known as the Brahmaputra) in Tibet, just a few kilometres from the Indian border.

Though satellite imagery had suggested activity at the site for some time, Premier Li Qiang‘s July announcement marked Beijing’s first open admission of the megaproject, which will have far-reaching environmental, geopolitical and hydrological consequences across Asia and beyond. For proof, just look at the current largest dam in the world, China’s Three Gorges Dam. It has proved to be an environmental nightmare; its mammoth reservoir has triggered landslides, increased seismic activity and even slightly slowed Earth’s rotation.

One would have expected such a revelation to trigger strong international reactions. Yet, despite the dam’s extraordinary implications, the world has stayed silent.

China’s new super-dam seeks to exploit the immense drop in elevation as the Brahmaputra descends from the Himalayas before curving into India. This geologically unstable, ecologically sensitive zone lies close to the heavily militarized border with India’s Arunachal Pradesh state – a territory almost three times the size of Taiwan that China claims as its own.

Thanks to its 1951 annexation of the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau – the source of 10 major Asian rivers – China is the origin of cross-border flows to more countries than any other nation. Since the 1990s, its frenzy of dam-building has shifted from internal rivers to international ones, without consultation or transparency.

China already boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined, and it has emerged as the main obstacle to institutionalized co-operation on shared water resources in Asia. It has no water-sharing treaty with any downstream neighbour because it asserts “indisputable sovereignty” over waters within its borders, including claiming the right to divert as much as it wishes. In this way, water is not merely a resource for China, but a strategic instrument.

The havoc caused downstream by China’s 11 giant dams on the Mekong – which sustains Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – has not deterred it from building more on that river. Against this backdrop, China’s colossal Brahmaputra project threatens to accelerate environmental degradation on the Tibetan Plateau, which is warming at twice the global average rate. That degradation could, in turn, disrupt Asian monsoons, weather and climate patterns.

With its towering height rising into the troposphere, the Tibetan Plateau profoundly shapes these patterns, influencing even the Northern Hemisphere’s atmospheric general circulation – the vast system of winds that transports warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes, helping to define different climate zones.

Tibet’s environmental fragility already has planetary implications, including accelerating biodiversity loss. Faster glacial retreat and permafrost thaw threaten to undermine the plateau’s role as Asia’s “water tower.”

Besides destabilizing a delicate Himalayan ecosystem, China’s super-dam – located on a geologic fault line – stands out as the world’s riskiest megaproject. It represents a potential water bomb for millions downstream. The Brahmaputra is a lifeline for northeastern India and for Bangladesh, the world’s most densely populated major country, and the super-dam will disrupt natural river flows, threatening food and water security for millions downstream.

In an era of increasing water stress and climate volatility, China can now deploy water as an instrument of coercion. The new dam will hand Beijing a potent new lever against India, its strategic rival. Should bilateral tensions with India rise, China could regulate or disrupt flows – whether by withholding water during the dry season, releasing excess water in flood season, or altering ecosystems. Even without hostile intent, unilateral control of river flow introduces long-term uncertainties for downstream communities, infrastructure planning and disaster management.

Yet India, in the absence of credible diplomatic options, has responded to China’s acknowledgment with restraint, voicing “concern” while stressing the “need for utmost transparency.” Other powers, meanwhile, have remained conspicuously silent, wary of offending Beijing. Such silence may appear low-risk today, but as the world’s largest dam rises in the fragile Himalayas, inaction carries long-term costs – not just for Asia’s water security, but also for the planet’s ecological balance.

The international community ignored warnings about the Three Gorges Dam until its consequences became undeniable. It should not repeat that mistake. By averting its gaze now, the world risks not only destabilizing South Asia’s water and food security but also undermining the environmental stability of an entire continent – with ripple effects that will be felt worldwide.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

It is impossible to know the full extent of China’s destruction of the Tibetan Plateau, not least because the area is off limits to international observers. But there is no doubt that the region’s ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragile, with far-reaching social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

The Tibetan Plateau is home to vast glacial reserves, which amount to the largest store of fresh water outside the Arctic and the Antarctic. It is also the source of ten major Asian river systems – including the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of mainland China, the Mekong, Salween, and Irrawaddy rivers of Southeast Asia, and the Indus and Brahmaputra of South Asia – which supply water to nearly 20% of the global population. And, now, it is the site of a slow-burning environmental calamity that is threatening the water security, ecological balance, and geopolitical stability of the entire Asian continent.

For over two decades, China has been engaged in an aggressive and opaque dam-building spree, centered on – though not limited to – the Tibetan Plateau. Yet China’s government has refused to negotiate a water-sharing treaty with any of the downriver countries, which must suffer the consequences of their upstream neighbor’s whims.

Already, Chinese-built mega-dams near the Plateau’s border have brought water levels in the Mekong River to unprecedentedly low levels, with devastating effects on fisheries and livelihoods across Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. As the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam retreats – driven partly by Chinese dams – rice farmers are being forced to abandon their traditional livelihoods, instead farming shrimp or growing reeds.

Yet China’s dam ambitions continue to grow. The Three Gorges Dam, which runs along the Yangtze River, is the largest in the world. But it will be dwarfed by the dam China is now building on the Yarlung Zangbo river, also known as the Brahmaputra, in a seismically active region of the Tibetan Plateau. If completed, this project would drastically alter water flows into India and Bangladesh, threaten the region’s food security and ecological balance, and increase China’s geopolitical leverage over downstream countries.

The specter of water weaponization looms large. In fact, water is fast becoming the new oil – a strategic resource with the potential to trigger conflicts. Already, water disputes within and between countries are intensifying.

But China’s assault on the Tibetan Plateau extends beyond water. Its avaricious mining of Tibet’s mineral-rich lands – which boast critical resources like lithium, gold, and copper – is contributing to deforestation and producing toxic-waste discharge, while providing cover for China’s militarization of the Plateau.

It is impossible to know the full extent of China’s destruction. The area is off limits to international observers, and efforts by members of indigenous Tibetan communities – whose cultural reverence for nature has underpinned a long history of sound environmental stewardship – to sound the alarm are quickly quelled, often through imprisonment or exile.

But there is no doubt that the Tibetan Plateau’s ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragile, especially given its heightened vulnerability to climate change. The Plateau is warming at twice the global average rate, and its ice is melting faster than at the poles – trends that are reducing its water-storage capacity and reshaping river flows.

The implications are far-reaching. The Tibetan Plateau, which towers over the rest of Asia (rising into the troposphere), profoundly influences Asian climatic, weather, and monsoonal patterns, and even affects atmospheric general circulation – the system of winds that transports warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes – in the Northern Hemisphere. Its degradation will exacerbate droughts and floods, accelerate biodiversity loss, contribute to agricultural collapse, and fuel mass migration across Asia and beyond.

Despite these risks, the international community, from global climate forums to multilateral institutions like the United Nations and World Bank, has been deafeningly silent about Tibet. The reason is not ignorance, but fear: China has used its clout to suppress meaningful criticism of its actions on the “roof of the world.”

Given the stakes, the international community cannot afford to let itself be cowed by China. Countries must relentlessly press for transparency about China’s activities on the Tibetan Plateau. Specifically, China must share real-time hydrological data and submit its projects for international environmental assessment. Independent environmental researchers and monitors must be granted unfettered access to the Plateau to gather vital data and conduct unbiased analyses.

China must also be held accountable for its violations of the rights of indigenous communities – including the nearly one million Tibetans who have been forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands since 2000. Western governments and multilateral institutions have leverage here. By tying environmental transparency, respect for indigenous rights, and equitable management of shared river systems to trade agreements and climate cooperation, they can compel China to change its behavior. Direct support for indigenous Tibetan voices and civil-society networks would also help boost transparency.

Ignoring the unfolding crisis on the Tibetan Plateau might seem expedient; after all, China has plenty of economic and geopolitical clout – and it is not afraid to use it. But the costs of inaction would be staggering. Tibet is Asia’s ecological lifeline. China must not be allowed to use it in ways that threaten to upend the lives of people throughout the continent and beyond.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.