I have been waiting my entire career to write this sentence: the West is winning an economic war and doesn't even realise it. One hundred dollars a barrel. One hundred beautiful, regime-crushing, IRGC-bankrupting dollars per barrel. And what is the response from the British commentariat? Hand-wringing. Pearl-clutching. The BBC wheeling out somebody's nan to complain about the price of filling up her Nissan Qashqai. It would be comedy if it weren't so pathetically unserious.

Let me paint you a picture of what $100 oil actually looks like from inside the Iranian finance ministry — not that they'd tell you, because admitting it would be an act of institutional suicide. Eighty per cent of government revenue: petroleum. Number of diversified revenue streams: zero. Sovereign wealth fund that could absorb a sustained price shock: doesn't exist — Ahmadinejad spent it and nobody's entirely sure on what. China, their supposed saviour, is buying Iranian crude at a 30% discount because Beijing knows Tehran has no other buyer and enjoys watching them squirm. The IRGC's construction empire, which accounts for roughly a third of Iran's GDP, is financed by oil revenue that is evaporating in real time. Every week this continues, another general's property portfolio becomes a liability rather than an asset. Every month, the gap between what the regime promised the Iranian people and what it can actually deliver gets wider, angrier, and harder to shoot your way out of.

And on our side? Europe's LNG terminals are running at capacity. Britain's offshore wind is generating so much electricity that the grid occasionally pays producers to stop. America has so much shale gas they're essentially burning money to keep the taps from overwhelming storage capacity. We built this. Deliberately. Over four years and hundreds of billions of dollars. The entire Western energy infrastructure was redesigned after 2022 specifically to make this moment survivable. And it is being survived. The lights are on. The factories are running. The economy hasn't collapsed. The only economy that's collapsing is Iran's. That's not a coincidence. That's strategy. And strategy that works should be celebrated, not apologised for.

But here's what really makes me want to put my fist through my laptop screen: the people who should be taking a victory lap — the energy security hawks, the LNG advocates, the offshore wind champions, the people who spent twenty years being called paranoid warmongers for arguing that energy independence was a matter of national security — are being completely ignored. Because many of them sit on the wrong side of the political aisle, and the commentariat would rather watch the West fail than credit someone from the wrong tribe with being right. The Guardian would sooner print a recipe for artisanal uranium than admit that energy sovereignty advocates had a point.

The green transition and energy security were always the same argument. They were always pointing in the same direction. The only people who couldn't see it were the ones who'd decided that caring about energy imports was a right-wing concern and therefore intellectually beneath them. Well, it turns out the right-wingers were right about the strategic case and the environmentalists were right about the solution, and the only people who were wrong were the centrist commentators who spent two decades sneering at both groups from the safety of their newspaper columns.