September 2025
The oil market in 2025 is in a paradoxical situation: even though the global demand remains relatively high, the political and technological changes are fundamentally changing the architecture of energy security. The geopolitics of oil is no longer the issue of quantity and price, but an instrument of global positioning, a means of economic pressure, and an indicator of deep systemic changes in the world order.
The last cycle of instability, which started after the Iranian attacks against tankers in the Hormuz Strait, further deepened due to the Red Sea conflict, has uncovered how vulnerable the energy infrastructure has become. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates tend to preserve the stability through cooperation within OPEC+, but the growing interests of China, India, and Russia for bilateral agreements on long-term deliveries undermine the traditional mechanisms of market control.
By 2025, the West is no longer a dominant factor in defining prices and passage of energy sources. The European Union, after almost completely relinquishing its dependence from Russian oil, tends to balance between African, Middle Eastern, and American sources. However, such a strategy of diversification has its own limitations – high transport expenses, unreliable infrastructure, and political instability in the countries such as Nigeria and Libya, make the energy security of Europe still conditioned by global shocks.
In the meantime, the Asian trade centers are becoming the new holders of demand. China and India are increasing their reserves fact and constructing new supply chains through Iran, Kazakhstan, and Russia. These connections, which often avoid Western sanctions, not only undermine the efficacy of economic instruments of pressure, but also consolidate the new “energy axis of East-East”.
In 2025, Moscow succeeded in stabilizing its energy sector despite sanctions that limited its access to Western technologies and markets. Instead, Russia redirected its export flows towards Asia and Africa, using its pricing as the key instrument of geopolitical pressure.
Russian oil exports towards China and India now surpasses all pre-war levels, and the deals Moscow is offering to its customers from the Global South have become the new form of “soft energy diplomacy”. At the same time, Russia is speedily investing in the control of transit routes via Arctic, which, long-term, ensures higher independence from unstable naval paths. This strategy – a combination of reducing the prices and geostrategic insurance of new transport directions – represents a form of “resource geopolitics of resistance”.
The Middle Eastern region remains the key arena of the global fight for energy influence. Saudi Arabia is attempting to profile itself as a factor of stabilization through the policy of moderate quotas and the investments into renevable sources of energy, but the growing tensions with Iran and the growing antagonism within OPEC+ block resemble the old patterns.
Iran, empowered by relative easing of sanctions by several Asian partners, uses oil as an instrument of regional influence – not only in terms of economy, but security as well. Tehrran is financing its allied groups in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen directly from the revenue from oil sales, while at the same time tending to represent its production capacities as an “alternative energy pole” in comparison to the West.
At the same time, Turkey, as a transit force, is increasingly becoming an intermediary between Asian and European consumers, using its infrastructure as an instrument of diplomatic pressure. Ankara is investing into widening the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and the new storing capacities in the Mediterranean, thus positioning itself as the “energy node” of the new multipolar world.
Even though renewable sources in 2025 will become the central topic of global politics, the reality shows that the “end of the era of oil” is not even close. The increase in expenses of green technologies, the instability in rare minerals chain supplies, and geopolitical tensions regarding ownership over resources, such as lithium and cobalt, have only partially reduced the dependence from fossil fuels.
For many countries of the Global South, the transmission to clean energy remains outside their reach without big subventions and technological transfers. This opens up space for a new form of inequality: while the developed economies are gradually reducing the use of oil, the developing countries remain trapped in depending from it – not only as a source of revenue, but also as an instrument of political stability.
This year show that the geopolitics of oil is less an issue of energy security, and more a question of power, control, and resistance. The world is entering into a phase in which there is no longer a unique market, but only a network of regional systems linked through asymmetric relations and unstable alliances.
The “black gold” no longer defines exclusively the power of countries, but also their ability to survive in the era of energy insecurity. Instead of a global energy transition, in 2025, the world is entering into a new era of fragmentation – in which oil is still the most powerful weapon in the fight for influence.
Author: Miloš Talović