🟡 Oil and gas facilities attacked in the Middle East, another US Marine unit deploying to the Middle East, desalination plants threatened || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #12/2026
Executive summary
Geopolitics: More oil and gas facilities in the Middle East were targeted in Israeli and Iranian attacks. Another US Marine unit is being deployed to the Middle East. Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s power infrastructure, and Iran threatened to retaliate against critical sites including desalination plants; Trump has backed down for now and says US-Iran talks are ongoing.
Will the US place 1,000 or more boots on the ground in Iran before July 2026? Our forecasters think there’s a 37% chance (14% to 55%).
Will the US place >10,000 boots on the ground before July? Our forecasters think there’s a 13.5% probability (4% to 27%).
Technology and AI: An AI agent at Meta reportedly went rogue recently, exposing sensitive data to those who should not have had access. An AI security researcher says that there have been other “loss of control” incidents over the past year.
Will there be an AI loss of control incident that causes over $100 million in damages in 2026? Our forecasters believe there’s a 5% chance (3% to 7%).
Economy: The Strait of Hormuz has been nearly closed for over three weeks, and several more weeks of closure are likely. Shortages of oil, natural gas and other commodities continue to impact the world economy. The impact of the war in Iran on natural gas supplies could soon be extreme.
What will be the highest price for Brent crude from closing time on March 23 to closing time on April 30, 2026? Our forecasters’ 50%-ile estimates of that maximum average $133 ($114 to $175), with a median of $125.
Will the US experience two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth in 2026? Our forecasters think there’s a 29% chance (20% to 45%).
Will this happen in the EU? Our forecasters believe there’s a 39% chance (33% to 55%).
Geopolitics
Middle East
The Iran War entered its fourth week on Saturday. Trump stated several objectives of the war, including degrading Iran’s missile capabilities, destroying its industrial base, eliminating their air force, navy and anti-aircraft weaponry, preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and protecting allies in the Middle East. Notably, regime change was not on this list of objectives, though he claims to want a “very serious form of regime change” to be the outcome of any talks.
Iran’s top security official Ali Larijani was killed in strikes by Israel. Larijani was a powerful and competent regime insider who orchestrated the recent crackdown on protesters. Since Ali Khamenei’s death, he and Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament and a former IRGC commander, had likely been ruling the country. His assassination leaves Ghalibaf as the de facto leader. Mojtaba Khamenei has not yet been seen or heard since his appointment as supreme leader. He was likely wounded in the attack that killed his father.
Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field, prompting Iran to retaliate by hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which accounts for approximately 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply. According to QatarEnergy, 17% of the site’s export capacity was destroyed, and it could take years to rebuild that capacity. Iran also attacked an oil refinery in Haifa, Israel. After markets reacted negatively to these developments, Trump said that he had no advance knowledge of the South Pars attack and that Israel would no longer be targeting Iranian energy infrastructure, though some Israeli and US officials say that the Trump administration gave Israel the green light for the attack.
Despite Trump’s pledge not to attack Iranian energy facilities, he later vowed to destroy all of Iran’s power plants unless the Strait of Hormuz was reopened within 48 hours. Iran, in turn, threatened to target power plants, oil and gas facilities and desalination plants in the Middle East and West Asia. Last week, we raised the possibility of desalination plants being explicitly targeted and forecasted on whether >10 would be attacked by mid-April. Trump backed down around 12 hours before his deadline, claiming that the US and Iran have been holding productive talks on a complete and total end to hostilities. He implied that the attacks could still go ahead in the future, perhaps after markets close on Friday. Iran has denied that it is holding talks with the US, though Pakistan may be preparing to host talks in the near future.
Iran targeted Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Yanbu, which is being used to try to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, for the first time. This caused loading oil onto tankers to be suspended for a short period.
Iran also reportedly targeted the US-UK base of Diego Garcia for the first time with Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs), having previously denied that it had missiles capable of travelling more than 2,000 km (Diego Garcia is around 3,700 km away from Iran). This means they theoretically have the capacity to target some Western European capital cities.
Multiple reports suggest that the US is considering a ground operation to reopen Hormuz or occupy Kharg Island, and a second Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is being sent to the Middle East. Forecasters think there’s a 37% chance (14% to 55%) that the US will place 1,000 or more ground troops, and a 13.5% chance (4% to 27%) that it will place >10,000, on Iranian soil before July 2026. On the one hand, it would be highly risky for US forces. On the other hand, Trump and some of his officials may view it as a high-risk, high-reward strategy that could force Iran to capitulate if it goes to plan. Israeli PM Netanyahu also said that a “ground component” will be required for regime change in Iran, which he views as a key component to winning the war in Iran.
There have been conflicting signals on when the war will end, but most of them suggest it will last for at least another couple of weeks. On the one hand, Trump said he was considering “winding down” the war, and reports suggest that some regional allies of the US are attempting to broker a deal between the US and Iran, with Trump now saying talks have been going very well. On the other hand, Trump’s Press Secretary implied that the war will end up lasting for at least 4-6 weeks (suggesting it could end from March 28 to April 11), while Israeli officials say that it will last for “at least another two weeks” longer. Some US officials say that “about a month” will be needed, and the second MEU will likely arrive in the region around mid-April.
Asia
China is restricting exports of fertilizer, almost certainly in response to supply pressures caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
China is issuing PLA reservist ID cards, increasing its ability to mobilize quickly
Pakistan carried out an airstrike on Kabul, reportedly killing over a hundred people.
The Americas
In the US, Joe Kent, a Trump appointee and former Republican candidate, resigned as Director of the US National Counterterrorism Center after saying that Iran was not an “imminent threat” and that the US had been forced into the war by “Israel and its powerful American lobby”. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in turn, refused to say that the Intelligence Community assessed that Iran posed an imminent threat to the US, but also claimed that the US President is the only person who can make that determination.
Also in the US, multiple waves of drones were spotted over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on several days last week. The drones appeared to be custom built and to require “advanced knowledge” of signals operations, and they appeared to be testing reactions at the base.
A federal judge struck down parts of the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets, stating that they violated the First Amendment. The judge wrote that the First Amendment “is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription.”
In Cuba, two island-wide power outages occurred in the past week, and three so far in March, as the country’s infrastructure lurches towards collapse without new oil shipments.
Europe
In the Czech Republic, tens of thousands of protesters rallied against Prime Minister Babis’ for “steering the country away from democratic values and aligning with the pro-Russia policies of Hungary and Slovakia.”
Economy
The US Treasury temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil at sea in an attempt to ease supply constraints.
Crude oil prices and futures dropped sharply on Monday morning following US President Trump’s step back from striking Iran’s power plants and energy infrastructure.
Before that development, in a note dated March 22, Goldman Sachs forecasted an average price of $85 for Brent crude oil in 2026, up from an earlier forecast of $77. This estimate is based in part on an expectation that the strait would remain nearly closed for six weeks, followed by a one-month recovery, resulting in cumulative losses of just over 800M barrels of crude oil.
Our forecasters’ medians for the maximum price of Brent crude oil from closing time on March 23 to closing time on April 30 average $133 ($114 to $175), while the median of the medians is $125.
Meanwhile, the last LNG tankers to leave the Persian Gulf will be arriving at their destinations within the next 10 days, and after that, LNG supplies will start to fall off a cliff.
Southeast Asian countries are being hit hard by the loss of oil and gas exports from the Gulf.
Shortages of other commodities exported by the Gulf or whose manufacture requires such commodities, including fertilizer, helium, several metals, and plastics, are ongoing, hurting manufacturing, transportation and food production.
Several brokerage firms and key individuals currently forecast a 25%-35% risk of recession for the US, with one outlier at 49%.
Our forecasters think there’s a 29% chance (20% to 45%) that there will be two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth in the US in 2026, and a 39% chance (33% to 55%) that this will happen in the EU. The annual base rate for this is quite low in both the US and the EU (in the single digits for the US and in the mid-teens for the EU, depending on how it’s calculated), and neither went into recession after the energy crisis sparked by the Russia-Ukraine war. That said, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is arguably causing more profound shocks to oil and natural gas markets than previous shocks, and it doesn’t just impact the oil and gas sector.
Forecasters agree that the EU is more likely to fall into recession than the US because it is more dependent on energy and other key commodity exports from the Middle East, though US petrol, diesel and fertilizer prices are still impacted by what’s happening in international markets.
Technology and artificial intelligence
Dan Lahav, an AI security researcher, says that loss of control incidents involving AI agents are already happening “in the wild”, claiming that there was a case last year “of an AI agent that went rogue in an unnamed California company when it became so hungry for computing power it attacked other parts of the network to seize their resources and the business critical system collapsed.” Meanwhile, there was reportedly a case of an AI agent at Meta going rogue when it revealed sensitive data to people who didn’t have authorization to view those data. Our forecasters think there’s a 5% chance (3% to 7%) that there will be an AI loss of control incident that causes over $100 million in damages in 2026.
The US Justice Department charged three individuals with violating the Export Control Act by selling about $2.5B worth of NVIDIA chips to China.
And: The Pentagon will be using Palantir AI as a core US military system. An OpenAI-backed candidate lost an election in the Congressional district of IL-02. The US government continues to support designating Anthropic a supply chain risk, calling the company an “unacceptable” national security risk, and the White House released a “National AI Legislative Framework”. Mistral released an open-source code agent designed for Lean 4.