China’s commodity production data for May captured the divergent ways the world’s largest producer and consumer of raw materials has navigated the Gulf conflict, with oil refining collapsing to a near-four-year low as crude imports plunged, aluminum output hitting a record as smelters exploited the global shortage, and coal production trimmed by the safety inspections that followed the country’s worst mining disaster in years.

The figures illustrate the selective adaptation that has characterized China’s response to the crisis, retreating from the markets the conflict made expensive while exploiting the opportunities it created and managing the domestic disruptions that compounded its effects.

India has emerged as the growth engine of the global steel industry, finally arriving at the moment that Tata Steel anticipated a decade ago when it built its Kalinganagar mill for a future in which India would supplant China as the industry’s principal driver of growth.

As Chinese consumption peaks and the global steel business finds itself short of major new markets, India stands as the indispensable source of demand growth, its expansion underpinned by Prime Minister Modi’s Make in India industrial policy and the infrastructure spending that aims to transform the country into a manufacturing powerhouse.

China’s consumer spending and investment have slumped to levels unseen since the pandemic, exposing the deep risks facing the world’s second-largest economy even as it benefits from booming exports and the de-escalation of the Gulf conflict, confirming the two-speed divergence between a faltering domestic economy and a roaring export sector that has come to define China’s predicament.

Retail sales declined 0.6 percent in May from a year earlier, a worse-than-forecast drop marking their first fall since the reopening from Covid lockdowns in late 2022, while fixed-asset investment shrank a deeper-than-expected 4.1 percent over the first five months and home prices fell at a quicker pace.

China has rolled out its first detailed national plan to electrify heavy trucks, a policy that will accelerate the shift away from diesel that is already cutting into fuel demand while creating new opportunities for the domestic truck and battery manufacturers that dominate the technology.

The plan targets electric vehicles making up forty percent of new heavy truck sales and twenty percent of the total fleet, or 1.6 million vehicles, by 2030, with the target rising to eighty percent on some short-haul routes around Beijing, marking a significant escalation of China’s effort to electrify the most fuel-intensive segment of its transport system.

The European Parliament is poised to ratify the trade deal struck with the Trump administration nearly a year ago at Turnberry, implementing the EU’s side of an agreement that would avert, at least for now, another eruption of tariff conflict between the world’s largest trading partners.

A clear majority is expected to back the legislation removing EU duties on US imports in exchange for broad US tariffs of fifteen percent, with the vote coming under the pressure of Trump’s threat of much higher tariffs unless the EU acted soon.

The framework agreement between the United States and Iran to end their war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices tumbling as traders anticipated the return of flows, but industry officials caution that a full return to pre-war production and refining levels will take weeks, months, or even years.

The deal marks the beginning of the end of the acute crisis, yet the gap between the diplomatic resolution and the physical recovery of the energy system defines the central reality of the post-conflict period: the supply that the conflict removed cannot be restored at the pace that the price collapse implies.

Britain faces the prospect of a shortage in a critical material as soaring exports of aluminum scrap threaten to leave the country without the supply it needs for defense, clean energy, digital technologies, and the automotive industry, according to a warning from manufacturing trade body Make UK.

The trade body cautioned that the UK could face a crisis if scrap continues to flow overseas, with industry potentially relocating abroad in search of better access to scrap markets, risking jobs, investment, and the resilience of domestic supply chains.

With a US-Iran peace deal expected to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the reckoning over the conflict’s lasting significance begins: was this a watershed moment that permanently alters the global energy system, or merely another blip from which the world will recover and revert to its prior patterns?

The question, posed as the acute crisis draws toward resolution, cuts to the heart of what the conflict will mean for the long-term trajectory of energy markets, the energy transition, and the behavior of consumers and governments across the world.