The European Union is once again confronting a familiar problem in a new geopolitical setting: an external war has exposed how vulnerable the bloc remains to imported energy and to the price shocks that travel with it. EU energy ministers met on March 16 to discuss emergency responses after the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran drove a sharp rise in oil and gas prices, with Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen describing the situation bluntly as a “price crisis.”

Even though Brussels insists that physical oil and gas supplies remain secure because much of Europe’s energy now comes from the United States, Norway and other non-Middle Eastern suppliers, the core issue is that Europe still imports a large share of its energy and therefore remains highly exposed to global benchmark prices, even when molecules keep flowing.

The more dramatic headlines around the war with Iran have focused on the threat to crude oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, but the sharper and potentially faster-moving shock may be in Asia’s refined fuel system. The effective disruption of traffic through Hormuz is already pushing diesel, jet fuel and other product markets into severe stress, with Australia and Indonesia among the most exposed because of their heavy dependence on imported fuels.

Australia imports roughly 900,000 barrels a day of refined products and Indonesia about 600,000 barrels a day, making them the two biggest refined-fuel importers in Asia in this crisis. At the same time, benchmark Singapore gasoil and jet fuel prices have jumped dramatically since the conflict escalated, showing that the immediate bottleneck is not just crude availability but the availability of usable fuels for transport, industry and aviation.

The financial markets’ attempt to extract guidance from the 2022 Ukraine invasion playbook while navigating the Iran crisis reveals both instructive parallels and critical divergences that complicate efforts to forecast trajectories or calibrate portfolio strategies.

The fundamental similarity involves energy supply destruction triggering inflation acceleration amid fragile global growth, yet the differences in asset behavior suggest that either markets have learned to navigate geopolitical shocks more effectively or that crucial dynamics distinguishing the current crisis from Ukraine precedents will generate outcomes that historical comparisons cannot adequately predict.