When the Pentagon’s acting comptroller told Congress on April 29 that Operation Epic Fury had cost about $25 billion, he was answering the wrong question. His figure covered U.S. munitions and operations through Day 60, with damage to overseas bases explicitly excluded.
The institutions actually estimating the full cost of the war have reached a different number. The IMF’s April Regional Economic Outlook puts 2026 global GDP growth at 2.6% in its adverse scenario versus a ~3.7% historical trend, dropping to roughly 2% in its severe scenario—implying $1.5–2 trillion in lost global output for 2026 alone. Goldman Sachs estimates that a 60-day Hormuz disruption produces a 0.9% drag on global GDP and a 1.7% boost to global prices. The IEA has called it the largest energy supply shock in history; Goldman put the hit to Persian Gulf oil flows at 17.6 million barrels per day, eighteen times the loss from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Add the direct ledger: $40–200 billion in U.S. and Israeli military expenditure (Pentagon official figure to CSIS replacement-cost), $400 billion to $1 trillion in physical damage across Iran, the Gulf states, and U.S. bases (UNDP estimates Arab GDP losses alone at $200 billion, and the cumulative cost across 2026–2027 runs to roughly $4 trillion—half the cumulative bill of the two-decade-long post-9/11 wars, in eighteen months.
The Pentagon has its figure. The Bangladeshi rice farmer paying 50% more for urea, the Italian steel producer absorbing a 30% surcharge, the Iranian shopkeeper watching a 10-million-rial note replace last year’s largest denomination, the Korean won at its weakest level since 2009—they will pay the rest. As Adam Tooze observed in Foreign Policy, the war is not congressionally sanctioned and may require hundreds of billions in additional U.S. funding before it ends.
The world is paying multiples of that, and that cost will be ongoing, even if the war ends today. It takes time and investment to increase the productive powers of the economy.
Over a longer time period: The war kills hundreds of thousands directly and through cascading food and energy shocks; pushes hundreds of millions into hunger over the next two to three years; and—through the destruction of productive capital and the diversion of $4T from development to destruction and the rebuilding of what once was—could reduce the planet’s mid-century potential population by something on the order of half a billion to a billion. The war’s most consequential casualties may be people who, had it never been started, would have been born into a more productive global economy and were not.
