As September opens across Europe, the continent finds itself staring into a winter with less energy cushion than it has known in fifteen years — a condition born not of negligence, but of geopolitical forces beyond its borders. A blockade in the Strait of Hormuz has severed the Qatari gas lifeline Europe had quietly come to depend upon, leaving storage tanks at 65 percent capacity and prices too high for suppliers to act swiftly. The gap between where Europe stands and where it must be before the cold arrives is measured not only in terawatt hours, but in the fragility of assumptions that peac