The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Flights through the Middle East have been cancelled. Petrol has surged well past $3 a litre. 

Four thousand shipping containers of New Zealand meat and dairy sit stranded on rerouted vessels. Tourism operators are fielding mass cancellations. The Reserve Bank Governor gave an emergency speech to business leaders on Tuesday. 

The national conversation, understandably, is about issues such as fuel prices, interest rates and the May Budget. 

The closure of the Straits of Hormuz is just one symptom of a much more serious condition. 

Ukraine grinds on with a million casualties and no resolution. Pakistan is bombing Afghanistan. North Korea is testing missiles. Chinese and Philippine vessels face off in the South China Sea. 

In Cuba, the electricity grid has collapsed under the weight of American sanctions. The island may well be the next target of US intervention. From Venezuela to the Taiwan Strait, the old order is coming apart. 

For decades, New Zealand assumed that global markets would remain open, shipping lanes would remain secure and somebody somewhere would keep enforcing the rules. 

The post-Cold War order had been so stable for so long that it felt like a permanent condition rather than the historical anomaly it really is. 

We arranged the country on that basis. We let our foreign affairs coverage wither until the entire country had fewer journalists than the New York Times employs. 

We treated geopolitics as something for academics and diplomats, not for people who run businesses or set budgets. 

In 2018, the Ardern government banned offshore oil and gas exploration, convinced the energy transition would be orderly and that we would always be able to buy what we needed on international markets. 

That locked away billions of barrels of oil and gas in the Great South Basin alone. The ban has since been reversed, but the mentality that produced it has not. 

I have been arguing for years that New Zealand needs to take global affairs far more seriously. For most of that time, it was treated as a niche concern. It is not one anymore. 

The current crisis is not a temporary disruption to be weathered and forgotten, like a cyclone or an earthquake. It is the beginning of something longer and harder, and we are only seeing its earliest effects. 

We are still in the opening act. And we are not remotely prepared for what will follow.