The diesel dried up on Tuesday. Mondays are meant for catastrophe. Tuesdays are supposed to be when you manage the consequences.

At first, nobody bought it. Hope is a blinding business. There was still petrol, still electricity, still moolah in the banks, still the teasing glow of the TV, laptop or phone. The Prime Minister called the situation serious but governable.

By Friday, the lorries had stopped. By Sunday, the supermarkets were looking less like lands of plenty and more like crime scenes with the evidence ‘disappeared’. The farmers had crops, the cities had mouths, and between them lay several hundred miles of paralysis.

Diesel, it turned out, was not just a fuel. It was the unacknowledged civil servant of the modern world, keeping everything moving while receiving neither pension nor thanks.

Europe had spent thirty years congratulating itself, sometimes justifiably. Goods arrived immediately and cheaply. The machinery of daily life had become so slick that nobody could remember what inefficiency looked like. Now it remembered. Inefficiency looked like a supermarket trolley containing three potatoes, a packet of batteries and a sudden suspicion of one’s neighbours.

The European Commission called an emergency meeting. First came the argument over whether the crisis was temporary, structural or abnormal. Then came the question of who should pay. After that, an argument over whether they’d asked the first two questions in the right order.

Germany wanted coordination. France pined for leadership. Poland demanded guarantees. Poorer states needed to know why solidarity always seemed too expensive when it was needed the most. Britain, no longer in the room, released a statement explaining that it had anticipated precisely this sort of thing and was therefore in an unusually strong position to experience it independently.

The populists were magnificent. Here, at last, was proof for them that the elites had failed, the experts were frauds, the foreigners were dangerous and the nation had been betrayed. The fact not one of these propositions explained the absence of diesel was considered irrelevant. Populism does not require an explanation of events so much as a satisfying array of enemies.

In Washington, the crisis became a question of power. It had spent decades cultivating the impression that power was a universal solvent, capable of dissolving difficulties wherever they arose. Now it was discovering that aircraft carriers, sanctions and presidential piques did not always keep the supply chains moving.

The United States could still project force. It was just less clear that it could afford to project force—not everywhere, not always—while its people watched the prices rise and wondered why their government seemed more into the geography of distant deserts than the geography of their kitchen cupboards.

The Middle East looked on with a beady eye. American protection had never been free. The invoices had just been tucked behind diplomatic language. Now Washington was asking questions previously unanswered: which commitments were absolutely essential, which were on repeat, and which had become so expensive that leaving them was cheaper than keeping them?

Saudi Arabia still had what the world wanted, but possession was no longer control. Oil in the ground was one thing. A functioning international economy was another. The Kingdom required safe exports, reliable imports, working infrastructure and partners whose promises survived their brushes with domestic politics.

The Americans, meanwhile, discovered retreat and defeat were not the same thing, although it could look like it on their TVs, laptops or phones.

Israel understood security better than most countries. The crisis raised the question of what security could actually secure. A society cannot organise its entire existence around the next emergency without eventually making the emergency its reason for being. Still missing was a political arrangement in which the security of one people didn’t require the permanent insecurity of another.

The crisis didn’t produce peace. History is never so obliging. There are times when the future becomes more expensive than the past, and people begin, reluctantly, to rethink what they’ve been calling inevitable.

Russia, naturally, saw opportunity. Moscow had long understood the value of making other countries miserable, especially when they were already doing a good job of it themselves. Pressure here. Disinformation there. A suggestion that Europe was divided beyond repair. The old repertoire, performed without a hopeful note.

The trouble was that a Europe fearful of dependency might actually become more hostile to Russia, not less. Customers deprived of a commodity might find someone or something else. A neighbour whose weakness has been exploited one too many times might very well decide that accommodation is just another form of submission.

By the second month, only the political vocabulary was rich. Resilience. Sovereignty. Solidarity. Strategic autonomy. National renewal. These were the words spoken from many a podium without the need for any of the speakers to lift a single crate of vegetables.

The public was less taken. It had been sold a world of extraordinary convenience and had not understood that convenience was a loan, secured against a network of dependencies. Now the lender wanted their money back.

So a farmer took vegetables to a town that could no longer supply itself. A shopkeeper put aside what an elderly customer needed. Someone with a working van made a delivery without asking who had voted for whom. None of it made the news. It was simply what people did.

And then—without anyone being entirely sure why, as if it came with a cost that everyone preferred to ignore—the diesel returned.

The lorries moved again. The shelves somehow filled. The supermarkets recovered their former air of endless provision. Politicians declared that it was their action which had averted disaster, although it was not clear which action they meant. The European Commission published a strategy. Washington announced a review. Riyadh reassessed its partnerships. Israel returned to its posts. Moscow continued to be Moscow.

The populists explained that the crisis proved everything they had said. Their opponents explained that it proved the exact opposite. Both sides were helped by the public’s desire to have been put through the thresher for a reason.

A commission was established to identify the lessons. Its report found that the disaster was from excessive dependency, short-term incentives and a general reluctance to contemplate events that would be politically inconvenient.

Civilisation, it turned out, was not quite as fragile as everyone had feared. It could survive shortages, panic, political exploitation, tactical miscalculation and even the revelation that its most sophisticated systems rested upon a substance that came in a tank. The question of how to make those systems less dependent on a single vulnerable supply was left, as before, for another day.

The diesel was back. The world was saved.

And because the world had been saved, it was once again time to postpone the question of what, precisely, it had been saved from.