Emily Holland

Emily Holland, Ph.D., rose to broader public attention in April 2026 when her analysis for War on the Rocks translated the Strait of Hormuz closure into a direct household cost: $857 in additional petrol spending per American household for the remainder of the year if disruption continued through 10 April. That single figure, drawn from Stanford researchers' projections, was cited in the IEA-IMF-World Bank joint statement and widely picked up by wire services, making it the most-quoted metric in the early economic framing of the Iran conflict.

Holland is the director of the Eurasia programme at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a Philadelphia-based think tank. Before joining FPRI she spent five years as research director and assistant professor in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College, and in 2024 served as deputy political director for critical undersea infrastructure at NATO's Maritime Command in Northwood, UK. She holds a Ph.D., MA, and BA in political science from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of energy, Russian Foreign Policy, and European security, and her writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and War on the Rocks.

The $857 figure matters because energy price impacts on working households are routinely abstracted into barrel-per-day statistics that obscure real-world pain. Holland's method of converting supply disruption into a concrete annual household cost gave policymakers and journalists a legible anchor during a fast-moving crisis. Her wider argument in the April 2026 War on the Rocks essay was that no amount of supplier diversification eliminates vulnerability in a fossil-fuel-organised economy, and that only an accelerated energy transition provides durable security.