Countries must seek energy independence through renewable resources and nuclear energy for their national security, and to avoid the “choke points” of fossil fuel supply, the former US secretary of state John Kerry has warned.

The war in Iran has sent oil prices soaring, as refineries and fields have closed down in several Middle Eastern countries and many tankers are stranded in the strait of Hormuz, with economic impacts beginning to be felt around the world.

“The key takeaway here is that it has emphasised, again, the degree to which fuel – oil and gas, particularly – is a security challenge. Energy independence is even more important going forward, because you don’t want to be the prisoner of a choke point or your economy being greatly disrupted as a result of that,” he told the Guardian.

Kerry said the war in Iran, led by the US and Israel, was not an oil war “per se”, in that it was not based on competition for oil resources, but the conflict was revealing a dependence on oil that has made many developed economies fragile.

“The lesson in the early days here is that people have started to figure out, ‘whoops, how do we not be dependent on other countries for our energy?’” he said. “They now have all understood what these choke points mean to their economic viability. We have to be more aggressive in our transition [to clean energy], for sure.”

China embarked on this strategy in 2019, he said, and had moved “at a staggering pace” to remove its reliance on fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy, he said.

The economic and national security impacts of the oil shock could do more to push the world quickly to clean energy than calls for climate action have done, he suggested. “In the 1970s with the oil embargo, there was a massive interruption, and it resulted in a speed up of the transition to finding other sources of energy. On the other hand, in the 1990s you had a [situation] where the climate issue began to take hold and people were setting goals and targets, things didn’t move as fast as they did when it was based on security,” he said.

Kerry also argued that countries should build new nuclear power plants, including “small modular reactors”, to satisfy the need for low-carbon power, including that of new AI datacentres. “The resurgence of interest in nuclear is very defined and very important,” he said.

Both renewables and nuclear power could satisfy those needs, without needing fossil fuel backup, he said. “The economic choice is so compelling for people now that you can do far better in your bottom line by deploying these new technologies. One [AI] datacentre will need as much energy as a small city in various places and, and we need to meet those needs. There’s been some avoidance of facts with respect to the choices that people face in order to fill out that demand.”

Countries were lining up to be either electro states or petro states, with the former enjoying greater national security and the latter risking fragility, he warned.

“We are at the dawn of the electro states, versus petro states, and electricity is the holy grail right now for everybody. They’re going to electrify, and people are moving in that direction very rapidly,” he said. “But the future is being able to harness the power of electrons and send them where we need them, and use them where and when we need them, and to have smart grids that are capable of delivering that kind of sophisticated demand, responding to that kind of demand that is happening, and it’s going to happen massively.”