The Trump administration underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz, note many in the media. CNN reported that while the Departments of Energy and the Treasury participated in pre-war planning meetings, “the agency analysis and forecasts that would be integral elements of the decision-making process in past administrations were secondary considerations.”
But the Strait of Hormuz was a catastrophe waiting to happen. A few years from now, people will look back on this moment and find it incredible that the world allowed the global economy to be dependent on moving so much oil and natural gas through such a dangerous bottleneck.
Part of the solution is for the world to reduce its dependence on Persian Gulf oil and gas. That will require expanding production outside the Persian Gulf. Another part is to help Persian Gulf nations move more of their oil and gas through new or expanded pipelines to the Red Sea and perhaps even the Mediterranean. The faster the world builds those alternatives, the less leverage Iran retains.
Many believe that the United States must not allow Iran to control the Strait under any circumstances, and the instinct to fight for Hormuz is understandable. It has been a central artery of global energy for over half a century.
But instead of fighting to reopen the Strait, the world should build around it. The infrastructure to do so already exists in embryonic form. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, built during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, carries crude 750 miles across the kingdom from the Gulf coast to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, with a design capacity of 7 million barrels per day. The UAE’s Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline runs to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing the Strait entirely. And Iraq’s Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline connects to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.
Gulf states are already exploring a broader network of pipelines, railways, and roads, including the U.S.-backed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), that would create multiple export routes to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, which have no bypass pipelines at all, should build routes through Saudi Arabia or Iraq, argued The National, a UAE newspaper. And Japan, South Korea, and India should, the paper argued, invest alongside Gulf sovereign wealth funds.
