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Under normal circumstances, the Strait of Hormuz carries one-fifth of the world’s oil nearly 20 million barrels a day along with almost a quarter of the oil trade transported by sea and land, and roughly 20 percent of liquefied natural gas exports. But the US-Israeli strikes on Iran at the end of February 2026 pushed the strait into one of the most complex energy crises in modern history.
Looking at previous energy crises helps reveal the depth of the crisis caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. During the 1973 and 1990 crises, just over 6 percent of global supplies were disrupted, while the closure of Hormuz disrupted nearly 20 percent of global energy supplies today.
Many companies are looking to the future pessimistically, including the UAE’s ADNOC, which said full flows through Hormuz may not return before 2027. The UAE is among the countries most affected by the war in the Middle East: It was hit by many retaliatory Iranian strikes, its economy was affected by the closure of the strait, and it was far from alone. Many Gulf states were harmed, and the damage was not confined to oil and gas alone.
The Gulf states produce 45 percent of the world’s sulfur, along with significant shares of urea, aluminum and helium, making the closure devastating for fertilizer supply chains, semiconductors and the copper industry. It also contributed to a wave of price increases reminiscent of the crisis triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war in early 2022.
More recently, several reports noted that because of the crisis, countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE have become more reliant on alternative outlets, while insurance and logistics costs have remained elevated in a way that suggests a return to normal flows will not be immediate.
What these reports indicate, and what can also be inferred indirectly, is that at a sudden historical moment, the Gulf states found themselves needing alternative corridors, ports outside the Gulf, secure pipelines, readiness for higher marine insurance costs, and hedges against relying on the US guarantee alone a guarantee whose frailty the months of war laid bare. All of those lessons go beyond the idea of strategic luxury; they have become an existential necessity for the day after the war.
In this in-depth piece, we try to examine those lessons, to uncover what the Gulf states learned from them and where the conclusions drawn from their hard-won experience may lead.
Alternative pipelines … and complacency
At root, there were infrastructure projects designed specifically to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. One example was the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, or Tapline, launched by the United States in 1947 to secure an outlet to the Mediterranean. But the clearest expression of this strategy was Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, Petroline, stretching 1,200 kilometers from the Abqaiq area in the east to the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea. It was built in the 1980s, the decade of the Iran-Iraq “Tanker War.”
The Tanker War, in which about 500 ships were sunk or damaged between 1984 and 1988, was an alarm bell for the Gulf states and their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz. That is why turning to an alternative has been high on the priority list ever since. Petroline was designed to carry 5 million barrels a day, and its capacity was later raised to 7 million.
When Iran closed the strait, Aramco pushed the line to maximum capacity in March 2026, sending Yanbu shipments soaring to about 2.2 million barrels a day in the first nine days of that month, compared with 1.1 million in the previous February an increase that marine tracking data estimated at about 330 percent above prewar levels.
Not far from Petroline, the UAE activated the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, Habshan-Fujairah, which runs about 360 kilometers to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman outside the strait. Built in 2012 at a cost of $4.2 billion, it has an operating capacity of 1.5 million to 1.8 million barrels a day. At the start of the crisis, it was operating at about 71 percent capacity, leaving spare room of around 440,000 barrels a day.
Those operating capacities were nowhere near enough. Even taken together, they compensated for only a limited portion of the normal ease of movement through the Strait of Hormuz. The International Energy Agency estimates their available spare capacity at between 3.5 million and 5.5 million barrels a day only about one-third of Hormuz’s flow leaving a structural gap of roughly 65 percent with no effective alternative. That was the first lesson.
There were also other technical constraints that are often overlooked in this discussion. Dedicating Petroline to all crude oil exports means giving up its role in transporting gas liquids and other products. Pipelines also remain designed for crude, not distillates such as diesel and jet fuel — a crisis that nearly upended Europe, which imported about 30 percent of its diesel and half of its jet fuel from the Middle East at the start of 2026.
Nor were those fallback routes for bypassing Hormuz beyond the range of Iranian missiles. On April 9, an Iranian drone struck a pumping station on Petroline, cutting its flow by about 700,000 barrels a day before full capacity was restored on April 12. That strike was followed by a Houthi drone attack in mid-May that temporarily halted operations once again.
Those strikes and others like them showed just how vulnerable the pipelines were, as defense systems failed to secure them against Iranian attacks. Put simply, they were solutions lacking in efficiency and marked by fragility, turning from alternative refuges into exposed bets against Iranian missiles.
Crisis managers in the Gulf states had been complacent about this until the cover was stripped away, prompting economic researcher Holly Ellyatt to say: “As long as the prospect of a full closure of the Strait of Hormuz seemed remote, building massive alternative infrastructure looked like spending unjustified by the risk. But the crisis proved those assumptions could be shattered, and that what seemed like excessive hedging was in fact far below the value of the insurance required.”
Congestion on port docks
Pipelines need ports, and the crisis highlighted the value of ports located outside the Strait of Hormuz above all Yanbu on the Red Sea and Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman as export outlets less vulnerable to geopolitical coercion and turmoil.
But Iran’s plan went beyond closing the strait to carrying the strikes over to the “emergency exits” of the embattled Gulf economy. The bottleneck thus shifted from the pipeline to the port and that is where the second lesson lies.
As for Yanbu, although the pipeline can pump 7 million barrels to it, its loading capacity in normal conditions does not exceed about 4 million to 4.5 million barrels a day, while it effectively falls to around 3 million in wartime conditions. Security is the last thing that can be said of the Red Sea route indeed, it is almost entirely absent because southbound shipments are still forced to cross Bab el-Mandeb, under the watch of the Houthis, who attack when they wish and refrain when they wish.
Fujairah, on the other hand, became a target for Iranian drones that struck loading operations at its oil terminal, where they hit an ADNOC tanker in early May.
Those alternative ports were stripped of their value when they were not paired with tight air defenses. Fujairah’s advantage, for example, was not only that it lies outside the Strait of Hormuz, but also that it is one of the world’s largest ship-fueling hubs and a major complex of strategic oil storage tanks, making it a safety valve for supplies when the Gulf chokes.
Even so, the export surplus available through it was always limited. The Habshan pipeline had been operating at only about three-quarters of capacity before the crisis, meaning the real room for expansion did not exceed a few hundred thousand barrels a day a figure that shrinks to near insignificance when compared with the volume that used to pass through Hormuz.
The UAE also stands out in the container economy, and during the war it emerged as the most exposed to catastrophic conditions. Ships piled up at Jebel Ali, the world’s ninth-largest port and the region’s main hub, while goods accumulated at Asian ports of origin with no clear route forward.
Most carriers were forced to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, adding about 3,500 to 4,000 nautical miles and up to 14 days to each voyage compared with the normal route, while a severe shortage of empty containers developed as they piled up in the Gulf with no return flow.
The lesson that emerged here was that an external port is a valuable asset, but its value depends on the capacity of its pipeline, its storage and the defense system protecting it — not on geographic location alone. That is what pushed the Gulf states to create new overland networks to reduce dependence on ports.
But one country stands as an exception in the Gulf case: Oman occupies an exceptional position in that equation. Its major ports Sohar, Duqm and Al Fahal overlook the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman outside the Strait of Hormuz, giving it a structural export advantage denied to its neighbors and placing it among the Gulf’s rare winners, with revenues rising 13 percent during the war.
In April, Saudi Railways announced the launch of five new logistics corridors for freight, expanding access to Red Sea ports, while a sea-land route was launched linking Dammam to the UAE port of Khorfakkan on the Gulf of Oman, in a joint operation between Saudi Ports Authority and Gulf Tainer, in addition to a shuttle shipping line to Bahrain.
Major shipping companies also created land bridges. MSC announced routes partially served by trucks across the Saudi desert, while Maersk informed its customers of new land bridges to secure supply to and from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.
Those steps embodied a new feature that the Gulf states — especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE — may intensify their reliance on in the future. Instead of thinking in terms of a single alternative port, there were attempts to create an integrated system of land and sea outlets. Yet a report published by Asharq Bloomberg said that despite their existence, export volumes through them remain 30 percent to 40 percent lower, and only higher prices help offset the losses.
A logistics crisis … and soaring prices
In one of his articles, researcher Behrooz Bakhtiari points to a striking paradox when he says: “Perhaps the most eloquent lesson of the crisis was that financial risk precedes military risk and survives it. The strait was effectively closed by insurance companies before it was closed at sea, as war-risk premiums jumped from 0.25 percent of a tanker’s value before the conflict to between 3 percent and 8 percent, which could mean an insurance cost of $8 million for a single tanker crossing.”
One report suggests insurance premiums may remain 20 times higher even after the strait reopens. At the start of the crisis, some companies canceled protection and indemnity cover for Gulf transit starting March 5, meaning anyone who dared cross did so with no coverage at all. Marine insurance and transport costs reached their peak, and that was another lesson the Gulf states had to confront before they could learn from it.
Other factors also shape insurance premiums. Clearing naval mines is a prerequisite for lowering them, and that process may take up to six months after the strait reopens, meaning the financial cost of transit will remain high even after the skies are free of missiles and drones, as Bakhtiari notes.
As for charter rates, there was another crisis. At the height of the disruption, hiring very large tankers cost about $800,000 a day. The biggest shipping companies responded with a new structure: the four largest container lines — Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd — rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope and restructured their contracts and schedules for the rest of 2026, leaving about 2 million containers out of place across the global network.
The logistical lesson here was that congestion does not disappear simply because the strait reopens; it shifts instead, as thousands of freed vessels crowd onto docks and cranes in ports such as Jebel Ali, Colombo and Singapore, which were already operating above capacity after absorbing diverted traffic. That delays a return to normal for additional months.
The disruption to container traffic also threatened export-based Gulf industries, from aluminum and fertilizers to petrochemicals, and disrupted food supply chains in countries that import most of their food by sea. That revived memories of the 2022 inflation wave, as we noted at the outset, making clear that logistics is not simply a matter of tankers and oil, but a lifeline that can affect both food and industrial security, creating a crisis that threatens national security. That is why the need to diversify import routes was no less urgent than the need to diversify export routes.
On another front, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps signaled moves that alarmed the Gulf states when it proposed a transit fee of about $1 for every barrel — roughly $2 million for a supertanker. The strait was thus transformed from a free passage into a source of income subject to the will and coercion of a single party, as a Brookings Institution report published under the title: “From chokepoint to crisis: The Strait of Hormuz and global oil markets.”
Nor did it stop there. It also floated the idea of collecting the fees in Chinese yuan or cryptocurrencies, and establishing a “Persian Gulf Strait Transit Regulatory Authority,” which left the Gulf states worried that this precedent could become a repeatable model in other corridors, turning the very “free” nature of transit into a privilege that is no longer guaranteed or sustainable.
Behind all these steps, as S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies researcher Hoozir Ezekiel suggests in one of his reports, the lesson the Gulf states drew from the crisis was that logistics costs are not a passing figure, but a structural burden embedded in contracts and prices for years after the strait reopens.
Panic inside the Gulf house
The response to the crisis was not uniform, because its consequences were not uniform either. As we have seen, only Saudi Arabia and the UAE had some capacity to bypass the Hormuz chokehold, even if that capacity came with problems, while Oman was a country with special geopolitical circumstances. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Iraq, by contrast, were left captive to the strait.
As reflected in a comparison drawn by The New York Times between the value of oil exported from the start of the war to May 8 and the same period a year earlier, the countries that showed an ability to avoid the Hormuz chokehold — namely Saudi Arabia through its pipelines to the Red Sea, and Oman by virtue of its location — recorded revenue increases, while revenues fell in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, which found no effective outlet.
For one country such as Kuwait, matters reached the point that it declared force majeure and cut production, even exporting no oil at all in April for the first time since Iraq’s invasion in the 1990s. Qatar, meanwhile, suspended gas production in early March and also declared force majeure on its gas contracts, warning that if the war continued, it could force other producers to halt their exports in a way that could bring down the world’s economies.
Bahrain, the most fragile of them all because oil and aluminum account for more than two-thirds of its revenues, was forced to receive Emirati support through a currency swap agreement worth $5.4 billion.
Those varied responses reflect both problems and lessons. Qatar’s case is one that pipelines cannot solve. Unlike oil, liquefied natural gas has virtually no overland bypass route, as Qatar’s exports are concentrated at Ras Laffan, from which tankers pass exclusively through Hormuz, making Doha more dependent than ever on reopening the strait.
Because Europe depends on Qatar for a far from negligible share of its LNG imports, the closure of Hormuz was a crisis that went beyond being a Qatari crisis to become a crisis for heating systems and industry across Europe alike. It was a reminder that dependence on a single corridor strangles not only the producer, but its customers on distant continents as well.
Iraq, which relies on oil for more than 90 percent of its revenues, saw Basra’s production nearly come to a halt when storage tanks filled up, and it resorted to exporting crude by tanker trucks through Syria, with whose new regime it has no good relationship — a scene that summed up the gravity of having no alternatives.
Taken as a whole, OPEC countries were affected by a drop in production estimated at more than 30 percent since the beginning, weakening the organization’s position in a market that has become more turbulent and that many believe is in the final stage of its decline, especially after the UAE withdrew from it at the end of April, adding to the challenges facing the organization’s future.
More broadly, the crisis highlighted winners outside the Gulf just as it exhausted losers within it. According to the aforementioned New York Times report, the United States, as the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, reaped about $50 billion in energy revenues from the price surge, Russia collected nearly $15 billion, and even Iran itself, in the midst of war, saw higher profits from energy revenues, while Gulf producers trapped behind Hormuz suffered the heaviest losses.
The paradox here is that the region’s pain turned into a gain for competitors in the global energy market. If that offers any lesson at all, it should have given the Gulf states an even stronger incentive to dismantle their dependence on a single corridor. Every day of closure not only drains their revenues, but continually redraws market shares in favor of others, giving US and Russian oil a foothold in Asian markets that had long been the preserve of the Gulf.
The effect on the Gulf body spread like cancer. The crisis went beyond economics to create a political fracture. The UAE, which absorbed more than 3,000 missiles and drones more than the rest of the GCC states combined leaned toward confrontation with Tehran, while Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait preferred containment and quiet truces, as indicated by a Brookings report titled: “How the Iran war will change the Middle East.”
The lesson at this point was clear: The Gulf states cannot respond to a stormy political and economic moment as a homogeneous bloc, whether in energy security or military security. Crisis response proceeds according to the hierarchy of capabilities each state possesses, and disparities in escape routes from the Hormuz chokehold translate directly into disparities in influence and decision-making.
Breaking out of the Hormuz chokehold … reviving old projects
One of the incidental virtues of crises is that they spur the search for solutions. The closure of the strait has dusted off overland transport projects that had sat in drawers for decades. For years, despite their scale, the costs remained below the threshold that would justify the enormous investment in alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, because deterrence and economic interdependence made a full closure seem too costly for anyone to attempt.
But what happened at the end of February 2026 proved that there are no certainties in Middle East geopolitics. It pushed Gulf producers, now far more wary of the continuing Iranian threat, to seriously consider a “post-Hormuz” phase, as Holly Ellyatt, mentioned above, sees it.
German insurer Allianz estimates the value of the more than 1,000 ships stranded in the Gulf at more than $125 billion; it has therefore become clear that the cost of failing to diversify alternative routes to Hormuz far exceeds the cost of building them. That is why Brookings analysts expect the Gulf states to accelerate investment in alternative export routes through new pipeline networks, reducing their dual dependence on the strait and on the US military’s willingness to keep it open. So what is happening on the ground to break out of the Hormuz chokehold? There are projects.
At the forefront of those projects is the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline, whose name has resurfaced frequently in recent months. It began operating in 1952 with a capacity of about 300,000 barrels a day, then stopped after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In August 2025, talks were held between Baghdad and Damascus to revive it, with estimates indicating a cost exceeding $4.5 billion and a period of about 36 months for rehabilitation, along with ambitions for a twin line with capacity reaching 1.5 million barrels a day.
The new Syrian government’s recovery of control over the oil fields in Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa in early 2026 strengthened its ability to conclude cross-border contracts.
The revival plan will take years, and Iraq was in desperate need of an outlet, so it turned to exporting crude by tanker trucks through Syria to the port of Baniyas. On April 1, the Al-Tanf crossing saw 299 trucks pass through, at an initial rate of 10,000 to 15,000 barrels a day. By midmonth, the number of tanker trucks crossing had reached about 500 to 700 a day, while the port of Baniyas can handle only about 300 tankers, or roughly 60,000 barrels a day. Even so, that did not prevent Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization from signing an export agreement for 650,000 tons a month via Syria between April and June 2026.
In parallel, the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey was reactivated, with about 220,000 barrels a day flowing through it, while Iraq hopes to triple that figure, even though Iraq’s treaty with Turkey governing operation of the pipeline expires in July 2026.
Iraq is also seeking to rehabilitate the Fishkhabour-Ceyhan pipeline, which, if brought into service, would operate at a rising capacity of about 600,000 barrels a day before reaching a maximum of 1.6 million barrels a day. It is also seeking to revive the dormant IPSA pipeline with Saudi Arabia, shut since 1991, allocating $1.5 billion to develop its infrastructure in partnership with Chinese companies.
Iraq was not alone in this effort. Turkey and Saudi Arabia have tried to revive a route running through Jordan and Syria over a 3,000-kilometer path rooted in the Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway. The project’s feasibility and cost remain under discussion, with an announcement expected by the end of 2026. But experts believe the importance of reviving this route lies in providing the Gulf with a secure overland corridor directly to Europe, which reduces dependence on maritime corridors vulnerable to the geopolitical storms of the Middle East.
But that project faces its own challenges. Syria, through which it would pass, is still in the process of rebuilding the state after years of war and devastation. Unifying the technical specifications of railway networks across four different countries also appears to be a complex engineering and regulatory challenge.
The “Four Seas Project” is another name that has resurfaced recently. It is an ambitious project first proposed in 2009 by Turkish President Abdullah Gul to his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, who showed little interest. The project seeks to create a network of energy pipelines and rail corridors linking Turkey and Syria with the Gulf and Central Asia.
That network would rely on existing and new pipelines, allowing oil from the Gulf and natural gas from the Caucasus and Central Asia to flow for export to Europe via Syrian ports and Turkish pipelines.
The Turkish project could also potentially connect with the proposed “Middle Corridor,” itself envisioned as an alternative to Hormuz to facilitate energy flows to East Asia via Central Asia.
Many of these projects are still stuck at the stage of reports with glossy headlines that ask: “Will they redraw the map of global energy and trade?” But what they contain is an expression of an overland lesson the region has clearly absorbed in the aftermath of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In themselves, however, they are no magic solution.
The Islamic State group has long targeted oil trucks crossing Syria, and the region is hardly free of recurring conflicts tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, tensions with Turkey and militia risks in Iraq. All of those threats combine to pose a constant existential challenge to the viability of overland routes. Land corridors may indeed reduce dependence on the sea, but they do not eliminate the security dilemma, nor can their scale match what tankers carry by sea, as a group of energy researchers argued in one of the reports published by Energy Now.
There is another problem: the short memory of crises. In theory, the wealthiest Gulf states possess sovereign wealth funds worth trillions of dollars, capable of financing alternative infrastructure without straining public budgets, along with a geographic position that allows three seas to be linked by pipelines and rail.
But history has its lesson too. As we reviewed earlier, once the Tanker War ended, the memory of crisis proved short. Saudi Arabia slowed investment in alternatives and did not continue at the same pace with Petroline. So it is not enough to rely on the availability of money and ideas; what matters is the persistence of political will once the cloud of danger lifts. And there is no better judge of whether that will happen than the years ahead, not the next few months, whether the war stops or not.
The US security umbrella … a castle of illusion that collapsed?
The shock of Hormuz was a shock in the literal sense of the word, because it proved that the Gulf security system framed by US military technology is not sufficient to defend Gulf security. The US presence at the scattered bases encircling Iran proved to be a double-edged sword: It offered a target for Iranian retaliation as much as it offered protection from Iranian strikes. And that protection itself is not nearly as strong as hoped. Years of assuming that America was capable of providing protection may have amounted to little more than wishful thinking. Perhaps this was the harshest and greatest lesson of all.
There had, in general, been precedents, but they were folded into wishful assumptions that there were rules of engagement that would not be broken. From the 2019 Abqaiq attack, to which the United States did not respond, to Israel’s 2025 attack on Hamas negotiators in Doha, the Gulf states should have realized that permanent American protection is an illusion and an expensive one.
There is therefore no sufficient strategic justification for why states with such immense wealth and sovereign funds failed to build high-level defenses of their own. That is the question that puzzled historian David Roberts in his article in Foreign Affairs titled “A new order for the Gulf: The region must make its security, not buy it.”
The framework agreement then came to deepen Iran’s supervisory role over navigation in Hormuz alongside Oman, raising concern among Gulf states that saw in it the mortgaging of their maritime trade to Tehran’s will. They therefore began to pivot away from the United States, with the first step being diversification of arms sources through reliance on Turkey.
More broadly, the Gulf states do not view the framework agreement with ease. It has proved fragile time and again with renewed attacks on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Thus, as the aforementioned researcher Hoozir Ezekiel argues, reconciliation with Tehran appears in the eyes of the Gulf states to be a truce liable to collapse more than a permanent settlement reinforcing, not weakening, the logic of building alternatives whose usefulness does not depend on the goodwill of a neighbor.
The first three days of the war alone exhausted more Patriot interceptor missiles than Ukraine fired in four years, and absorbed more than 4,300 missiles and drones targeting airports, oil facilities and financial centers in nearly every Gulf capital. Faced with that brutal war, reports emerged suggesting that the terms of neutrality long upheld by Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, had changed to the point that they took part in offensive operations against Iranian targets.
That meant there was rapid movement on the front of armament and partnerships. The Ukrainian president visited the region twice, signing long-term security agreements with Riyadh and Doha and deploying counter-drone experts, while Italy’s prime minister offered to help restore energy infrastructure and deployed air defenses in the region.
Saudi Arabia had in fact already begun a new armament drive in late 2025, when the crown prince concluded a major US arms deal as a major non-NATO ally and entered into a joint strategic defense agreement with Pakistan, even if mutual defense pacts remain commitments that do not obligate US or Pakistani intervention in the event of war.
As part of diversification, the Gulf states tried to view their security through a Eurasian lens different from Washington’s familiar one, expanding their circle of allies to include China, India, Europe and Turkey. But the criticism directed at this diversification, according to political analyst Zaidoun al-Kinani, is that it is “diversification bounded by limits, because none of these powers yet possesses what the United States does in terms of a permanent military presence in the region, making Gulf security independence a long-term aspiration without a ready substitute.”
But the crisis, on the other hand, broke old taboos. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite their differences, moved to link their coastal cities in a direct bypass of Hormuz a step that had seemed impossible before the war, when tensions between the two countries had intensified and flared in Yemen.
Yet the central lesson is that the Gulf’s defense systems inherited from the 1990s were not designed for drone warfare or for the equation of a Hormuz closure. Closing that gap requires integration in radar systems, interception protocols and joint monitoring of the strait an integration that, according to international law and Gulf affairs specialist Eric Alter, “runs up against sensitivities of sovereignty more than against any shortage of money.”
Alter argues that what hinders the creation of a Gulf defense institution is hesitation over treating legal integration such as granting a joint body authority to act without unanimous political approval as a military matter rather than a sovereignty issue.
The six Gulf monarchies do not view the threat in the same way, and each state’s assessment of the Iranian threat differs, while any framework requires full agreement among the GCC states. What actually happened was that the conflict accelerated the pace of bilateral and operational partnerships among willing states, while other states’ roles faded. The question that remains is this: Can these partnerships be institutionalized before the political pressure that gave rise to them dissipates?
Conclusion … and a hanging question
The day that sees the safe and smooth return of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — whether after weeks or months — will certainly not be like the day before shipping stopped. Much will have changed. The overarching lesson for the Gulf is that energy security is not a guarantee rented from an external power, nor can it depend on a single corridor assumed to remain open.
Rather, it requires a network of diverse options: secured pipelines, ports outside the circle of the Hormuz chokehold, overland corridors to the Levant even if fragile, and self-defense capabilities that remove the need to wait for decisions made in Washington, across the Atlantic.
Hedging as a strategy has also proved not to be a luxury that can be postponed or implemented slowly. It is strategic insurance, and the consequences of ignoring it come at a cost measured in billions of dollars and mortgaged sovereignties.
But crises and their lessons alone do not produce transformation. The disparity in capabilities among the Gulf states, and the divergence in their geopolitical approaches toward Iran, can obstruct any defense integration and slow the translation of what the region has learned into lasting institutions and infrastructure.
So the question remains suspended: Do the Gulf states have the political will to turn the shock of the Hormuz chokehold into a real turning point in energy security and collective defense, or will they return, once the waters in the strait calm again, to the old wager that the artery will not close another time?
The answer will take years of action or inaction. And that action or inaction is what will determine whether this crisis was a passing lesson or a founding moment for a new Gulf doctrine in energy security, and an anchor for a new political order for the region as a whole.