For me, the question was not abstract. I came from a country where, for more than half a century, leaders had repeatedly threatened to weaponize the Strait. As an energy correspondent, I wanted to understand whether the region had built credible alternatives, or the world was still exposed to a risk it preferred to ignore.
Routing oil supplies away from the Strait of Hormuz has been a recurring topic in the Middle East, especially since the “tanker wars” of the 1980s. Regional governments had long been reviewing and funding contingency plans to deal with a possible closure of the Strait and to reroute their oil and petroleum exports.
Yet most of these plans never moved beyond paper, even after cabinet approvals. Those that did remained underfunded, and the volumes they could carry were a drop in the bucket compared to the total flow through the Strait of Hormuz.
Analysts I spoke to at the time believed such plans were not economically feasible in the absence of a real disruption. The reality was that regional countries were reluctant to commit billions of dollars to precautionary infrastructure that might never be needed.
And even if disruption did occur, many of them believed it would be short-lived — that the United States would intervene militarily and reopen the waterway quickly.
The alternative routes
As a result, projects remained limited in scope. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline carried oil to the Red Sea, but its capacity increases remained modest relative to the scale of Hormuz. The UAE’s Fujairah terminal bypassed the Strait, but remained geographically too close to be fully secure.
Other routes were even more constrained. The Iraq–Turkey pipeline faced political disputes between Baghdad and the Kurdish region over oil rights and territory. The Iraqi Pipeline through Saudi Arabia (IPSA), built by Saddam Hussein in 1989 to bypass Hormuz, has been largely inactive since 1990. Plans for a pipeline to Jordan’s Aqaba port depended on fragile Iraqi-Jordanian relations.
Deep-seated rivalries across the region prevented the implementation of most cross-border projects. The alternative plans were small, and governments were so reluctant to share information that I abandoned the article.
Two winners
Only two countries took the threat seriously.
China diversified its energy sources over the past decade and worked to reduce its dependence on the Strait of Hormuz.
The second was Iran, which built the Goreh–Jask pipeline to bypass the strait altogether, and also invested heavily in its ability to affect alternative routes.
Tehran repeatedly reminded regional countries that these alternative routes were vulnerable. The 2019 attacks on oil tankers near Fujairah, the 2019 drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, and the 2023 attacks by the Houthis on shipping lanes in the Red Sea were direct challenges to efforts to secure alternative export routes.
The US-Israeli war against Iran in March was a sobering reminder to the global economy that the world had long neglected one of its most critical chokepoints.
Iran managed to wipe out trillions of dollars from global markets by closing the Strait and added inflationary pressure to economies already under strain.
The price of securing the Strait was now much higher than the price of alternative projects would have been if they had been taken seriously.
Alternative routes were a partial answer at that time, but now they are no answer at all. During the US-Iran war, the region began to realize that a lasting solution lies not in infrastructure, but in a new regional security framework that limits the weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz.
