The 21-Mile Chokepoint That Broke the World

One regime. One strait. Twenty-one miles wide. And the entire global economy brought to its knees.

Whatever the military outcome of the conflict with Iran, the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already delivered a verdict that no ceasefire can erase. Between 9 and 10 million barrels of crude oil have been stripped from global markets every single day. Roughly 20 percent of the world's daily liquefied natural gas supply has vanished. 5 million barrels of refined products—diesel, jet fuel, the petroleum gases that hundreds of millions of people use to cook their food—are missing. So are the fertilizers that feed billions, the helium used in semiconductor fabrication and hospital MRI machines, and the petrochemical feedstocks that underpin modern manufacturing.

This is not a regional disruption. Analysts are calling it worse than the Arab oil embargo of 1973, and broader in scope than the Russian gas cutoff that followed the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Pakistan have already moved to four-day workweeks to conserve energy. Factories in Malaysia and Indonesia are cutting capacity. Airports across Asia are limiting flights—not because fuel is too expensive, but because there simply isn't enough of it.

Two Pipelines Standing Between Order and Chaos

The uncomfortable truth is that the world had options—just not enough of them.

Only two major pipeline systems can currently move Gulf energy to global markets without passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and both are running at or near maximum capacity. Neither carries the refined products the world is desperately short on.

Saudi Arabia's Petroline—a 746-mile pipeline running from eastern oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu—was built during the Iran-Iraq War specifically to hedge against an Iranian embargo. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. But a single pipeline, even at full throttle, cannot absorb the demand shock. More critically, it moves crude oil only. Diesel doesn't flow through it. Jet fuel doesn't flow through it. The liquefied petroleum gases that keep cooking stoves lit across the developing world don't flow through it. Those products require entirely separate infrastructure—dedicated lines, separate terminals, separate investment.

The UAE's Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline (ADCOP), operational since 2012, connects inland fields to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, completely bypassing Hormuz. Its foresight has been vindicated every day of this crisis. But with a capacity of roughly 1.7 million barrels per day, it leaves approximately 40 percent of UAE production with no bypass option at all.

And then there's the largest gap of all—one that gets almost no attention. Kuwait and southern Iraq, home to enormous reserves that are critical to global supply, have no bypass route whatsoever. Nearly every barrel they produce must transit Hormuz. They are entirely exposed.

The Pipeline That Was Never Built

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The solution to that third gap is technically straightforward: a modern, high-capacity corridor running from southern Iraq and Kuwait northward through Iraqi Kurdistan to the Ceyhan export terminal on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. A version of this route—the Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline—already exists, but it is aging, dramatically under-capacity, and administratively fractured between competing political actors.

Bringing this project to life requires getting Turkey, the Iraqi central government, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and Kuwait around the same table. That is a sentence that describes years of failed diplomacy. During both the Obama and Biden administrations, serious effort was invested in exactly this goal, with little to show for it. The current crisis may represent the rare moment when the political will to resolve those differences finally aligns with the urgency to act.

The financing architecture proposed by experts involves anchoring a broader coalition through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the World Bank, drawing in Gulf sovereign wealth funds, multilateral development banks, and private capital. The logic is straightforward: the nations of Europe, Asia, and the Americas that depend on Gulf energy have a direct stake in ensuring this infrastructure gets built. Leaving it entirely to Gulf states alone is neither fair nor strategically sound.

There's a geopolitical dimension here that sharpens the urgency. If America doesn't lead this effort, the vacuum won't stay empty. China has demonstrated both the appetite and the capability to finance strategic infrastructure across the developing world. The question of who builds the pipelines that bypass Hormuz is also a question of who shapes the energy alliances of the next generation.

History's Lesson, Already Paid For

The precedent for this kind of collective infrastructure investment isn't theoretical. It's recent.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the widely predicted catastrophic collapse of European energy didn't happen. Why? Because of a decade of patient, unglamorous infrastructure work that almost nobody noticed at the time: the Southern Gas Corridor brought Caspian gas through Georgia and Turkey into Southern Europe; LNG terminals in Poland, Lithuania, and Greece had been quietly expanded; pipelines had their flows reversed. Infrastructure built before the crisis made the difference when the crisis finally arrived.

The same logic produced the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve after 1973 and the International Energy Agency, which have helped buffer every major supply shock since—including this one. More recently, the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) was launched to connect rail, energy, fiber-optic, and hydrogen pipeline infrastructure from India through the Gulf to Europe. Building Hormuz bypass capacity could be understood as IMEC's most urgent energy component.

The pattern is consistent: the infrastructure built in quiet times is what saves you when things go loud.

The Clean Energy Objection—and Why It Misses the Point

Some environmentalists argue that massive new investment in fossil-fuel infrastructure will slow the clean energy transition. It's a position worth taking seriously—and then examining carefully.

Over the past two decades, the world added more renewable energy capacity and electric transport than almost anyone predicted. And yet fossil fuels still represent roughly 80 percent of the global energy mix—the same share as in 1980. Energy demand is growing faster than renewables can fill it. More fundamentally, oil is not simply a fuel. It is the feedstock for plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and synthetic materials that electricity cannot replace. Airlines don't run on wind power. Hospital MRI machines don't run on solar panels.

Accelerating the clean energy transition is necessary and worth pursuing with urgency. But the supply chains of the present must be secured simultaneously. These are not competing priorities—they are parallel obligations. Framing them as a binary choice is a luxury the current crisis has made impossible to afford.