Iran weaponized the Strait of Hormuz. Now its neighbors are building around it

Brett McGurk is a CNN global affairs analyst who served in senior national security positions under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Wars often end in a different place than where they started.

The current conflict with Iran is troubled by ill-defined and shifting goals, from desires for regime change to more focused goals of weakening Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities.

Within about six months, the situation had morphed into something else entirely: a struggle over who would control the Strait of Hormuz, and with it, one of the world’s most important arteries for global energy. Iran has demonstrated its ability and willingness to target commercial ships passing through the strait, as long as it is not done in accordance with the rules prescribed by Tehran.

Much of the world, including the United States and the Gulf countries neighboring the strait, rightly think this is unacceptable.

The strategic goal is now increasingly about a single issue. Will the Strait of Hormuz remain an international waterway, or will Iran have the authority to determine who passes through it and under what conditions? Transferring control to Iran would give its regime tens of billions of dollars in tolls annually and the ability to measure energy flows to the rest of the world. Iran can effectively control the thermostat of the global economy.

Short term: Advantage Iran

Iran does not physically close the strait. Drones and cruise missiles are being fired at civilian ships. This is enough to halt trade and overturn the long-held assumption that the Strait of Hormuz will remain an international transit route even in times of conflict. For example, during the twelve-day war in June 2025, including US attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hormuz remained unaffected.

This long-standing assumption has now been broken and poses a major challenge to both the United States and the world.

I served in the White House when Iran’s proxy group, the Houthis, used Iranian missiles and drones to block the Red Sea, using the same tactics in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The US formed a coalition and launched an air campaign to weaken the Houthis’ capabilities; But we couldn’t stop every launch or restore commercial shippers’ confidence to transit. The Houthis ceased fire only after reaching an agreement with Washington.

Today, the United States will face the same problem: a time-consuming, costly and extremely difficult task to thwart Iran’s ability to attack with drones and cruise missiles that can be fired from more than 1,000 kilometers away. This is the classic finding a needle in a haystack task.

But this problem is much worse. Bab al-Mandeb accounts for 10% of global shipping. This is enough to increase inflation slightly. Hormuz accounts for 20 percent of global energy trade. That’s enough to trigger an “economic disaster,” as President Donald Trump said before announcing a short-lived deal with Iran.

Long term: Advantage USA

Iran’s strategy is to increase energy prices globally in order to pressure the White House to give up control of the strait completely. But his tactics of attacks on civilian shipping and other parts of the Gulf are producing a long-term backlash that will eventually work against him.

In the Middle East, governments and energy companies are ramping up pipelines, ports and transportation corridors that will move oil, gas and goods around Hormuz rather than passing through it. The United States now directly supports these initiatives.

The Bosphorus will maintain its importance. But for the first time in decades, the region is investing seriously in a future in which it can no longer be indispensable.

The energy map of the Middle East is being redrawn, especially in order to reduce Iran’s influence on this narrow point.

new map

Let’s break it down. Before the war, approximately 23 million barrels of energy products passed through the Strait of Hormuz per day. It was the sole transit point for exports from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain and the main transit route for products from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Governments are now planning for a future in which Hormuz will periodically shut down or remain commercially unreliable. This changes the equation. Rather than an indispensable transit point, states are investing in a system of multiple export routes that can gradually reduce Iran’s influence.

These projects will not replace all of the barrels that passed through Hormuz before the war, but they will significantly reduce their importance. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that existing or new bypass routes could carry about 60% of the oil transported through the strait by the end of 2028.

Consider the following projects that continued due to the war:

• Saudi Arabia (9M): Iran’s last objection to the Strait of Hormuz was 40 years ago during the Iran-Iraq war. At that time, Saudi Arabia decided to invest billions of dollars in the “east-west” pipeline stretching across its territory from oil-producing regions to the Red Sea. This pipeline has provided relief to the global market during the current crisis, with exports of approximately 7 million barrels per day. Saudi Arabia has since announced that this pipeline system will be expanded, adding another 1-2 million barrels per day by the end of 2029, bringing the total bypass through Hormuz to 9 million barrels per day.

• UAE (3.6 million): The UAE also has an existing port and pipeline south of Hormuz, currently supplying some 1.8 million barrels of oil to global markets. The country then announced a massive expansion program that will double this capacity by the end of 2027, producing a total of 3.6 million barrels per day.

• Iraq-Syria (2-3M): Last week, Iraq’s new prime minister visited the White House and announced that US oil companies would invest tens of billions of dollars in new investments in coordination with Syria to renew dormant lines and integrate new lines to export Iraqi and Kuwaiti barrels to the Mediterranean. Tom Barrack, Trump’s envoy for Iraq and Syria, said the projects were aimed at making Hormuz “an afterthought” and would be completed around 2030. I wouldn’t go that far, but moving Iraq’s vast energy resources west instead of south via Hormuz would be a game changer.

• Iraq-Türkiye (1M): The Iraqi projects include the renovation of the existing but mostly idle pipeline, which runs from Kirkuk in Iraq to Ceyhan on the Turkish coast of the Mediterranean. New global demand, which has been affected by the political disputes between Ankara and Baghdad for years, once again highlights this export route as an important and lucrative resource.

• Iraq-Jordan (1-2.5M): The Iraqi government is also accelerating plans to build an oil pipeline to Jordan. This pipeline will connect Basra to Hadisa in western Iraq and connect to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, exporting to global markets via the Red Sea. The governments of Jordan and Iraq, which has long been discussed, announced plans to accelerate development earlier this month due to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

All this is just the beginning, as these and other projects are being implemented to bypass Hormuz. Saudi Arabia is also negotiating a route for shipments to feed into the Mediterranean from the north to Aqaba or further north via Türkiye.

unprecedented

There is an important historical example. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States proposed an ambitious pipeline to the Mediterranean, passing Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye. This project, known as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) project, required billions of dollars of investment and years of American diplomacy between administrations. At first, many experts dismissed BTC as too ambitious (extending over 1,000 miles), too expensive, and politically impossible. History has proven otherwise.

When completed in 2006, BTC permanently reduced dependence on Russian-controlled export routes and demonstrated that energy infrastructure could reshape global politics as well as military alliances.

In contrast, Europe made the opposite strategic choice by remaining highly dependent on Russia’s energy and pipelines. Moscow then turned this dependence into leverage; today’s Gulf states seem determined not to repeat when it comes to Iran.

Strategic direction

These new partnership networks and pipelines will face challenges and setbacks. Iran could target static pipelines and delay construction. There may be delays in construction, bureaucracy and financing. But taken together, they reveal a strategic direction that is unlikely to reverse.

Middle Eastern capitals, which once assumed that Hormuz would reliably remain open, are now planning for the possibility that that may not happen. Resilient and redundant export routes have become national security imperatives, backed by U.S. leadership and state funds with support and assistance.

New target: redundancy

Iran’s strategy is ultimately based on the assumption that the world has no practical alternative other than the Strait of Hormuz. Eventually, he may discover that by weaponizing the gate, he has persuaded his neighbors to build territory that is no longer affiliated with him.

This is an outcome that Washington and its allies must actively help achieve.

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