The Gulf Cannot Build Its Way Around Iran on Hormuz

For a narrow channel of water, the Strait of Hormuz carries an outsized share of the world's anxieties. Through it, in normal times, passes something close to a fifth of the oil the planet burns, roughly 15 million barrels a day squeezed between the coast of Iran and the Arabian peninsula. Since the spring, when Iran throttled traffic through the strait in the aftermath of war, the Gulf's oil producers have been forced to confront a vulnerability they had long preferred to ignore. Their response has been to reach for the engineer rather than the diplomat, and that is a mistake.

The engineering answer is a rush of pipelines. Around seven projects are now being built or studied to carry Gulf crude overland to the open sea, bypassing the chokepoint altogether. The United Arab Emirates is racing to add more than 3.5 million barrels a day of bypass capacity by the middle of next year. Saudi Arabia already has an east to west line capable of moving some 7 million barrels across the kingdom to the Red Sea. Turkey has floated extending an Iraqi pipeline south toward Basra to open a Mediterranean route. By one bank's estimate, such projects could handle more than 60 percent of the Gulf's pre war exports by the end of 2028.

Steel is not a shield

All of this is worth doing, and none of it is enough. The first problem is arithmetic. Even on optimistic timelines the pipelines will take years to finish and, when complete, will still leave a large slice of the region's exports with no route but the strait. A bypass that covers three fifths of the flow leaves two fifths exposed, and in a market as tightly balanced as oil, the missing fraction is more than enough to send prices lurching and economies reeling.

The second problem is more fundamental. A pipeline is not obviously safer than a tanker. Both are long, fixed and fragile, and both sit within easy reach of the cheap drones and missiles that Iran and its allies have used to such effect. Swapping a vulnerable sea lane for a vulnerable land route does not remove the threat so much as relocate it. The Gulf states are spending enormous sums to change the address of their exposure rather than to reduce it.

The problem has a name

Underneath the maps and the construction schedules lies a truth the region would rather not say aloud. The threat to Hormuz is not really a matter of geography, which cannot be changed, but of politics, which can. Iran can menace Gulf exports whenever it chooses because it has both the means and, at moments of confrontation, the motive. No amount of concrete poured in the desert alters that basic fact. As long as Tehran has reason to reach for the strait as a weapon, it will remain one.

Which points to the answer the Gulf has been most reluctant to consider. The surest way to keep Hormuz open is not to render Iran irrelevant, an impossible task, but to give Iran a stake in the flow it currently threatens to block. A strait that carries Iranian as well as Arab oil, that sits within a web of trade and quiet understanding rather than pure hostility, is far harder for any Iranian government to justify closing. Security here is bought with interdependence, not with steel.

A road already begun

This is less far fetched than it might once have seemed. Only a few years ago Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic ties after a long estrangement, and the Gulf monarchies have grown practised at hedging between rival powers rather than lining up neatly behind one. The raw materials of an accommodation exist. What has been missing is the will to treat a bargain with Tehran as a serious instrument of security rather than a betrayal of it.

A deal need not be warm to be useful. It would not require anyone to trust Iran, nor to abandon the pipelines, which make sense as insurance whatever else happens. It would simply recognise that a neighbour with something to lose is more predictable than one with nothing, and that the cost of a modest understanding is trivial beside the cost of a strait shut for months. Diplomacy and concrete are not rivals here. The concrete buys time, and the diplomacy is what that time should be used to secure.

The alternative is worse

The instinct to wall Iran off is emotionally satisfying and strategically hollow. It commits the Gulf to a permanent and expensive standoff, an endless race between Iranian weapons and Arab workarounds that Iran, needing only to threaten while its rivals must actually defend, is well placed to win. Every barrel rerouted at vast cost is a reminder that the underlying quarrel has been managed rather than resolved.

The Gulf states are wealthy enough to build their pipelines and clever enough to know their limits. The harder task, and the more valuable one, is to pair the construction with a genuine attempt to lower the temperature with Iran. That means talking, trading and binding a dangerous neighbour into arrangements it would be loath to break. It is unglamorous work, and it asks the region's leaders to swallow some pride. But a deal on Hormuz would do more for the security of Gulf oil than any pipeline yet drawn on a map.