How Washington Is Building Its Way Around the Strait of Hormuz
The February blockade of the Strait of Hormuz left a lasting impression on Washington, and the response now taking shape is not a short-term fix but a structural one. Tehran’s decision to shut the chokepoint at the outset of the joint U.S./Israeli operation sent oil prices spiking more than 70 percent almost overnight, a shock severe enough that the prospect of the blockade dragging into the November midterms became a central factor pushing Trump toward a ceasefire. Having lived through that scenario once, the U.S. and its allies are now working to make sure Iran’s most potent card loses most of its value.
What actually held during the blockade
The stopgap measures used during the crisis were revealing mostly for how limited they were. A coastal shipping route hugging Oman’s coastline eventually built up to roughly 119 vessels transiting per weekend, a fraction of the roughly 700 weekly transits the Strait normally handles. Overland truck convoys through Iraq and into Syria moved a similarly modest volume relative to what the Strait carries on a normal day. Pipeline capacity did more of the real work: Saudi Arabia pushed its East-West Pipeline toward a nominal 7 million barrels per day, though bottlenecks at the Yanbu terminal capped actual throughput well below that, while the UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line ran at its full 1.8 million barrel-per-day ceiling. None of it came close to replacing the Strait’s normal 20-21 million barrel-per-day flow, which is precisely the gap the current buildout is designed to close.
The pipeline buildout now underway
The next phase is about scale rather than improvisation. The UAE is fast-tracking a second parallel line to Fujairah that would more than double its bypass capacity, with completion pulled forward to 2027. Iraq is central to several tracks at once: reactivating the Kirkuk-Ceyhan link into Turkey, working to rehabilitate the older Kirkuk-Banias pipeline into Syria alongside Damascus, and advancing the much larger Basra-Haditha project, a multibillion-dollar internal pipeline meant to move southern Iraqi crude north toward Europe or Syria entirely outside the Strait. The Kirkuk-Ceyhan track has stalled over unresolved terms with Ankara, but the strategic incentive on all sides to unblock it is strong enough that the delay is unlikely to hold for long.
IMEC as the centerpiece
The most consequential piece of the strategy may be the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, a project that had been dormant since its 2023 launch until the blockade gave it new urgency. Planners now see it eventually diverting a majority of the container traffic that would otherwise risk transiting Hormuz, via a maritime leg connecting Indian ports to the Gulf and an overland rail network running through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Haifa, with onward shipping into Europe. Notably, the wartime version of the route anchors its Gulf terminus in Oman rather than the UAE, letting cargo clear the Strait entirely before it ever reaches the rail network. Additional nodes through Egypt and Syria, along with new legal frameworks designating Greece as Europe’s entry point, are being layered on top.
The Americas as a release valve
Washington is also leaning on supply diversification outside the Middle East entirely. The Americas already account for roughly a third of global crude production, and U.S. policy is pushing to expand that further, with Venezuela viewed as the biggest untapped prize and Argentina and Brazil not far behind. U.S. officials have framed deepening security cooperation with governments across the hemisphere, including Ecuador and El Salvador, as the foundation for unlocking that economic potential — the implicit logic being that more secure, more diversified supply outside the Gulf makes any future Hormuz disruption easier to absorb.
What this does and doesn’t solve
None of this eliminates Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait when it chooses to. What it does is erode the payoff of doing so. Every additional kilometer of pipeline, every new port expansion, and every corridor that comes online chips away at the economic leverage a blockade delivers, shifting Hormuz from a single point of catastrophic failure toward one node in a wider, more redundant network. The strategic bet in Washington is straightforward: the next time Iran closes the chokepoint, the world should have enough alternative routing that the closure registers as a regional problem rather than a global one.