(CNN) — Wars often end somewhere different from where they begin.
The current conflict with Iran has been plagued by ill-defined and shifting objectives, from aspirations of regime change to more focused aims of degrading Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities.
Nearly six months in, it has evolved into something else entirely: a struggle over who controls the Strait of Hormuz and, with it, one of the world’s most important arteries for global energy. Iran has demonstrated both the capability and willingness to target commercial shipping passing through the strait unless conducted under rules Tehran prescribes.
The US – and much of the world, including all the Gulf states adjacent to the strait – has rightly deemed that unacceptable.
The strategic objective now is increasingly about one issue. Does the Strait of Hormuz remain an international waterway, or does Iran acquire the ability to determine who passes through it and under what conditions? Ceding control to Iran would hand its regime tens of billions of dollars in transit fees per year, and the ability to meter energy flows to the rest of the world. Iran would effectively control the thermostat for the global economy.
Short term: Advantage Iran
Iran is not physically blocking the strait. It’s firing drones and cruise missiles at civilian ships. That is enough to stop commerce in its tracks, and upend a long-standing assumption: that the Strait of Hormuz would remain an international passageway even during periods of conflict. During the twelve-day war in June 2025, for example, including the US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hormuz remained unaffected.
That longstanding assumption has now broken, and it presents a massive challenge to the US and to the world.
I served in the White House when the Iranian proxy group the Houthis used Iranian missiles and drones to shut down the Red Sea using the same tactics in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The US built a coalition and mounted an air campaign to degrade Houthi capabilities – but we could not stop every launch, or restore confidence to commercial shippers to make the passage. The Houthis only stopped firing after they reached a deal with Washington.
Today, the US will confront the same problem: a time consuming, costly, and extremely difficult mission to deny Iran’s ability to attack with drones and cruise missiles that can be fired from over 1,000 kilometers away. It’s a classic needle-in-a-haystack mission.
Only this problem is far worse. The Bab al-Mandeb accounts for 10% of global shipping. That’s enough to boost inflation a bit. Hormuz accounts for 20% of global energy trade. That’s enough, as President Donald Trump said before announcing a short-lived deal with Iran, to spark an “economic catastrophe.”
Long term: Advantage US
Iran’s strategy is to boost the price of energy globally to pressure the White House to cede control of the strait altogether. Its tactics, however, with attacks on civilian ships and across the Gulf, are producing a longer-term reaction that will eventually work against it.
Across the Middle East, governments and energy companies are accelerating pipelines, ports and transportation corridors designed to move oil, gas and goods around Hormuz rather than through it. The US is now directly supporting these initiatives.
The strait will remain important. But for the first time in decades, the region is investing seriously in a future in which it may no longer be indispensable.
The energy map of the Middle East is being redrawn specifically to reduce Iran’s leverage over this chokepoint.
The new map
Let’s break it down. Before the war, approximately 23 million barrels of energy products per day passed through the Strait of Hormuz. It was the single chokepoint for exports from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and the main transit route for products from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Now governments are planning for a future in which Hormuz periodically closes or remains commercially unreliable. This changes the equation. Instead of one indispensable chokepoint, states are investing in a system of multiple export routes that can gradually reduce Iran’s leverage.
These projects will not replace all of the barrels that transited Hormuz before the war, but they will significantly reduce its importance. Goldman Sachs recently estimated that existing or new bypass routes could by the end of 2028 carry about 60% of the oil typically being shipped through the strait.
Consider the following projects getting underway because of the war:
- Saudi’s Arabia (9M): The last time Iran contested the Strait of Hormuz was four decades ago, during the Iran-Iraq war. At the time, Saudi Arabia made the decision to invest billions of dollars in an “east-west” pipeline across its territory from oil producing provinces to the Red Sea. During the current crisis, this pipeline provided relief to the global market with approximately 7 million barrels of exports per day. Saudi Arabia has since announced an expansion of this pipeline system to add another 1-2 million barrels per day by the end of 2029, boosting total bypass from Hormuz up to 9 million barrels per day.
- UAE (3.6M): The UAE also has an existing port and pipeline south of Hormuz, which currently delivers up to 1.8 million barrels to global markets. The country has since announced a massive expansion program to double this capacity by the end of 2027, delivering 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 tens of billions of dollars in new investments from US oil firms in coordination with Syria to refurbish dormant lines and integrate new lines to export Iraqi and Kuwaiti barrels to the Mediterranean. Trump’s envoy to Iraq and Syria, Tom Barrack, said the projects aim to make Hormuz “an afterthought” with times to completion around 2030. I would not go that far, but moving Iraq’s vast energy resources west instead of south through Hormuz would be a game-changer.
- Iraq-Turkey (1M): The Iraq projects include refurbishment of this existing but often dormant pipeline, running from Kirkuk in Iraq to Ceyhan on the Turkish coast of the Mediterranean. Plagued for years by political disputes between Ankara and Baghdad, the new global demand is once again pushing this export route to the forefront as an essential and lucrative resource.
- Iraq-Jordan (1-2.5M): The government of Iraq is also accelerating plans for an oil pipeline to Jordan. This pipeline would connect Basra to Haditha in western Iraq with a spur to the Jordanian port in Aqaba and export through the Red Sea to global markets. While long discussed, the Jordanian and Iraqi governments earlier this month announced plans to accelerate its development due to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.
All of that is just the start as these and other projects get underway to bypass Hormuz. Saudi Arabia is also discussing a northern route for shipments to Aqaba or further northward through Turkey to feed into the Mediterranean.
Not unprecedented
There is important historical precedent. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US proposed an ambitious pipeline crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to the Mediterranean. Known as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) project, it required billions of dollars of investment and years of sustained American diplomacy across administrations. At first, many experts dismissed BTC as too ambitious (it stretches over 1,000 miles), too expensive, and politically impossible. History proved otherwise.
Once completed in 2006, BTC permanently reduced dependence on Russian-controlled export routes, and demonstrated that energy infrastructure can reshape global politics as much as military alliances.
By contrast, Europe made the opposite strategic choice, remaining heavily dependent on Russian energy and pipelines. Moscow later converted that dependence into leverage — a lesson today’s Gulf states appear determined not to repeat when it comes to Iran.
Strategic direction
These new networks of partnerships and pipelines will face challenges and setbacks. Iran might target static pipelines and delay construction. There may be delays in construction, or bureaucracy, or financing. But taken together, they reveal a strategic direction that is unlikely to reverse.
The Middle East capitals that once assumed Hormuz would remain reliably open are now planning for the likelihood that it will not. Resilient and redundant export routes have become national security imperatives, backed by leadership and sovereign funds with support and assistance from the US.
New destination: redundancy
Iran’s strategy ultimately depends on the assumption that the world has no practical alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. It may ultimately discover that in weaponizing the passageway, it persuaded its neighbors to build a region that no longer depends on it.
That is an outcome that Washington — and its allies — should actively help to bring about.
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