The future of global trade won’t depend on the Strait of Hormuz
A new infrastructure is being built rapidly to avoid the strategic chokepoint and ensure global energy and food security
Badr Jafar
The world’s analysts have spent the past month mapping what the Strait of Hormuz crisis is breaking: disrupted shipping routes, surging insurance premiums and oil price volatility.
But inside the region a different story is unfolding — one that will outlast whatever ceasefire or escalation comes next.
A 50-year-old trade and infrastructure model is being redrawn in weeks.
I have spent the past month in discussions with hundreds of business leaders and senior Gulf government officials on the crisis and what comes after it.
The conversation has already shifted — from managing the immediate crisis to redesigning the systems that created this vulnerability in the first place.
The scale of that vulnerability is staggering.
Thirty per cent of global seaborne oil flows and a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade normally transit a waterway that is 21 nautical miles wide.
A third of seaborne traded fertiliser and nearly half the world’s seaborne sulphur exports depend on the same passage, with direct implications for global food security.
So do significant volumes of aluminium and helium — the latter essential to semiconductor manufacturing and the global AI supply chain.
The concentration of so much global commerce through a single contested corridor is an anomaly the world has tolerated for decades.
That tolerance has now ended.
Those investing in post-Hormuz resilience are constructing the trade infrastructure of the future.
Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports and expanded pipeline capacity offer an alternative energy corridor.
The UAE’s east coast provides deep-water ports and pipeline routes connecting Gulf producers to the Indian Ocean.
Oman’s developments at Duqm and Sohar sit well outside the chokepoint.
Goods and energy are already moving along these routes — in some cases through cross-border land bridge arrangements that would have seemed improbable just months ago.
The Middle East also holds a largely untapped inheritance: pipeline infrastructure built in previous crises and mothballed for decades, road and rail corridors, cross-border electricity grids and water systems that stretch beyond established networks.
With renewed co-operation, these assets could deepen regional connectivity to global markets.
The crisis is doing what years of summitry could not — creating the conditions for genuine intraregional economic integration.
States whose ties were strained only weeks ago are now finding common cause.
Rerouting essential commerce away from a single chokepoint de-risks not only the economies of the region but global supply chains.
For Europe, Asia, and Africa, this means fewer supply shocks and more reliable access to critical resources.
For investors and private-sector infrastructure developers, it represents a generational opportunity to help build the corridors that will carry the next half-century of global trade.
The multinationals operating in the Gulf see this clearly and are positioning for what comes next.
For many, the concern is not only the current disruption; it is whether they will be well placed to participate in the build-out.
As we in the UAE know to our cost, having lived through strikes on our soil, none of this should be seen through rose-tinted lenses.
The vulnerabilities are immediate and geopolitical uncertainty remains a source of deep anxiety.
But the region’s direction of travel is now locked in, and it will not reverse.
However the current crisis is resolved, no government will return to a posture of strategic dependence on a narrow strait controlled by an unpredictable neighbour.
The pipelines will be expanded.
The port capacity will be built.
The power grids, water systems and trade corridors connecting the region’s economies will be formalised.
The world is watching what is being destroyed.
It should pay equal attention to what is being built.
The writer is the UAE’s special envoy for business and philanthropy
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