The disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has demonstrated the danger of relying heavily on a single maritime corridor. But the problem extends beyond Hormuz. Ongoing insecurity in the Red Sea and Black Sea means that several routes carrying the world’s energy, food, and goods are under pressure at the same time. When disruptions overlap, rerouting around one chokepoint can simply shift traffic—and vulnerability—to another, turning separate security crises into a broader challenge of economic resilience. Supply chains built around predictable maritime access must now account for interruptions that cross regions and sectors.
That is changing the strategic value of infrastructure across the Gulf, Türkiye, and Iraq. Ports, pipelines, railways, roads, and logistics networks once justified primarily by their commercial efficiency, trade expansion, or competition for hub status now have strategic value because they can provide alternatives when established routes are disrupted. No overland corridor can replace maritime trade, and no pipeline can substitute for Hormuz at scale. But they do not need to. Their value lies in creating enough redundancy to keep critical flows moving when the most efficient route is unavailable.
The Black Sea and the Gulf Are No Longer Separate
The conflicts affecting these regions have different origins, but they expose the same structural weakness: global trade depends heavily on a handful of maritime corridors whose accessibility has long been taken for granted.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the two countries accounted for roughly 30 percent of global wheat exports and about 80 percent of Egypt’s wheat imports. When Black Sea shipments were disrupted, global food prices reached a record high in March 2022. A crisis in Eastern Europe quickly became a food-security problem thousands of kilometers away.
The Gulf demonstrates the same vulnerability in energy markets. Before the current war, about 20 million barrels a day (mb/d) of crude oil passed through Hormuz, equivalent to roughly a fifth of global consumption, along with about a fifth of global LNG trade. Since late February, commercial transits have fallen by around 90 percent. At the peak of the disruption in May, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that 10.9 mb/d of Gulf crude production was shut in. Qatar also declared force majeure after strikes damaged some 17 percent of its LNG export capacity, with repairs expected to take up to five years. The global benchmark Brent crude, trading at about $72 a barrel before the war, touched $126 a barrel in April and was still trading around $106 in mid-October.
A disruption to a single route can often be managed through inventories, rerouting, insurance, and higher transport costs. Simultaneous or recurring disruptions across several corridors are much harder to absorb, especially when the alternatives are also under pressure. The result is a shift in the economics of connectivity. Efficiency still matters, but so does redundancy. Infrastructure that appears underused in normal times can become strategically valuable when it prevents dependence on a single point of failure.
Corridor Resilience Is Becoming an Economic Security Priority
Spare capacity and alternative routes can look wasteful until an established route is disrupted. Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline, with a capacity of 7 mb/d, reaches the Red Sea, while the UAE’s 1.8 mb/d Habshan–Fujairah pipeline moves crude to the Gulf of Oman without transiting Hormuz. But the margin is thin: before the crisis, the EIA put unused bypass capacity at about 2.6 mb/d—roughly an eighth of normal Hormuz flows. Saudi Arabia nevertheless made extensive use of its alternative outlet, increasing crude loadings at the Red Sea port of Yanbu from about 1 mb/d to around 4 mb/d.
Yet bypassing one chokepoint can simply shift exposure to another. Saudi crude shipped from the Red Sea toward Europe remains vulnerable to disruption around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal. Oil flows through Bab el-Mandab fell from 8.7 mb/d in 2023 to 4 mb/d in January–August 2024, while annual Suez Canal revenue dropped from $10.25 billion to under $4 billion. In August 2026, canal transits were still 39 percent below pre-crisis levels.
This year has tested that vulnerability directly. On July 20, Yemen’s Ansar Allah—widely known as the Houthis—announced a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia, and on September 10 drone strikes on pumping stations shut down the East–West pipeline. It restarted on September 22 at reduced rates, and by early October Riyadh said it was pumping 5.8 mb/d. The episode demonstrated why corridor resilience cannot be measured simply by the existence of an alternative route. What matters is whether the wider network can keep goods and energy moving when several routes are disrupted at once.
Iraq faces a similar problem. Oil provides around 90 percent of state revenue, and before the war more than 90 percent of its crude exports left through southern terminals on the Gulf waterway. Exports declined from about 3.6 mb/d in February to roughly 330,000 barrels a day in April, and monthly oil revenue fell from $6.8 billion to $1.1 billion. The Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline to Türkiye theoretically provides an alternative, with a nameplate capacity of around 1.5 mb/d. Yet it carried only about 250,000 barrels a day in September. The gap illustrates an important distinction: Capacity on paper is not capacity in use when the links feeding a route are missing. A one-year agreement signed on August 1 covering 750,000 barrels a day could expand the route’s role, but it cannot substitute for Iraq’s southern export system.
Nor can overland infrastructure replace maritime trade more broadly. Ships move volumes that roads and railways cannot match at comparable cost, while pipelines are constrained by fixed capacity and geography. The realistic goal is therefore not to replace Hormuz or other major waterways, but to preserve the ability to redirect a meaningful share of flows when they are constrained. In this environment, several complementary routes may provide more strategic value than a single dominant corridor—a different logic from the familiar competition among states to capture the largest share of transit traffic.
Türkiye and the Gulf in a More Connected Corridor Map
Türkiye is well positioned at the intersection of the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Caucasus, Middle East, and European markets. Geography alone, however, does not confer strategic advantage. Turning location into resilience requires sufficient infrastructure, predictable regulation, and durable cross-border cooperation.
Iraq is central to that equation. The Development Road—a roughly 1,200 km road-and-rail project estimated at about $17 billion and agreed in principle by Iraq, Türkiye, Qatar, and the UAE in 2024—could strengthen Iraq’s links to European markets while expanding Türkiye’s north–south connectivity. Whether that potential is realized will depend as much on institutions as on construction. Türkiye also has a direct stake in Gulf stability: its energy import bill was $62.5 billion in 2025, and central bank estimates suggest each $10 rise in the oil price adds about $2.6 billion to the current-account deficit. With Brent some $34 above its pre-war level, that implies close to $9 billion a year.
For Gulf states, these overland connections through Iraq and Türkiye offer diversification rather than an escape from Hormuz. Their potential value also extends beyond energy. Gulf economies import an estimated 85 percent of their food, while the Black Sea supplies grain to much of the Middle East. Renewed insecurity there—including the sinking of a Turkish-owned cargo ship off Romania following a reported drone strike in early October—underscores how disruptions across different transport networks can compound one another.
Putting a Price on Flexibility
The economic case for resilience resembles the logic of insurance. Spare capacity carries a premium paid every year, while the payout arrives only when a corridor fails. In 2026, that payout was large.
War-risk coverage for Hormuz transits rose to 7.5–10 percent of a vessel’s hull value by late July, compared with a fraction of 1 percent before the war. Rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope can add roughly 3,000 nautical miles and ten days to an Asia–Europe voyage. Iraq’s oil revenue in April was about $5.7 billion lower than in February. Annualized over 30 years at an 8 percent cost of capital, the Development Road would cost about $1.5 billion a year—making a single month of that shortfall equal to nearly four years of the corridor’s cost. The comparison is illustrative, not a business case, because a road and rail link does not carry crude at Hormuz scale. But it reframes the test. A corridor need not beat the sea route in normal times; its annual cost must simply be lower than the expected loss it helps avoid.
Physical infrastructure alone, however, is not enough. Routes crossing jurisdictions require political agreements, regulatory coordination, and security arrangements; a corridor that becomes unreliable whenever relations deteriorate offers little resilience. The Gulf states, Türkiye, and Iraq should therefore focus not on a single grand project but on networks able to absorb shocks without shifting dependence from one bottleneck to another, treating operational reliability across borders as a core policy objective.
Not every proposed corridor makes economic sense. But the cost of maintaining alternatives must now be weighed against the potentially greater cost of having none in a more volatile geopolitical world. The emerging logic from the Black Sea to the Gulf is not to try to replace a corridor like Hormuz but rather to see the value of flexibility. The states best positioned for the next disruption will be those able to keep energy, food, and goods moving when the most efficient route can no longer be taken for granted.
