More than a month into the U.S.-Iran war, the Persian Gulf's major energy exporters have been forced into costly improvisations. Oil tankers, container ships and bulk carriers sit motionless across the horizon near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, bottled up with no clear path forward. The daily vessel count through the strait has plunged from well over 100 to a handful.
The few ships still making the crossing take circuitous routes through Iranian territorial waters, often paying the Iranian regime directly for the privilege, Yaroslav Trofimov reports for the Wall Street Journal from the U.A.E. coast, as cited by "Hvylya".
Saudi Arabia has redirected part of its oil exports via a pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, bypassing the strait entirely. The U.A.E., meanwhile, is shipping its oil to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman - a sprawling complex of oil and gas storage facilities that continues filling tankers despite fires caused by Iranian drone attacks in the early days of the war.
The strain extends beyond the energy sector. Lines of idling trucks stretch for miles to the nearby U.A.E. port of Khorfakkan, which has been picking up shipments that can no longer reach Dubai. In U.A.E. villages near the strait, such as Al Jeer, new posters show the country's ruler flanked by troops, jet fighters and helicopters, with the words: "I have strengthened you in the name of God, oh Homeland."
Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former Bahraini national-security official, warned that if Iran retains control of the strait after the war, Tehran would gain a permanent chokehold over Gulf economies and global energy flows. Iran would be able to enforce "selective sanctions on whomever it wants and whenever it wants," Alhasan said, leaving its neighbors at the mercy of a wounded, embittered adversary.
Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on how the war exposed a critical weakness that America's closest Asian allies never expected.