The UAE will not allow any single country to control access to the Strait of Hormuz or impose a toll on shipping through the vital waterway, Minister of Foreign Trade Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi said, calling the strait a “red line” for the Gulf.
“We cannot allow individual nations to determine our trade ambitions,” Dr Al Zeyoudi told the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday. “International waterways must remain free from any form of restriction or toll. No country owns the Strait of Hormuz, and no country should determine who can and can't access it. This is a red line for the UAE and should be for every country in the Gulf.”
Before the Iran war, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas transited the waterway.
Dr Al Zeyoudi said the UAE has established regional logistics corridors linking the Arabian Gulf to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman, and is working with Omani authorities to process UAE-bound cargo through the ports of Sohar and Duqm. Development of east-coast ports at Khor Fakkan and Fujairah, outside the strait, has been accelerated. The UAE is also building a new pipeline to provide additional capacity for exporting Abu Dhabi oil via the Gulf of Oman.
The ongoing expansion builds on a plan outlined by Dr Al Zeyoudi in June to reduce the UAE’s dependence on Hormuz to “zero”, regardless of whether the waterway reopens. At the time, he said the country would expand its eastern ports, and develop pipelines, road and rail links to connect them with oilfields, gasfields and petroleum facilities.
“No other country has the ability to activate multiple new trade corridors at this scale and with this speed,” Dr Al Zeyoudi said. “These are not short-term fixes. These are now permanent shifts in our positioning. No single checkpoint can be allowed to threaten our economic viability.”
The UAE’s trade data from the first half indicates these workarounds are proving viable for the economy, the minister said. Non-oil foreign trade reached a record Dh1.94 trillion ($528 billion) in the six months through June, up 13.1 per cent from a year earlier and almost 80 per cent above the same period of 2022. Non-oil exports hit an all-time high of Dh453 billion, which Dr Al Zeyoudi said underlined “the strength of our diversified trade corridors”.
“Every challenge we have faced, we have emerged with renewed purpose, turning crisis into structural advantage,” he said.
