For decades, globalisation rested on a comfortable assumption: goods would flow. Oil through Hormuz, containers through Suez, grain across the Black Sea and semiconductors out of East Asia. The system was imperfect but efficient, rewarding speed, scale and the cheapest route. That era is not ending — it has ended.
The proof arrived violently in late February. Following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz — a passage barely more than three kilometres wide at its navigable narrowest — was effectively shut to global commerce. Before the conflict, roughly 3,000 vessels transited the strait each month, carrying about a fifth of global seaborne oil trade. In April, just 191 crossed in the entire month. The International Maritime Organisation’s official shipping lane was, in the words of one analyst, almost entirely abandoned.
The crisis has been called the largest disruption to energy supplies since the 1970s oil shocks. Brent crude surged above $90 a barrel. War-risk insurance premiums quadrupled. Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd suspended operations. The world was reminded, brutally, of a truth it had spent decades suppressing — that globalisation did not eliminate geography. It merely hid it.
The vulnerability is not evenly shared, and a new index by The National maps the fault lines with uncomfortable precision. The Gulf Trade Exposure Index (GTEI) ranks countries by their dependence on Gulf oil, gas and fertilisers — and the results make for sobering reading. Pakistan sources nearly 80 per cent of its fuel imports from the Gulf, earning it a Critical rating; Kenya is close behind at 70 per cent. Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy, relies on the Gulf for 49 per cent of its fuel and has almost no domestic production to fall back on. China spent $174 billion (Dh638.9 billion) on Gulf fuel imports in 2024, the largest single buyer in the index. On fertilisers, Malawi — one of sub-Saharan Africa’s poorest countries — sources 61 per cent of its supply from the region. India imports $2.76 billion worth annually.
The GTEI’s deeper value lies not in the headline figures but in what they reveal about the architecture of risk. The most fragile economies are rarely the largest importers. They are the ones with shallow reserves, thin fiscal buffers and no leverage to secure alternatives when prices surge. Fuel shortages become transport crises. Fertiliser shortages become food crises. Food crises become political ones. Hormuz is not merely a maritime chokepoint — it is an inflation switch, a food-security trigger and a geopolitical pressure valve, compressed into a few kilometres of water.
For years, companies and governments optimised for efficiency. “Just in time” was the operating philosophy of the global economy. This was elegant in a stable world but is lethal in an unstable one. Today, crises overlap and compound: wars, sanctions, cyberattacks and climate disruptions. In this age of polycrisis, “just in time” keeps becoming just too late.
The logic of trade must change. The old question of what the cheapest route is must now give way to a harder one: what is the safest, most reliable route when the cheapest one fails - which it will. The answer points toward corridors.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is the most prominent expression of this new thinking. Announced at the G20 in New Delhi in 2023, stalled by the war in Gaza, revived with fresh urgency as Hormuz wobbled, IMEC is no longer merely a concept. The construction of rail lines, ports and logistics hubs began in April last year. The EU-India trade deal signed in January gave it further momentum, and US President Donald Trump called it one of the greatest trade routes in all of history.
It is not alone: the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor threads through Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan; the International North-South Transport Corridor links India to Europe through the Caspian. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has spent a decade building exactly the infrastructure logic that western planners are now scrambling to replicate. The new Silk Roads are not one grand route. Instead, they are a portfolio of contingencies.
The winners in this reordering will not simply be producers. They will be connectors. The UAE’s investment in ports, free zones and logistics networks was always commercially shrewd; it is now strategically prescient. Likewise, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey and India are each positioned to become indispensable nodes — valued not for what they produce alone but for what they route, store, insure and finance.
This demands a new statecraft. While trade policy once meant tariffs and market access, it now means ports, pipelines, reserves, digital customs and the painstaking work of corridor-building across fractious geographies. Governments must think like supply-chain designers and every nation should be asking five questions: What do we depend on? Where does it pass through? Who controls that route? How long can we survive disruption? What is our alternative?
The Strait of Hormuz will eventually reopen. Ships will return and markets will stabilise. However, something will not return — the assumption that three kilometres of navigable water can safely bear one fifth of the world’s oil trade without consequence. The old Silk Road connected civilisations through commerce. The new Silk Roads will determine which nations remain connected when commerce is threatened. The future belongs not to those who merely sit on routes, but to those with the foresight — and the infrastructure — to shape them.
