Alan Duncan is a former oil trader and UK Foreign Minister, and is currently a senior advisor at Highgate, with 30 years of energy experience in the Middle East
I’ve spent 30 years watching the geopolitics of energy in the Middle East, and I can tell you: the rules are changing faster right now than at any point I can remember.
For most of the last century, power in global energy markets was simple. You controlled the reserves, you controlled the world. But the Strait of Hormuz crisis has shattered that assumption — and what’s emerging in its place is something genuinely new.
The US-Iran deal announced on 14 June may calm the waters, but the past few months have triggered a strategic re-think. Here’s what I think people are missing: this isn’t really a story about Iran. It’s a story about where power is moving, and who’s already positioning themselves to grab it.
Look at the Gulf states. They’re not waiting around. Leaders who once shrugged at their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz are suddenly spending serious money on alternatives — east-west pipelines to the Red Sea, expanded routes to the Mediterranean, overland corridors through Iraq and Turkey. Projects that looked overpriced two years ago now look like bargains.
And then there’s Syria, which I suspect isn’t the first country that comes to mind when you think about the future of energy infrastructure, but perhaps it should be.
For years, the instability there made any serious conversation about pipelines or transit routes feel almost academic. But something has shifted.
Since the fall of Assad, a fragile stability has taken hold, and Syria and Iraq have already announced plans to restore the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline — a corridor that’s been dormant since 2003 but can move up to 300,000 barrels a day when operational. Syria also sits along potential routes linking the Persian Gulf to Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean.
The challenges are real — damaged infrastructure, a shortage of skilled workers, and political uncertainty that hasn’t been fully resolved. But the strategic interest is intensifying rapidly. The question of who rebuilds Syria has quietly shifted from a humanitarian one to a geopolitical one.
Nobody, though, has moved faster or more deliberately than Turkey. It was already well-placed — sitting at the junction of Europe and Asia, with years of pipeline investment behind it — but the Strait of Hormuz disruption has turbocharged its ambitions.
Ankara has proposed extending the Iraq-Turkey pipeline south to connect Basra directly to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. More ambitiously still, it’s partnering with Syria to revive the Four Seas Project: a network of pipelines designed explicitly to route Gulf and Central Asian energy to Europe without ever going near a vulnerable maritime chokepoint.
Turkey’s geography and existing infrastructure have become a source of genuine geopolitical power.
China, I should say, saw all of this coming long before the rest of us.
The Belt and Road initiative was never really about trade in the conventional sense. It was built on a straightforward insight: that ports, railways and pipelines generate strategic influence just as reliably as oilfields do.
While Western energy policy remained fixated on production and reserves, Beijing was quietly buying up infrastructure and seizing the influence that comes with it.
What the past few months have demonstrated — and this is the part that should concentrate minds — is that you don’t need to lose a single barrel of oil for a crisis to hit.
Strategic uncertainty has an economic cost in and of itself. Insurance rates climb. Freight markets wobble. Oil prices swing. Governments dust off contingency plans they’d quietly assumed were theoretical.
This calculus has not disappeared with the peace deal announced between the US and Iran on 14 June — it has been confirmed by it.
Infrastructure that would once have struggled to clear a commercial hurdle can suddenly be justified on strategic grounds. Redundancy and resilience — the ability to go a different way if one route closes — have become assets in their own right. That changes the calculus for investors and governments alike.
The Strait of Hormuz isn’t going away. But it is becoming optional in a way it never was before. And once the world starts planning on that basis, the old order doesn’t just adjust — it fades.