Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide.
Every crisis in the Middle East returns the world’s attention to the same stretch of water. When tankers are seized, or missiles fly near the Persian Gulf, oil prices move, insurers reprice risk, shipping reroutes, and the United States repositions naval and airpower to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. The reflex is sound, because the strait carries volumes nothing else can. Alongside the maritime map, a second geography of energy security is taking shape: the pipelines, railways, power lines, and transit corridors linking the Caspian Basin and the South Caucasus to Europe.
Western governments are pairing forward military presence in the Persian Gulf with a slower effort to diversify the routes by which energy and trade reach markets. The two efforts are being pursued separately, by different parts of government and on different timelines. They may not form a single strategy, but together these reduce the leverage any single chokepoint, supplier, or armed actor can exert over the system.
The scale of that leverage was on display this year. About 20 million barrels of oil a day crossed Hormuz in 2024, roughly a fifth of global petroleum-liquids consumption, along with about one-fifth of the world’s traded liquefied natural gas, most of it shipped from Qatar. Then, during the confrontation between the United States and Iran, the passage nearly closed. The Energy Information Administration estimates that oil flows through the strait fell to about 4.9 million barrels a day in the second quarter of 2026, from 21.6 million two quarters earlier, with liquefied natural gas shipments all but ceasing, though the agency cautions that vessel-tracking data have been unreliable since February.
No overland route through the Caucasus can carry volumes on that order, and none of the corridors discussed here touches the Asia-bound crude and Qatari gas that make up the core of Hormuz exposure. In 2024, 84 percent of the crude and 83 percent of the liquefied natural gas crossing Hormuz went to Asia, and most of it to China, India, Japan, and South Korea. A railway through Armenia or a new line across Anatolia cannot hedge that. That is the paradox driving the corridor race. The strait is at once irreplaceable and, as the spring showed, able to choke the system at will. The corridors provide additional redundancy for Europe, but they do not diminish the strait’s central role. The case for building them grows each time a crisis exposes how much depends on a single waterway.
The routes that already exist are marginal in volume and significant in politics. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline carries Caspian crude across Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast without touching Russian or Iranian soil, which is its entire value. But its politics outrun its throughput. Against a nameplate capacity of 1.2 million barrels a day, the line moved about 206 million barrels in 2025 — roughly 565,000 a day — under half its rated capacity and down almost 8 percent on the year.
When it comes to natural gas, the story is similar. Azerbaijani supply reaches Europe through the Southern Gas Corridor and amounted to about 12.8 billion cubic meters to Europe in 2025, little changed from the previous year and small compared with the bloc’s roughly 335 billion cubic meters of annual demand. Deliveries to Germany and Austria began in January 2026, a diplomatic milestone that did not change the order of magnitude. The frequently cited ceiling of expanding the Trans-Anatolian line to 31 billion cubic meters is engineering headroom, not a funded plan: The compressor investment and long-term contracts required to approach it have not been committed.
Some might point to the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a proposed corridor across southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and onward to Turkey, but this is just a framework at this stage. It doesn’t yet exist, and it may not come to fruition. Its announced scope is broad, but the settlement it depends on was only initialed at the White House in August 2025 and remains unsigned, with Baku still conditioning final signature on constitutional change in Armenia. Its architecture is nonetheless taking shape.
A U.S.-majority company would hold development rights for an initial 49 years — 74 percent American and 26 percent Armenian — while Armenia retains border control, customs, taxation, and security authority over its own territory. By design, the structure displaces Russia, whose border guards were tasked with monitoring the route under the 2020 ceasefire, without transferring Armenian sovereignty to Washington — a redistribution of influence more concrete than any volume figure.
The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity is not operating yet, and engineering surveys in Armenia are only now underway. Today’s arteries still run through Georgia, whose relations with Washington and Brussels have deteriorated sharply, while the Turkish-Armenian border remains closed even after Ankara eased direct-trade restrictions in May.
If any state gains from this rearrangement, it is Turkey. Most of the westbound routes under discussion — the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line, the Southern Gas Corridor, the Middle Corridor, and the proposed route through southern Armenia — either cross Turkish territory or terminate at a Turkish port, which makes Ankara the near-indispensable transit state for Caspian energy moving west. The more energy and commerce pass through Turkey, the stronger its hand against Europe, Washington, Moscow, and Tehran alike, and the freer it becomes to set its own terms. Turkey operates as an independent broker on this map, and the corridor strategy depends on cooperation — cooperation that Ankara is free to negotiate on its own terms.
A maritime chokepoint is a concentrated theater in which American naval and airpower can be brought to bear in a geographically bounded space. Land corridors present a different problem, stretching across thousands of kilometers of fixed, largely undefended infrastructure and several jurisdictions, much of it within reach of Russian and Iranian standoff weapons and adjacent to unresolved conflicts. Diversifying routes spread the risk across more points of potential disruption.
The Nord Stream sabotage in 2022 showed that a single pipeline can be severed without clear attribution or effective recourse. In July 2026, drone strikes on the Black Sea terminal of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium cut loadings by more than a fifth — several hundred thousand barrels a day — on a route that moves close to 2 percent of world oil supply and is Kazakhstan’s main outlet to the sea.
Pipeline segments in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia lie outside the territory of NATO, and sabotage against them would not automatically invoke its mutual defense clause. A network of routes is a more resilient hedge than a single passage. Physical risk remains, and pretending otherwise invites the same complacency that once made the sea lanes seem permanent.
This brings us to Iran. It is common to say that Iran, with its position between the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, is being bypassed. But that’s not really correct. Iran is excluded from the Western and Persian Gulf-Arab corridor systems while being hard-wired into the competing Russian-centered one. The clearest evidence is the International North-South Transport Corridor, the Russia-Iran-India route whose missing Iranian link, the Rasht-Astara railway, reached a financing agreement in early 2026 as trade over the corridor roughly doubled in 2024. The cost to Iran is adverse lock-in. It becomes a captive, sanctions-shadowed, lower-value node in a network dependent in Moscow. That leaves Iran with less room to act as a preferred connector courted by all sides. Its eastern hedge is thinner than many seem to understand. The 25-year partnership with China has produced discounted oil sales but little of the promised investment.
The leverage Iran keeps is of a specific, self-diminishing kind. It still flanks Hormuz and can still threaten the strait. It also treats a corridor along its Armenian border as a red line and objects to a U.S. presence on its northern frontier. This gives Iran the ability to raise costs and insurance premiums for others. It provides little of the economic leverage that comes from transit fees and integration. The Islamic Republic is trading the profitable position of a country the world wants to route through for the impoverished position of a chokepoint the world spends billions to route around.
Because most of Hormuz’s oil and gas moves east rather than west, no pipeline through the Caucasus reaches the bulk of the exposure. It cannot carry the Asia-bound crude or Qatar’s gas. The corridors therefore provide only marginal redundancy for Europe. Most of the dependence on the strait remains in Asia.
On that measure, diversification is a partial strategy. Its deeper effect is to reprice Iran’s geography by building a competing network of transit relationships across Eurasia. That lowers the premium on Iran’s position while leaving the underlying dependence on Hormuz largely unchanged. The near-closure this spring showed that dependence remains concentrated in the same narrow waterway and in the hands of the same government.
That is the paradox the corridor race leaves behind. The world cannot route around Hormuz because the volume of crude and gas crossing it is too large, and too heavily oriented toward Asian destinations, to move any other way. New corridors increasingly route around Iran. Hormuz will remain indispensable for as long as the Persian Gulf produces and Asia buys. Iran’s wider geography depends on whether the pipelines, railways, and grids of the coming decades are built across it. Increasingly, they are being built elsewhere. That choice is now being made in concrete.
Aidin Panahi is an energy expert and member of the Iran Prosperity Project. Follow him on X at @Aidin_FreeIran.
Image: Jelger Groeneveld via Wikimedia Commons
