The Strait that Shook the World
From fertilisers to helium, the Third Gulf War is redrawing the map of who pays and who profits.
Foreign Affairs Newsletter
Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 158 - April 19, 2026
Strategic Atlas, the monthly series dedicated to paid subscribers, whose first issue focused on Mexico, returns with a new report on April 30, dedicated to Vietnam.
Today, to understand the future geopolitical balance of Asia - which is increasingly at the center of global competition - one must inevitably look to Hanoi as well.
With its nearly 100 million inhabitants, a strategic location, and a historical ability to navigate among the great powers, Vietnam could prove to be the tipping point in the tug-of-war between Beijing and Washington.
This issue will also feature a dedicated contribution from former British Ambassador to Vietnam, offering an inside perspective on how diplomacy actually operates within the country’s political system and culture.
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The conflict has entered its fifth week, and its consequences are rippling outward far beyond the Gulf.
The pattern, familiar from other episodes of global disruption — the pandemic of 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — is by now well established: winners and losers, widening inequalities between nations and between social strata within them.
The global export of inflation on one side; the entrenchment of economic power on the other.
A Chokepoint Unlike Any Other
The strategy pursued by the Islamic Republic of Iran since the Israeli-American strike of 28 February 2026 — the opening act of the Third Gulf War — has thrust the Strait of Hormuz back to the centre of geopolitical reckoning as an indispensable artery of the world’s oil supply.
The waterway is barely 33 kilometres wide; its navigable lanes narrow to two corridors of roughly three kilometres each, one inbound, one outbound.
Through them flows one fifth of the crude oil traded globally, accounting for approximately 30 percent of worldwide primary energy consumption.
When the flow through a node of this magnitude is disrupted, entire economies are forced to reconfigure their energy priorities.
But the consequences extend far beyond the price of fuel at the pump.
Our Daily Bread
We are accustomed to overlooking the degree to which the petroleum century, so frequently declared over, persists because hydrocarbons permeate, directly or otherwise, virtually every activity of our hyperindustrial societies.
The ramifications surface in the most unexpected places.
Consider food.
Urea is the most widely used nitrogen-based fertiliser in agriculture.
Its industrial production is an intensely energy-hungry process, wholly dependent on natural gas.
This is where the Gulf asserts its centrality: the region produces approximately 40 percent of the world’s exported urea and 20 percent of its ammonia.
Roughly 30 percent of global fertiliser exports and 20 percent of liquefied natural gas pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Even sulphur, a byproduct of oil refining and an essential input in fertiliser production, originates in the Gulf for nearly half of the world’s supply.
A single month of closure, arriving on the eve of the planting season across the northern hemisphere, is sufficient to threaten a widespread shortfall in crops that depend heavily on nitrogen fertilisers: maize, wheat and rice — the grains that sustain the greater part of humanity.
The impact would be felt across the world’s leading agricultural producers, from Brazil, India and South Africa to the major European growers, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Alternative suppliers — Russia, China and the United States among them — have little spare capacity and are structurally unable to compensate for a disruption of this magnitude.
When natural gas becomes expensive, fertiliser prices follow.
Combined with the increased cost of the petroleum that powers farm machinery and cold-chain logistics, this burden ultimately falls upon the price of food, where energy accounts for roughly 50 percent of total cost.
For the approximately one billion inhabitants of the wealthy world, the consequence is inflation. For much of the rest, it is hunger.
The alimentary cost of the war is unevenly distributed.
India, with a population of 1.4 billion, is among the most acutely exposed.
The region at greatest risk, however, remains sub-Saharan Africa, where even in ordinary circumstances many countries apply quantities of fertiliser wholly inadequate to meet nutritional needs.
Paradoxically, the food security of the Gulf states themselves has been thrown into question.
The Arab Gulf imports 90 percent of the food it consumes. Under normal conditions, 70 percent of the food supply reaching Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates passes through the Strait of Hormuz and arrives at the port of Jebel Ali in Abu Dhabi, one of the largest container terminals in the world.
Since the outbreak of hostilities, part of this flow has been rerouted through the ports of Fujairah and Sohar, but both are significantly undersized for the volumes involved. Cargo is being redirected overland by truck, at greater cost, with longer lead times and diminished throughput.
Iran, which has suspended its own exports since the conflict began, was, until recently, the principal supplier of fresh fruit and vegetables to the United Arab Emirates.
The Logistics of a World Under Strain
The effects of the Hormuz blockade are compounded by the precarious situation at the Strait of Bab el-Mandab, the other critical bottleneck of the Gulf-Red Sea system, on which roughly one third of global maritime trade depends.
The Houthi militia has been relatively quiet in the opening weeks of the conflict, but its capacity to strike vessels transiting to and from Suez remains formidable.
With the exception of China’s COSCO, the major shipping lines — Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd — have suspended all transits through Hormuz and are giving Bab el-Mandab a wide berth.
The only viable alternative is the circumnavigation of Africa, which adds approximately 3,500 nautical miles to each voyage, several additional weeks at sea and upward of one million dollars in extra fuel costs.
These expenses are passed on, in large measure, to consumers.
Rounding the Cape of Good Hope ties up vessels for a materially longer period, thereby contracting the effective supply of global cargo capacity and driving container freight rates higher.
Over the course of these weeks, an average of 600 to 700 ships have been immobilised, representing roughly 10 percent of the world’s total cargo capacity.
Gulf ports, either shut down entirely or operating at severely reduced throughput, normally handle some 14 million containers annually, carrying chemicals, polymers, metals, construction materials and consumer goods.
The disruption has reached sectors that rarely attract attention: aluminium smelters in Qatar and Bahrain together supply close to 10 percent of the world’s output.
Qatar, the second-largest exporter of helium after the United States, produces approximately one third of the global total at the Ras Laffan industrial complex, which has been repeatedly targeted by Iranian drones and missiles.
Helium is indispensable across a range of industries, from cryogenics and welding to nuclear fusion research and particle acceleration. No other producer can make good the shortfall.
The war has also disrupted overflights of the Gulf, with airspace partially or wholly closed across Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE.
Semiconductors, electronic components, medical supplies, perishable goods: these are categories of cargo that routinely travel in the holds of passenger aircraft and dedicated freighters.
Longer routings require more fuel, which reduces usable payload capacity.
Jet fuel has risen by more than 70 percent since the onset of hostilities. The cost of air freight between Asia and Europe has increased by approximately 50 percent, compared with 25 percent on Asia-United States routes.
The outcome is a global air cargo network that is simultaneously more expensive, slower and less reliable.
The situation is further aggravated by the continued closure of Russian-Ukrainian airspace to the north: two fronts of the same encompassing conflict have effectively bisected the globe along a longitudinal axis, disrupting some of the planet’s busiest flight corridors.
Who Pays, and Who Profits
The war has struck the economies of Europe and Asia more swiftly and severely than the American economy, owing to their greater dependence on Gulf hydrocarbons, their geographic proximity and their exposure to the affected maritime and air routes.
An analysis of fifteen economies finds that Italy bears the heaviest burden from rising energy costs. At the opposite extreme stand Canada and Norway, hydrocarbon exporters whose revenues benefit from elevated prices.
Within Asia, India, South Korea and Japan are the most acutely affected.
China, though also a significant importer of Gulf energy, has accumulated substantial strategic reserves and is partially offsetting the shortfall through increased imports from Russia.
The United States is not immune.
America has no supply shortage, but oil and gas are internationally priced commodities: in March, with crude trading at 110 dollars per barrel, petrol rose to nearly 3.9 dollars per gallon from 2.92 in mid-February.
This fresh inflationary wave compounds the structural price pressures that took hold in the post-pandemic economy, and falls with particular severity on lower-income households, which depend on the automobile for 80 percent of their daily travel.
At the financial level, the war’s impact is more concentrated.
Foreign direct investment in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries generates returns three to four times higher than comparable investments in developed markets. American companies alone operate approximately 3,000 sites in the region. This concentration of capital means that, for those who can sustain operations, the conflict yields extraordinary rents. For those who cannot, the losses compound.
But war does not create wealth. It redistributes it along pre-existing lines of force. And these, as invariably, tend toward concentration.
In March 2026 alone, the major oil and gas companies generated approximately 23 billion dollars in windfall profits, equivalent to 30 million dollars per hour.
Should current price levels persist, annual estimates exceed 200 billion dollars. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom benefit almost automatically: physical scarcity translates into price, and price into margin.
The more significant development, however, occurs where volatility itself becomes an asset. The major integrated companies and energy traders amplify their returns through arbitrage, storage plays and geographic price differentials.
Equinor and BP have reported trading results above expectations, confirming that it is not production alone that generates rent, but the capacity to navigate uncertainty.
The second principal beneficiary is the defence industry.
War consumes military capital and necessitates its replenishment: missiles, missile defence systems, drones, munitions. RTX Corporation has more than doubled in value over recent years; Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics have risen by more than 50 percent.
Alongside the traditional contractors, a new generation of beneficiaries has emerged, less conspicuous but increasingly central: Palantir Technologies and CrowdStrike are recording rising demand for intelligence, surveillance and cybersecurity services, confirming that contemporary conflict is conducted as much in the information domain as on the battlefield.
A third tier, less visible but economically significant, encompasses fertiliser producers and the chemical industry.
The Hormuz blockade disrupts roughly one third of global fertiliser flows, raising prices and margins for producers elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the increase in hydrocarbon costs improves the competitiveness of alternative fuels, particularly biofuels, favouring European and Asian operators active in those segments.
In a global system that presents itself as frictionless and interchangeable, thirty-three kilometres of contested water are sufficient to demonstrate that not everything can be substituted.
When geography reasserts itself, the bill is never shared equitably.
It is paid, as it has always been, by those least positioned to refuse it.