By Kenneth Maxwell
A crisis at the Strait of Hormuz was always coming. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 10, 2026 that Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline and the UAE’s smaller Habshan-Fujairah pipeline are now among the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the world economy, the only overland arteries capable of bypassing the Persian Gulf’s chokepoint while more than a thousand ships sit stranded in its waters. The Saudi Aramco chief executive described it as, by far, the biggest crisis the region’s oil-and-gas industry has ever faced.
Yet to anyone who has spent time studying the deep history of the Persian Gulf, this moment carries a powerful sense of déjà vu. The geography has not changed. The strategic imperatives have not changed. What has changed are the players and the technology. The fundamental problem of controlling access to the Persian Gulf’s trading arteries is as old as recorded commerce itself, and no figure in modern history understood this more acutely than Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, the Armenian-Ottoman financier known to the world as “Mr. Five Per Cent.”
The Portuguese Template: Choke Points as Strategic Instruments
Five centuries before the current crisis, the Portuguese were grappling with precisely the same geographic challenge and solving it with the tools available to a 16th-century maritime empire. When Vasco da Gama’s fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and reached the Malabar coast of India, the Portuguese initiated a seaborne revolution in world trade. Within a generation, they had established a chain of fortified trading posts stretching from Mozambique to Japan, sustained by a warrior culture and a ruthless military commitment.
Their most enduring strategic contribution, however, was not their fortresses or their cannons. It was their identification and mapping of the world’s critical maritime chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz still, half a millennium later, one of the world’s most vital maritime transportation corridors and the Strait of Malacca were the twin pillars of Portuguese commercial power in the East. With superior ships and artillery, the Portuguese seized these key nodes and held them by force, establishing what can only be described as a toll-gate system for Asian trade.
In 1515, Afonso de Albuquerque returned to Hormuz and built the fortress that would anchor Portuguese power in the Gulf for over a century. Together with their positions at Muscat in Oman and Bahrain where they constructed a massive stronghold first occupied in 1521 and enlarged in 1559 the Portuguese created a network of control points from which they could monitor and tax the entire flow of goods between the Indian Ocean and the eastern Mediterranean. Hormuz, with its cosmopolitan population of Arabs, Persians, Indians, Jews, and Christians, was where Portuguese command of the customs house placed a small European power at the crossroads of three great civilizations.
The Portuguese also established a system of “cartazas” essentially protection documents granting safe passage to allied vessels while leaving enemies vulnerable to attack. It was, in modern parlance, a protection racket built on naval supremacy. While there were no European competitors, the system worked. The Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company that followed understood the lesson well: whoever controls the straits controls the trade.
Portuguese control of Bahrain ended in 1602 when Shah Abbas of the Safavid dynasty expelled them. Their fortress at Hormuz fell twenty years later to a joint Persian and English force. But the strategic logic they had established did not disappear with them. It simply passed to new hands and has never ceased to be contested.
Gulbenkian and the Architecture of Modern Middle East Oil
When the world oil industry began its extraordinary expansion at the turn of the twentieth century, it inherited the same geographic logic that had governed trade for millennia. The question was no longer who controlled the straits for spices and silk, but who controlled the pipelines and concessions for petroleum. And for nearly half a century, that question was answered largely by one man operating from the shadows: Calouste Gulbenkian.
Gulbenkian was born in 1869 into a wealthy Ottoman Armenian merchant family. He visited an oilfield only once in his lifetime, a four-week trip to Baku in 1888, yet he would shape the architecture of Middle Eastern oil production for the next six decades. He never ran a drill. He never managed a refinery. What he did, with extraordinary patience and precision, was broker the deals that determined who got access to the oil and on what terms. For this he extracted a five percent stake in virtually everything he touched, becoming — by the time of his death in Lisbon in 1955 — the richest man in the world.
The instrument through which Gulbenkian built his empire was the “red line” agreement of 1928, which brought together BP, ExxonMobil, Total, and Royal Dutch-Shell in a joint venture — the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) — to cooperate across the entire former territory of the Ottoman Empire in Asia. This was the foundational compact of modern Middle Eastern oil, and it bore Gulbenkian’s fingerprints throughout. He had spent fifteen years positioning himself to be indispensable to every party in the negotiation. His self-imposed rule of independence, never tying himself irrevocably to any single company, gave him the leverage to be the honest broker that no one entirely trusted but everyone needed.
Critically for our present purposes, Gulbenkian also ensured that the vast oil fields of Mosul and Kirkuk fell on the Iraqi side of the Turkish-Iraqi border after the First World War keeping them within a region that was effectively a British protectorate. A well-placed Ottoman connection and a timely bribe ensured the outcome, as did Clemenceau’s willingness to trade French claims on the Rhineland coal for access to Mosul’s oil. Then Gulbenkian waited. He financed the construction of the pipelines connecting Mosul to the Mediterranean. In 1927 the most productive oil field in the world was discovered near Kirkuk. In October 1934, the first crude oil reached Haifa along a 662-mile pipeline from Kirkuk. Gulbenkian had waited forty years to see the return on his investment.
The pipeline to Haifa ran from the oil fields of northern Iraq across Syria and Jordan to the Mediterranean coast. A second branch ran to Tripoli in Lebanon. This infrastructure was the physical expression of Gulbenkian’s strategic vision: oil from the interior of the Middle East could reach Western markets without crossing the Persian Gulf at all. It supplied British and American forces throughout the Second World War. It was severed in 1948 when Iraq refused to pump oil to the newly established State of Israel.
Pipelines as Geopolitical Instruments: A Recurring Pattern
The history of Middle Eastern pipelines is, in microcosm, the history of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Every pipeline reflects a political calculation about alliances, rivalries, and vulnerabilities. Every closure or diversion reflects a shift in those calculations. The current crisis at Hormuz has forced the world to rely on two specific pipelines, Saudi Arabia’s East-West artery to Yanbu on the Red Sea, and the UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to the Gulf of Oman, that were themselves built precisely because of earlier Persian Gulf crises.
The Saudi East-West pipeline was constructed in the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, when tanker traffic through the Gulf came under threat for the first time in the modern era. The lesson that Albuquerque had grasped in 1507 that maritime chokepoints are strategic vulnerabilities as much as they are strategic assets had been relearned at enormous cost. Saudi Arabia spent decades and billions of dollars building overland capacity specifically to hedge against the day when the Strait of Hormuz might be closed.
That day has now arrived. The Saudi pipeline, 746 miles long and capable of carrying up to seven million barrels per day, has never run at full capacity for an extended period. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, partially constructed by a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corp., carries up to 1.8 million barrels per day. Together they represent the only significant bypass routes available. Yet as analysts have noted, they cannot replace the volume normally carried by tankers through the Strait, and they present their own vulnerabilities, the UAE port of Fujairah was struck by a drone attack only last week.
The parallels with Gulbenkian’s era are striking. He too operated in a world where the physical infrastructure for moving oil was perpetually contested, sabotaged, and redirected by political forces. The pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa became a casualty of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Trans-Arabian Pipeline — TAPLINE — which once carried Saudi crude all the way to the Lebanese Mediterranean coast, was progressively shut down between 1976 and 2002 as regional hostilities made it impossible to operate. Each closure forced a recalculation of routes and dependencies.
The Abraham Accords and the Return of Old Geographies
The Abraham Accords of 2020, the normalization agreements between Israel and the UAE, followed by Bahrain, represented, among other things, a potential return to the geographic logic of the Gulbenkian era. My analysis in my 2020 article noted that the accords offered a plausible path toward reconstructing and reactivating the very infrastructure that Gulbenkian had built: overland pipelines connecting the oil fields of the Middle East interior to Mediterranean ports without transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
Haifa which in the 1930s was the Mediterranean terminus for Iraqi crude, and which Gulbenkian’s pipeline had supplied until 1948 was identified as the ideal terminal for Saudi oil if normalization extended to the Kingdom. Dubai’s DP World expressed immediate interest in partnering on Haifa port operations. The logic was exactly what Gulbenkian had understood: the overland route from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, bypassing both Hormuz and the Suez Canal, would be cheaper, more secure, and more strategically valuable than any maritime alternative.
The current Hormuz crisis has given that logic an almost brutal clarity. Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain have oil stranded in the Persian Gulf with no easy exit. The pipelines that do exist cannot handle the volume. And Iran has not only blocked the strait but has signaled its willingness to attack the overland infrastructure that bypasses it. The strategic geography that the Portuguese identified five hundred years ago, that Gulbenkian monetized in the twentieth century, and that the Abraham Accords were beginning to reshape, is now the central fact of the global energy crisis.
The Long Continuity
What the current crisis reveals, above all, is the extraordinary durability of geographic logic in international affairs. The Strait of Hormuz mattered to the Portuguese because it was where the Persian Gulf met the Indian Ocean, the junction of the overland and maritime trading systems of Asia. It matters today for precisely the same reason, except that the commodity at stake is crude oil rather than pepper and cloves, and the tankers are supertankers rather than carracks.
Gulbenkian understood this continuity intuitively. He was, as the historian Jonathan Conlin has written, a spider at the center of a global web, an oilman who thought in decades and in maps. He grasped that the real value of Middle Eastern oil lay not just in the oil itself but in the infrastructure that moved it: the pipelines, the concessions, the agreements that determined who could pump, who could transit, and who could export. He spent his career building that infrastructure and defending his stake in it through litigation, negotiation, and the patient cultivation of relationships across governments and corporations.
The lesson of both the Portuguese thalassocracy and the Gulbenkian era is the same: whoever controls the choke points controls the trade, and whoever controls the trade controls the geopolitical balance. The Saudi and Emirati pipelines are the contemporary equivalent of the Portuguese fortress at Hormuz, the physical expression of the same strategic imperative. They were built by states that understood, as the Portuguese had understood five centuries earlier, that dependence on a single maritime passage is an existential vulnerability.
The deeper question raised by the current crisis is whether the Abraham Accords framework, the emerging architecture of Gulf-Israeli normalization can survive and mature into the overland economic corridor that both Gulbenkian’s legacy and the region’s geography suggest is its natural destiny. A pipeline from Iraqi or Saudi fields to the Israeli Mediterranean coast, an energy corridor connecting the Gulf to Europe through Jordan and Israel, a Haifa that once again serves as the terminus for Middle Eastern crude: these are not fantasies. They are the restoration of a geography that existed within living memory, severed not by economics but by war and politics, and now potentially restorable by the same forces that severed it.
Whether that restoration occurs will depend, as it always has, on decisions made by a small number of actors with enormous stakes and competing interests. Gulbenkian would have recognized the situation perfectly. He might even have recognized the solution, a patient, long-term, quietly brokered deal that served everyone’s interests just enough to hold together. What he would not have recognized is the scale of what is now at stake, or the speed at which events are moving. The age of chaos does not allow for forty-year investment horizons. But the geography is the same.
Editor’s Note: The October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel should be read as a strategic intervention against the Saudi-Israeli normalization process specifically because that process would have legitimized the Haifa route, an overland corridor from the Gulf to the Mediterranean that, unlike Hormuz, lies beyond Iran’s effective reach.
A functioning Haifa route backed by Saudi normalization would have directly undercut Tehran’s most powerful geopolitical lever.
The attack froze normalization, prevented the corridor from advancing, and preserved Iran’s stranglehold on Hormuz as the central vulnerability of global energy markets.
Kenneth Maxwell on Global Trends: An Historian of the 18th Century Looks at the Contemporary World