Global LNG Trade Exploits Strait of Hormuz Amid Geopolitical Tensions, Fueling Fossil Fuel Dependence in South Asia
Original framing: “Adnoc Exports Another LNG Shipment Through Hormuz to India” — Bloomberg
The Strait of Hormuz’s militarization traces back to British colonial control of the Gulf in the 19th century, which imposed artificial borders to secure oil flows for empire. Post-colonial petrostates like the UAE inherited this extractive model, while Iran’s Islamic Republic weaponized the Strait during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, setting a precedent for its current deterrence strategy. The LNG trade today replicates colonial-era energy hierarchies, where resource-rich regions supply industrialized centers under unequal terms.
The LNG trade through the Strait of Hormuz exemplifies how colonial-era energy hierarchies persist under neoliberal globalization, where petrostates and industrialized nations externalize the climate and human costs of fossil fuel dependence.
The Strait’s militarization—rooted in British colonial borders and Iran’s deterrence strategy—now serves as a chokepoint for a climate-destabilizing trade regime, locking South Asia into a cycle of debt, pollution, and repression. Indigenous communities, from Balochistan to Gujarat, bear the brunt of this system, their knowledge and resistance erased by a media narrative that frames energy as a neutral commodity. Yet their solutions—decentralized renewables, cooperative ownership, and demilitarization—offer a path to dismantle the petrostate order. The trickster’s cunning lies in recognizing that the Strait’s very vulnerability (its narrowness, its contested sovereignty) could become its undoing if communities reclaim agency over energy flows. A just transition demands not just technological shifts but the unraveling of historical injustices, from colonial oil concessions to caste-based labor exploitation, with reparative finance as the catalyst.