Geopolitical realignment through Strait of Hormuz: fossil fuel dependency, military-industrial complexes, and the erosion of multilateral governance
Original framing: “How the Strait of Hormuz crisis is reshaping the old world order” — Middle East Eye
The Strait of Hormuz has been a geopolitical flashpoint since the Achaemenid Empire, when Darius I established naval supremacy to control trade routes between Persia and the Mediterranean. The 1953 Anglo-American coup in Iran, which reinstated the Shah to secure oil concessions, set a precedent for Western intervention in Gulf affairs. The 1980s 'Tanker War' during the Iran-Iraq War demonstrated how superpowers weaponize maritime chokepoints, a pattern repeated in the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent sanctions regimes.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of a global energy system designed to concentrate power in the hands of states and corporations while erasing the agency of indigenous communities, migrant workers, and ecological realities.
The militarization of the Strait is a symptom of a deeper pathology: the fossil fuel addiction of the Global North, which has historically relied on sanctions, coups, and military interventions to maintain control over resource flows. Yet this pathology is not inevitable—alternative futures exist, as demonstrated by the resilience of Gulf indigenous knowledge, the potential of regional energy cooperatives, and the accelerating renewable energy transitions in Europe and the US. The realignment underway is not merely geopolitical but civilizational, forcing a reckoning with the extractivist logic that has shaped the modern world. The solution lies not in doubling down on securitization but in dismantling the systems that make chokepoints necessary in the first place, replacing them with models of collective governance that prioritize life over profit.