The passages of Petra have been carved by footsteps for more than 2,000 years. On a morning in March 2026, they were empty. The souvenir stalls were shuttered, the horse handlers had gone home, and the cancellation rate for tourist bookings had reached one hundred percent. In Tokyo and Seoul, meanwhile, equity traders were watching circuit breakers trip on stock exchanges as energy stocks cratered and manufacturers stared down input costs that had no precedent in living memory. In Mumbai, refinery operators were absorbing margin compression so severe that HSBC downgraded the entire Indian equities sector in a single note. In Dhaka and Karachi, the question was no longer about margins it was about whether LNG cargoes would arrive at all.
Different cities, different crises, different vocabularies for the same disruption. What connects them is 21 miles of water between Iran and Oman – the Strait of Hormuz – and the decision, taken on February 28, 2026, to turn it from a shipping lane into a weapon.
The chokepoint
The scale of what the Strait of Hormuz carries in normal times is difficult to internalise. Twenty million barrels of oil per day — roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption and more than a quarter of all seaborne oil trade. Eighty million tonnes of LNG annually, including nearly all of Qatar's exports. Up to thirty percent of globally traded fertilisers. In 2024, 84 per cent of the crude oil flowing through the strait was destined for Asian markets, with China, India, Japan, and South Korea collectively accounting for 69 per cent of all Hormuz crude flows.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran – Operation Epic Fury – killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and targeting Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure. Iran's response was total. Hundreds of ballistic missiles and thousands of drones fanned across the Middle East. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps broadcast a message over VHF radio to every vessel in the area: No ship was permitted to pass. Within days, tanker traffic had collapsed. Over 150 vessels anchored outside the strait. MSC, Maersk, and Hapag-Lloyd suspended transits. The International Energy Agency characterised what followed as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
In the economics of global trade, unreliability is indistinguishable from closure. The strait did not need to be permanently shut to break the supply chains that depend on it. It only needed to become unsafe.
By April 13, the United States had imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports, creating what analysts now describe as a dual blockade: Iran controls access from the Gulf side, Washington controls access to Iran's commercial maritime outlets. Transit volumes, 62 days in, remain at approximately five per cent of pre-war levels. Baker Hughes executives project that full operating capacity will not return before the second half of 2026. A Dallas Federal Reserve survey found eighty percent of oil and gas executives expect the closure to persist past August.
Asia's wound
The geography of exposure is not evenly distributed. The United States, as a net energy exporter, absorbs the Hormuz closure as an inflationary pressure and a foreign policy problem. For the major Asian importers, it is something more fundamental: a threat to the physical inputs their economies cannot function without.
Japan sits at the sharpest end of this exposure. The country imports approximately 95 per cent of its crude oil from the Middle East, with close to three-quarters of that moving through Hormuz. Before the war, Japan was absorbing 1.6 million barrels per day through the strait. The closure has widened its trade deficit, weakened the yen, and pushed an economy already navigating demographic headwinds toward what analysts describe as stagflation territory. The Nikkei 225 fell approximately eight percent in the first two weeks of the conflict. Japan has approached Saudi Arabia to negotiate emergency supply increases a signal that even a country with 254 days of strategic crude reserves in storage cannot simply wait this out indefinitely.
South Korea's position is structurally similar. It sources roughly 68 per cent of its crude imports through Hormuz – around 1.7 million barrels per day – and holds approximately 210 days of reserve coverage. The KOSPI index declined over eleven percent in the conflict's first weeks, with a circuit breaker triggered on March 4. For South Korea, the war also strikes at the energy intensity of its export industries: semiconductor fabrication, petrochemicals, and steel are all acutely sensitive to sustained energy cost inflation in ways that erode competitiveness that took decades to build.
For Japan and South Korea, the reserve buffer is real but finite. Beyond it lies a supply shock with few historical parallels and limited policy tools to offset it.
India's exposure combines the worst of the structural vulnerabilities. Approximately sixty percent of its oil imports and more than half of its natural gas supplies move through Hormuz. The LNG dependency is particularly acute because India's gas contracts are substantially Brent-indexed – meaning a crude spike simultaneously raises oil import costs and LNG contract prices, creating a dual physical and financial shock. India's top refining operators have absorbed significant margin compression. The manufacturing sector, which the government has spent years trying to develop as an engine of growth, faces sustained input cost pressure that narrows its resilience window considerably.
Further south, the closure hits hardest where it is least reported – food security. The Persian Gulf accounts for roughly thirty to 35 per cent of global urea exports and 20 to 30 per cent of global ammonia exports, the chemical inputs that modern agricultural production depends on. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates account for 99 per cent of Pakistan's LNG imports, 72 per cent of Bangladesh's, and 53 percent of India's. Qatar halted LNG production at Ras Laffan – one of the world's largest gas production terminals – after Iranian drones struck its facilities. India subsequently reduced production at three urea plants. That is not an abstract supply chain adjustment. It is the beginning of a chain that ends at the price of food.
China occupies a different position – materially exposed but more insulated than its neighbours. Beijing holds approximately 1.2 billion barrels in strategic crude reserves, providing roughly 108 days of import cover even under zero new inflows. Roughly 40 per cent of its oil imports pass through Hormuz, but its coal-heavy energy mix and domestic production capacity provide buffers that Tokyo and Seoul simply do not have. More significantly, Iran sells approximately 90 per cent of its crude to China – a commercial dependency that has given Chinese-flagged vessels practical passage through the strait even as Western shipping retreats. Beijing condemned the war and called for de-escalation while quietly extracting bilateral passage rights for its own fleet. It declined to join Washington's coalition to militarily reopen the strait. The calculation was transparent to every capital that watched it.
Southeast Asia has experienced its own version of the shock, filtered through energy and labour markets. Indonesia and Malaysia, as energy producers, have been comparatively cushioned but both have deployed expensive subsidy regimes to absorb domestic price pressure. Malaysia, which has the largest Persian diaspora in Southeast Asia and extensive political ties with Tehran, condemned the US-Israeli strikes more forcefully than most ASEAN members and secured Iranian permission for its vessels to transit. Ethiopian Airlines – whose routes depend critically on Gulf hub connectivity – lost approximately $137 million per week. The ripples from 21 miles of Iranian-controlled water reached Cape Town.
The kingdom at the fault line
Jordan's position in this crisis is distinct in a way that receives insufficient attention in analyses focused on energy markets and great power competition. Japan and South Korea are paying a price measured in equity indices and trade deficits. Jordan is paying a price measured in missile fragments in the streets of Irbid, empty hotels above Petra, and an electricity grid running on emergency gas imports it was never designed to afford.
The kingdom is not a belligerent. It did not launch a strike, sign an alliance with either side, or choose the moment for this confrontation. And yet the Jordanian Armed Forces have spent 62 days running an active air defence campaign over their own cities. Iran launched at least 262 missiles and drones against what Jordanian military officials described as ‘vital sites' on Jordanian territory – not projectiles transiting toward Israel, as Tehran claimed, but deliberate strikes on Jordanian military infrastructure. The targets included Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, a THAAD radar installation subsequently damaged and requiring US replacement, and a German Bundeswehr field camp in eastern Jordan. Civil defence teams logged 414 debris incidents. Fragments landed in residential neighbourhoods of Irbid, a city of 800,000 people. An intercept was conducted above Aqaba – Jordan's only port, its singular maritime gateway.
Iraq-based militia group Saraya Awliya al-Dam claimed direct drone strikes on Jordan in solidarity with Iran. Iran-aligned militias reportedly targeted five major Jordanian airbases. The US Embassy in Amman evacuated personnel as a precaution. Jordan's eastern flank along the Iraqi border – the sparse Badia desert corridor – remains structurally exposed to militia infiltration in ways that no diplomatic request to Baghdad has yet closed.
Japan and South Korea are paying in equity indices and trade deficits. Jordan is paying in missile fragments in the streets of Irbid and empty hotels above Petra.
The energy shock arrived differently in Jordan than in Asia, but no less severely. Israel suspended gas exports to Jordan during the peak combat phase – gas that had accounted for approximately eighty-five percent of Jordan's energy imports and generated roughly seventy percent of its domestic electricity. The suspension forced an emergency pivot to imported LNG through Aqaba's regasification terminal, at an additional cost of $120 to $140 million per month on a budget already running a deficit of $1.5 billion in the first half of 2025. The government raised fuel prices by eleven percent, introduced purchase limits on staple goods, and issued public reassurances about cargo arrivals at Aqaba – a detail that reveals the level of public anxiety governments do not normally need to manage. The price of ten litres of corn oil rose from ten to seventeen dollars. A bag of rice moved from one dollar to three.
Tourism, which contributes roughly 15 per cent of Jordan's GDP and serves as one of its primary hard-currency earners, has experienced a collapse with few precedents in the sector's history. The year had begun with record booking levels – business owners had reinvested, expanded, and taken on debt. March cancellations reached 100 per cent. Approximately 70 per cent of international flights into Jordan were suspended; the carriers maintaining service were Turkish Airlines, Lebanon's Middle East Airlines, Romania's Tarom, and Oman Air. April bookings ran 60 to 65 per cent below projections. May figures stand at 40 to 50 per cent below forecast, with Petra registering 50 per cent cancellations and rising. The Central Bank of Jordan reported tourism revenues of $1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026, down 4 per cent year-on-year – a figure that conceals a March decline of 23 per cent. The government has introduced interest-rate subsidies for hotels and restaurants taking loans to cover operating costs – life support for a sector that was, weeks earlier, celebrating its strongest year in memory.
Independent economic modelling places Jordan as the single most exposed non-belligerent importer in the world, with a projected 180-day cumulative GDP loss of -6.35 per cent – worse than Lebanon, Singapore, or Egypt. None of those countries are also intercepting missiles over their cities.
The shared architecture of pain
What connects the semiconductor plant in South Korea running at reduced output, the urea factory in India that has cut production, the rice trader in Amman who has tripled his prices, and the Bedouin guide in Petra who has not seen a tourist in six weeks is not political alignment or geographic proximity. It is structural dependence on a single piece of maritime infrastructure that the global economy built around and then forgot to protect.
For decades, the Strait of Hormuz was treated as a geographic constant – a chokepoint to be managed, not a weapon to be wielded. Energy planners, shipping executives, and financial risk teams modelled scenarios around its disruption but largely treated them as tail risks. What 2026 has demonstrated is that the strait does not need to be permanently closed to break the supply chains that depend on it. It only needs to become unreliable. In the economics of global trade, unreliability is indistinguishable from closure.
The geopolitical response to the closure has been revealing in its own right. A 38-nation coalition signed a statement supporting safe passage. France and Germany co-hosted diplomatic conferences. The UN Secretary General called for the strait to be opened. Russia and China vetoed the Security Council resolution. NATO allies – including Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Australia – declined Washington's invitation to militarily reopen the strait. Germany's defence minister stated plainly that ‘this is not our war.' Japan and South Korea, the two Asian economies most acutely exposed to the closure, signed the coalition statement while declining to send warships. The gap between strategic exposure and strategic action was noted in every capital that watched it, including Tehran.
The gap between which countries bear the cost of the Hormuz closure and which countries have agency over its resolution is the defining structural feature of this crisis.
China's conduct has been the most strategically instructive. Beijing condemned the war, called for de-escalation, extracted bilateral passage rights for its own fleet, declined to contribute to reopening efforts, and positioned itself – through its existing investments in Southeast Asian renewable energy infrastructure – as the responsible long-term alternative to an America whose foreign policy had just created the energy crisis the region was living through. That positioning required no military deployment. It required only that Washington create the problem and Beijing decline to help solve it. Analysts have noted that if the ceasefire breaks down and the closure persists, large parts of Asia face an economic recession – and China's relative insulation from that recession will speak for itself in years of economic diplomacy that follow.
For smaller states in Asia and the Levant alike, the lesson being absorbed in real time is uncomfortable. The post-war liberal economic order assumed that the great maritime commons were secured by a combination of US naval power and shared commercial interest in their openness. Both assumptions are now demonstrably conditional. US naval power can project into the strait; it cannot, in practice, reopen it without the coalition that allies have declined to join. And commercial interest, it turns out, is not uniformly distributed: some parties benefit from the disruption, and others have enough reserve capacity to wait it out in ways that weaker economies simply cannot.
Where this ends
Three trajectories remain plausible from day 62. Negotiations – mediated through Pakistan and the Omani channel – produce a framework. The strait reopens in stages. The risk premium embedded in energy futures begins to dissolve. For Jordan, this is the only path to meaningful near-term recovery – the fiscal breathing room it would create is not abstract given how few tools remain available to a government that has already raised fuel prices, cut subsidies, waived taxes, and introduced emergency loan support for its tourism sector. For South Korea and Japan, it means strategic reserve drawdowns that have not yet depleted can stop. For India, it means the fertiliser supply chain stabilises before the agricultural season is irreparably disrupted. This scenario is possible. It is, on current evidence, the least probable in the short term.
The second trajectory is the one currently being lived: prolonged volatility, a dual blockade that neither side can exit without appearing to concede, and a sustained state of structured uncertainty that compounds damage on the economies least equipped to absorb it. Oil prices stay elevated. Freight costs remain high. Insurance premiums price in ongoing risk. Tourism recovery is pushed to 2027. South Korea and Japan continue drawing down reserves while hedging for a deal. Jordan manages, as it has always managed – but the structural damage to a tourism sector leveraged for growth, to an energy budget absorbing a $140 million monthly shock, and to a fiscal position that began this crisis already stretched, compounds with each additional week.
The third trajectory requires less imagination than it did in February. Iran has threatened, through senior advisers, that its allies could extend the blockade to Bab al-Mandeb – the strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Analysts have described the simultaneous restriction of both straits as capable of blocking a quarter of the world's energy supply. UNCTAD has issued formal warnings. JPMorgan has stated publicly that oil prices still have room to rise. If escalation resumes at scale, the economies now managing a difficult situation would be managing an emergency. For Jordan – already absorbing direct strikes, energy shocks, a tourism collapse, and a widening fiscal gap – the distance between a difficult situation and an emergency is shorter than for any of its neighbours.
Conclusion
The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide. The distance between that chokepoint and a street market in Amman, a factory floor in Busan, or a rice paddy in Punjab is measured not in kilometres but in the length of a supply chain – and in 2026, that chain has been pulled taut to the point of breaking.
What this crisis has stripped away is an assumption so deeply embedded in the architecture of the global economy that it was rarely articulated: that the world's critical maritime corridors were effectively public goods, underwritten by a security order that could be relied upon. That assumption is now revealed as contingent, political, and breakable. The countries that will feel its absence most acutely are not the ones whose militaries are in the strait. They are the ones whose economies were built around the assumption that the strait would always be open – and who had neither the leverage to keep it open nor the resources to survive comfortably without it.
Japan's reserves are finite. India's fertiliser production cannot run on diplomatic optimism. Pakistan and Bangladesh have no alternative to the LNG supply chains that have gone quiet. And Jordan, which has intercepted missiles, absorbed price shocks, watched its tourism sector collapse, and asked its citizens to stop hoarding rice, is doing all of this because a decision was made – in Washington and Tel Aviv – that February 2026 was the moment. The bill, as it always does, has been sent to those who had the least say in the matter.
The author is a security analyst with decades of on-the-ground experience in the Middle East.