"One command and prices worldwide rise," Iran's most powerful retaliation first accidentally harmed the workers.

In an era where global division of labor is becoming increasingly fine-grained and cross-border supply chains are growing by the day, some “eggs” are destined to be put into one basket. (A photo released on March 11 shows a Thai cargo ship being attacked and catching fire in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. Photo source: Thailand Navy.)

By Xu Xinmeng

For this stretch of time, anime-and-manga fans never expected that the war unfolding in Iran would literally bring the sky down on their heads.

After Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the “tuna” they wanted to buy unexpectedly saw prices surge across the board.

Many people for the first time realized that the parts of the figurines on your table, acrylic display stands, keychains you carry with you, the self-sealed baggies for “baji” (stickers), and BJD dolls you play with every day… are actually all components made through refining and processing crude oil.

Japanese acrylic that’s joked about as “more expensive than gold.” With oil prices rising, its prices have naturally climbed as well.

At the same time, because of raw material shortages, a “plastic bag rush-buying” trend has emerged among Korean residents, forcing supermarkets to introduce purchase limits.

In India, the price of tomatoes has skyrocketed by 700%. A family got into a fight after putting two extra tomatoes in the cooking; the wife left home. Farmers were attacked, and the perpetrator took all his tomatoes.

Tomato price hikes—local media report screenshots.

Although their appearances differ, all of the above are the results of the Strait of Hormuz stopping operations for a full month.

This narrowest strait in the world connects the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Sea, serving as the essential passageway for 25% of the world’s seaborne oil and 20% of its liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Crude oil is the raw material for producing plastic, while nitrogen fertilizer made from processed natural gas is the lifeline for crops.

After fighting broke out at the end of February, a large number of cargo vessels anchored at the Strait of Hormuz while waiting for the exit, global crude oil prices rose 45%, reaching more than $100 per barrel.

With every domino you set in motion, the Strait of Hormuz has the ability to do exactly that. As long as it stays closed for even a day, the effects transmitted along the supply chain will continue to shake markets around the world.

On March 21, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a harsh warning: if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, he will “attack and destroy” Iran’s power stations.

Screenshot from a report by NPR (National Public Radio of the United States).

But a week later, there are still no signs of restoration here.

A superpower has been hopping mad for so long—why can’t it seem to get a grip on the Strait of Hormuz? In wartime, is the geographic constraint of “this road belongs to me and this tree gets planted by me” really unsolvable?

Eggs destined to be put into one basket

On March 26, the chairman of the Civil Affairs Committee of Iran’s Islamic Parliament said, “We are seeking a bill that can both legally safeguard Iran’s sovereignty, dominion, and regulatory rights over the Strait of Hormuz, and also generate revenue for the nation by imposing transit fees.”

This puts the Strait of Hormuz into a kind of “Schrödinger’s unsealing” state—while Iran can loosen its grip and allow oil to flow out, every drop of oil must still be charged a “toll,” and the initiative is always in its hands.

Some people have lamented that the reason the blockade’s impact is so huge is “putting the eggs in one basket,” which is what has led to Iran’s being able to control others now.

Is that really the case?

From the perspective of network science, the complexity of energy transport lies in the fact that the transportation network contains many unavoidable “nodes,” such as oil fields, refineries, storage facilities, and consumer markets; and to connect these “points,” it naturally gives rise to “edges” like cruise routes, straits, and canals.

A study published in Frontiers of Physics shows that oil export regions have long been concentrated in the Middle East, Russia, North America, and so on, while import regions are concentrated in East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North America.

This means that most oil transport must move by sea, and it flows over an imbalanced network.

On this network, the appearance of “choke points” is inevitable. In 2025, a study published in Nature Communications analyzed 24 major global seaborne choke-point corridors and systematically assessed their interruption risks and economic consequences.

Based on consequences ranging from least severe to most severe, these 24 choke points are divided into three categories: first, there are almost no feasible bypass options; second, bypass is possible, but the bypass cost is extremely high; third, it is relatively easy to reroute and replace.

According to an analysis by Caixin, the Strait of Hormuz is the most typical “narrow-waterway-type systemic bottleneck” in the world—namely the first category of choke point. It is extremely efficient in peacetime; once it enters a conflict state, as long as there is harassment, attacks on ships, turning back, delays, and insurance premium surcharges, it is enough to create an effect close to a “semi-blockade” at the market level.

In an era where global division of labor is becoming increasingly fine-grained and cross-border supply chains are growing by the day, some “eggs” are destined to be put into one basket.

For example, besides the plastics mentioned at the start, the upstream raw materials of many pharmaceutical intermediates and organic solvents (such as benzene, toluene, and ethylene) are also oil. The over-the-counter antipyretics acetaminophen and ibuprofen, and amoxicillin commonly kept at home, will all be affected.

When natural gas hubs and power-generation facilities are damaged, various bulk-commodity raw material trades get stuck together as well.

In early March, Iranian ballistic missile strikes caused a fire at a liquefied natural gas receiving terminal located in Qatar, which resulted in an emergency suspension of operations on March 2; around one-fifth of global LNG was thereby blocked.

Because fertilizer’s raw material is natural gas, about 46% of global urea supply and about 29% of ammonia are being constrained at the Strait of Hormuz. Reports say that in Brazil, which relies on imported fertilizer, farmers are about to miss the spring planting season.

The hardest place to find a true “alternative”

If the Strait of Hormuz is so important, over decades of time why hasn’t there been a “Plan B” that could replace it and improve resilience to risk?

Actually, it’s not that no one looked—it’s that the history of “finding an alternative” is almost a history of “wild ideas.”

People first truly felt what a “Strait of Hormuz crisis” was like in the 1980s.

During the Iran-Iraq War, oil tankers at sea became key targets. Frenzied bombing caused the volume of oil exports to plunge from 2.6 million barrels per day to 600,000–700,000 barrels per day.

It was also then that Saudi Arabia, having taken the lessons to heart, built a nationwide “east-west pipeline” to connect to Yanbu Port on the Red Sea. It is about 1,200 kilometers long.

Over the following decades, this pipeline spent most of its time operating at low load, jokingly called “an expensive insurance.” Until this year’s outbreak of hostilities, it finally ran at full load for the first time.

Besides that, Dubai planned in 2008 to build a canal about 180 kilometers long—starting from along the Gulf coast, passing through the Hajar Mountains, and reaching Fujairah Port in the Gulf of Oman—fully bypassing the Strait.

But the scale of this project was on the order of moving mountains. The average height of the Hajar Mountains is about 1,220 meters, including Oman’s highest peak, Jabal Shams, at as high as 3,352 meters.

Moreover, this mountain range is also the largest exposed region of mantle rocks on Earth, composed mainly of iron-rich peridotite.

Carrying out large-scale excavation here, plus constructing entirely new port infrastructure, is expected to cost as much as $200 billion—40 times the cost of the Panamanian Canal expansion project. In the end, the plan stalled at the research stage.

At the end of 2011, Iran also began threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Western nuclear sanctions.

Stoked by such pressure, an even more grandiose—and unrealistic—plan emerged: building a canal 950 kilometers long, cutting Saudi Arabia in half from the Persian Gulf through to the Red Sea.

In the plan, the canal’s scale would be enormous: its width would be comparable to two standard soccer fields, and its depth could accommodate eight stories of residential buildings, capable of receiving fully loaded supertankers.

But due to issues such as construction costs and engineering difficulty, the plan was abandoned.

If the canal won’t work, what about the railways?

In fact, back in the 2009 Gulf Cooperation Council summit, a 2,177-kilometer rail network connecting six Gulf states had already been approved. It was named the “Gulf Railway,” with an estimated cost of $250 billion, and once completed, the annual freight capacity could reach 201 million tons.

However, the project was cursed by procrastination: the “deadlines” in 2018 and 2021 were not met, progress was repeatedly pushed back, and even today some segments still have not begun construction.

The last struggle came in 2024, when a few waterway engineers published what has been, to date, the most detailed engineering research report on the issue. They proposed three different canal routes, but none received funding support.

So it’s clear that what shows up in the news today is mostly plans that were piled away long ago—some existing for dozens of years.

Every time Iran issues another threat, these proposals spring back to life; once the threat fades, they get shelved again.

In this crisis, only Saudi Arabia’s east-west pipeline, and in the UAE another shorter oil pipeline—“Abu Dhabi to the Gulf of Oman”—can fully bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

Even if throughput is pushed to the maximum, the east-west pipeline can transport only 7 million barrels of oil per day, just 25% of the Strait of Hormuz’s capacity.

In short, decades of proposals, studies, and summits have produced almost no tangible results.

When this war ends, will the Gulf states continue to look for “alternatives”? That remains unknown.

Making the strait a weapon is not new

As of now, the troubles of the Strait of Hormuz have not been resolved, and another strait has come under trouble as well.

According to a March 20 report by CCTV News, a member of the political bureau of Yemen’s Houthi movement said that in support of Iran, the group might blockade the Strait of Mandeb, “attacking ships of the countries that take part in attacks on Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.”

The Strait of Mandeb connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It is the “choke point” linking the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean.

It is also known as the “water corridor” connecting the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and it has even been regarded as “the best alternative route to the Strait of Hormuz in the world.”

This announcement reveals a harsh fact: this “escape route” had already been unsafe long before the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

As early as two years before the war this year broke out, the Houthis had been attacking merchant ships in this “choke point.” On the first day of the conflict, the Houthis already announced an alliance with Iran and issued warnings to shipping routes in the Red Sea.

Text on the image: “Houthis attacked 3 ships in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.”

With a complex web of geopolitical relationships, and power politics with no end in sight, this has been going on for hundreds of years on the stage of straits.

In the 16th century, the Strait of Malacca became a focal point of European powers due to its role as a hub connecting East and West.

Historically, it changed hands many times, first controlled by Portugal, then the Netherlands, then Britain, and so on—while creating economic value, these countries also deployed militarily for it.

The deep underlying cause behind the outbreak of World War I is indirectly related to the Strait of Hormuz.

At the time, Germany planned to build the Berlin–Baghdad railway, in order to connect trade routes in the Western Asia region while bypassing the “choke point” Suez Canal controlled by Britain and France, and ultimately push deep into the Persian Gulf to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Map of the Berlin–Baghdad railway route. (Photo source: Elya Zhang Database)

A commentator once said, “If the Persian Gulf were in Germany’s (or other great powers’) hands, Britain would feel as if a 42-centimeter cannon were pointing at India.”

And now, with the Strait of Hormuz in Iran’s hands, it is no different than a rifle aimed at the opponent.

The difference is that when this rifle fires, it hits not only strategy—but also people’s everyday lives.

According to Caixin magazine, rising prices of fertilizers and natural gas will increase the costs of agricultural products and food processing, and companies and consumers around the world will feel the crisis.

For example, because cold-chain logistics are affected, fresh produce prices in Thailand have risen; a natural gas shortage increases the price of glass bottles; and transportation delays prevent replacing them with aluminum cans, leading several beer plants in India to shut down.

In terms of transportation, the price of packed cardboard boxes has doubled, and the costs of other packaging materials like labels and adhesive tape have continued to climb.

The impact on daily life is already imminent.

On March 25, Trump publicly said that the U.S. and Iran are close to reaching a peace agreement. But Hazrati, chairman of Iran’s government information commission, said, “The enemy has listed the wishes it cannot achieve through attacks,” adding that this is “another lie” from Trump, and “don’t pay attention.”

This kind of chaos may continue for a long time.

A massive amount of information, precise analysis—exclusively on the Sina Finance APP