Iran

The US-Iran standoff over the Strait of Hormuz — disruptive to global trade and energy flows, and devastating for debt-burdened economies — has handed Pakistan an unexpected geoeconomic opportunity, one that may persist even if the framework agreement announced on June 14 results in a lasting peace and permanent reopening of the strait. But seizing it will have interlocking consequences for Islamabad’s ties with Tehran, Washington, and the Gulf states.

As the US and Iran move to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the war’s real lesson lies in how Gulf states rapidly adapted — building pipelines, ports, and rail to bypass the chokepoint. Washington should seize this momentum, pursuing a “long game” of regional connectivity that serves shared security and economic interests.

In March, there was talk of armed Kurdish fighters opening a second front in Iran’s northwest, but it never happened — for several very good reasons.

Three months after the Iran war began, the United States and Iran are engaged in talks aimed at ending the crisis, even as both sides conducted limited military strikes against each other this week and a separate-but-linked conflict between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon continued to escalate.

When Iranian drone strikes hit two of Amazon’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in early March, amid the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran, much of the media’s reflex was to declare it the end of the Gulf’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions. That read is misguided, and it misses why what Iran was trying to accomplish failed.

Two and a half months into the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, what lessons can markets draw from the resulting global energy shock? Colby Connelly, MEI Senior Fellow, joins hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj to assess the crisis’s impact on the energy industry. Together, they examine how producers are responding to the conflict in both the short and long term, how this moment differs from past energy disruptions, and how regional reverberations may shape international energy policies going forward.