Overland, over budget

Good morning, friends. The region’s workarounds are load-bearing now, and today we check how much weight they can take.

Going around Hormuz by road costs four to five times as much as going through it by sea, and DP World’s boss warns shoppers everywhere could eventually feel it. Group CEO Yuvraj Narayan told Bloomberg the bill runs through DP World’s land network, including trucks moving more than 3k containers a day, and it’s eating into margins and inventory buffers.

Further north, the detours are pulling the Gulf and the Levant closer together, the International Monetary Fund’s Jihad Azour told The National last week, as new trade routes to the Mediterranean get fresh attention. Iraq has the most riding on them, since 80% of its oil exports pass through Hormuz and oil brings in 90% of state revenue. (We covered last week why a finished GCC railway still stops at the Gulf’s edge.)

Which brings us to the bypasses the Gulf has already built, and the drones that have found them. Strikes on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline and at Fujairah have rewritten what counts as a backup. In today’s Lede, we ask how much oil keeps flowing when the pipes, the terminals, and the repair crews are all under fire, and who picks up the tab.