When a single strait concentrates 20% of global oil trade in a passage just 54 kilometers wide, vulnerability is not an abstract geopolitical concept. For the United Arab Emirates, whose essential hydrocarbon exports and merchandise imports transit through the Strait of Hormuz, this is a concrete commercial constraint that has become a strategic priority. Abu Dhabi’s response is neither military nor diplomatic. It is logistical: building enough alternative routes so that no hostile actor can block the country’s commercial flow with a single gesture.
The Emirates are now reorienting their port investments toward Jordan and Syria, expanding their presence well beyond Jebel Ali, their historic hub on the Gulf. This strategy illustrates how a middle power responds to the weaponization of global commerce: by multiplying exit points rather than seeking to control entry.
The Essentials
The United Arab Emirates is investing in alternative terrestrial and port corridors in Jordan and Syria to reduce its dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, the only maritime passage between its main Jebel Ali hub and global markets. This reorientation, documented by FMES and the Montaigne Institute via Perspectives Med, signals a shift in logistical doctrine: building resilience through redundancy rather than through securing a single chokepoint. Djibouti is simultaneously positioning itself as an alternative hub on the Red Sea, adding a new piece to the commercial geography being recomposed in the region.
Jebel Ali, a Fragile Masterpiece
Jebel Ali is one of the most remarkable ports built since the second half of the twentieth century. Its 25 kilometers of quays according to official DP World data, its 15.5 million TEUs handled in 2024—a record since 2015—and its total capacity of 19.4 million TEUs make it the 9th port worldwide by volume. The emirate of Dubai has made it the beating heart of its economic model: transforming a city without oil into a logistical pivot between Asia, Europe, and Africa.
But Jebel Ali has a design flaw that no one has ever managed to correct. To reach the oceans, every container, every barrel, every cargo must pass through Hormuz. Yet this strait is shared with Iran, a power that has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity and willingness to disrupt maritime traffic. In 2019, attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman triggered a significant increase in maritime insurance premiums for regional crossings. In 2023 and 2024, Houthi attacks in the Red Sea reminded us that substitute routes could also be targeted.
The concentration of traffic creates vulnerability. The Emirates have understood this and are acting accordingly.
Ports on the Mediterranean Rather Than the Gulf
The Emirati strategy rests on a simple idea: for Hormuz to lose its value as a pressure lever, goods must be able to enter and exit through other channels. Investment in Jordanian and Syrian ports responds to this logic.
In Jordan, the port of Aqaba offers access to the Red Sea independent of the Strait of Hormuz. It is AD Ports Group, Abu Dhabi’s port arm, that has developed infrastructure there and obtained a 30-year concession. DP World, the port operator of Dubai present in more than 40 countries, operates in Tartus, Syria. Saudi Arabia, for its part, is building a Riyadh-Doha rail link whose ramifications extend northward, toward a potential terrestrial corridor to the eastern Mediterranean. According to Perspectives Med, the primary source of this article published by the Montaigne Institute via FMES, the regional rail axis under discussion focuses less on the Riyadh-Haifa corridor than on transit routes bypassing maritime pressure points.
Syria represents a more complex case. The partial normalization with Damascus initiated since 2023 by several Gulf countries, including the UAE, opens up possibilities for terrestrial transit toward Syrian Mediterranean ports in Latakia and Tartus. These ports provide access to the Mediterranean without passing through either Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb. Syrian infrastructure remains degraded after a decade of war, but several regional actors are betting that its reconstruction will be financed, at least in part, by logistics flows that the country can intercept if it plays its geographic position correctly.
The Emirati calculation is clear: investing in these alternative corridors today costs less than suffering a Hormuz blockade tomorrow.
Djibouti, the African Piece of the Puzzle
While the Emirates build northward, Djibouti is working to position itself southward. The small state in the Horn of Africa has long understood that its geography is its primary asset. Located at the entrance to the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, at the junction between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, it controls the other major maritime chokepoint in the region.
Djibouti’s logic is symmetrical to that of the Emirates, but inverted: whereas Abu Dhabi seeks no longer to depend on a single passage, Djibouti seeks to become the inescapable passage that Gulf actors will want to use for their alternative flows. DP World is present there, but China has developed considerable port infrastructure, including a military base—the first permanent foreign military base that Beijing has established abroad. This coexistence makes Djibouti a terrain of competition between logistical powers as much as a commercial hub.
For supply chains linking Asia to Europe while avoiding Hormuz, Djibouti constitutes a natural waypoint. Containers can transit through Aqaba toward Jordan and the Mediterranean, or pass through Djibouti toward East Africa and the Suez Canal. These two routes together form an alternative network whose value increases as tensions around Hormuz intensify.
Houthi attacks in the Red Sea between 2023 and 2025 certainly disrupted this route, diverting dozens of ships toward the Cape of Good Hope and lengthening transit times by two to three weeks according to major shipping company estimates. But they also accelerated investment in alternative infrastructure: when a route is targeted, network redundancy becomes an immediate necessity, not a long-term project.
The Doctrine of Redundancy Against the Doctrine of Control
What makes the Emirati strategy intellectually interesting goes beyond logistics. It represents a doctrine of economic security distinct from that of the great powers.
The United States, China, and their respective allies respond to risks on commercial routes by seeking to control strategic points: military bases, naval presence, defense treaties. This doctrine of control works for powers capable of projecting credible military force over thousands of kilometers. For a power like the UAE, this option does not exist at the necessary scale.
The doctrine of redundancy operates from a different principle. A chokepoint has strategic value only if everyone is forced to pass through it. If economic actors can reroute their flows toward sufficiently performing alternatives, the pressure leverage that the chokepoint represents loses value. A Hormuz blockade truly frightens only if Hormuz is the sole possible passage. If alternative routes exist, function, and are sufficiently sized, the blockade remains costly but not fatal.
This logic is also that which underlies China’s massive investments in the Belt and Road Initiative: building terrestrial roads and alternative ports so that the Chinese economy is not entirely captive to maritime routes controlled by the American navy. The Emirates apply the same principle on a more modest scale, but with potentially comparable commercial efficiency, as shown by the dynamics of development financing reconfiguring around major investment routes.
The Next Vulnerability is Already Called Aqaba or Latakia
There remains a question that the doctrine of redundancy does not entirely resolve: do new routes create new chokepoints, or do they structurally reduce the system’s vulnerability?
Examination of two plausible scenarios for the 2030-2040 horizon is instructive. In the first, alternative routes reach critical mass of traffic sufficient for a Hormuz blockade to cease being a decisive weapon. Insurers integrate alternatives into their risk models, shippers develop stable multimodal transit contracts, and Jordanian, Syrian, and Djiboutian ports handle sufficient volumes to maintain competitive economies of scale. In this scenario, Hormuz’s leverage value gradually depreciates, without disappearing completely, but also without constituting an existential threat to regional commerce.
In the second scenario, the multiplication of routes does not reduce overall vulnerability: it disperses it. Aqaba becomes a Jordanian chokepoint. Latakia becomes a Syrian chokepoint. The Suez Canal remains what it has always been, a unique passage point over which Egypt exercises a sovereignty not immune to political pressure. Bab el-Mandeb, which the Houthis have transformed into a zone of intermittent warfare, confirms that alternatives can be targeted as effectively as the main route. Vulnerability shifts; it does not disappear.
Probable reality combines both trajectories. Alternative routes will reduce Hormuz’s leverage value without annulling it. They will create new points of tension, but more dispersed points, more difficult to target simultaneously, and under different sovereignties, which complicates any coordinated blockade strategy. An actor wishing to paralyze Gulf commerce would need to simultaneously control Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Aqaba, and Syrian land borders. This is a substantially more difficult ambition than controlling a single passage.
What this intermediate scenario requires to function is not solely logistical. Stable multilateral transit agreements, legal guarantees for investments in countries like Syria whose stability remains fragile, recognized commercial insurance mechanisms for new routes, and coordination among regional powers that do not always share the same interests. Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Gulf countries each have a different vision of what the regional commercial architecture should be. The negotiations that came close to achieving a Riyadh-Haifa corridor before October 7, 2023, illustrate both the potential and the fragility of these convergences.
The signals to monitor are concrete: the evolution of traffic volume at alternative ports compared to Jebel Ali, new Emirati investments in the eastern Mediterranean, and the capacity of Syrian terrestrial routes to handle significant commercial volumes as the country stabilizes. If within five years Aqaba handles 10 to 15% of the volume currently concentrated on Jebel Ali, the doctrine of redundancy will have proved its operational viability.
Gulf Commercial Corridors, Revealing Geopolitics
The Emirati strategy is part of a broader movement of recomposition in global commercial geography. Gulf countries are no longer content to export hydrocarbons and import manufactured goods. They seek to control the infrastructure that enables these exchanges, to diversify their economies around logistics, finance and services, and to build resilience that gives them political room for maneuver.
DP World, Mubadala, and ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s three major investment arms, are present in dozens of ports and airports across multiple continents. This presence is both commercial and strategic. It creates relationships of interdependence with host countries, cross-interests that complicate political ruptures and economic sanctions. A country seeking to penalize the UAE by closing a port must calculate the costs that this closure imposes on its own economy. This is the same mechanism described by Edward Fishman in his work on geoeconomics and chokepoints: commercial dependence works both ways, and the Emirates have learned to build protective cross-dependencies.
This dimension connects with the dynamics analyzed on how development financing decouples from the needs of emerging economies: when major powers and Gulf sovereign wealth funds invest in African and Middle Eastern infrastructure, they construct political relationships as much as commercial assets.
The reorientation of Emirati investments toward Jordan and Syria obeys the same logic. Financing the reconstruction of Syrian ports means creating with Damascus an economic interdependence worth more, for the commercial security of the Emirates, than any treaty of good conduct. It also positions Abu Dhabi as an essential player in regional reconstruction, with the political leverage that implies.
Toward a More Robust Commercial Architecture, or More Complex?
The multiplication of bypass routes around Hormuz is a rational response to a real risk. The Emirates have the financial means, the port operators, and the strategic vision to implement it. Jebel Ali will not be replaced: its scale, its economies of scale, and its position in global logistics chains make it an irreplaceable asset in the short term. But its position as a unique and exclusive hub for Emirati commercial flows is evolving toward that of a central node in a more distributed network.
For economies dependent on the stability of Gulf commercial routes, notably African countries whose imports of food and industrial products transit through these corridors, this diversification is generally good news. A more distributed network is a more resilient network. Local disruptions have less catastrophic effects. But a more distributed network is also more complex to coordinate, more difficult to secure coherently, and more vulnerable to failures in countries with weak governance.
The question that will guide the next decade of logistics in the Middle East may be this one: can the transit agreements and investment guarantees necessary to stabilize these new routes be built quickly enough to precede the next crises, or will they, as often happens, have to wait to be forced by them?
Sources
- FMES / Montaigne Institute, Perspectives Med: “Rail Corridor in the Middle East: the Riyadh-Doha axis rather than Riyadh-Haifa”
- Lloyd’s Market Association, data on maritime insurance premiums in the Gulf (2019)
- DP World, annual report and operational data for Jebel Ali
- Montaigne Institute, work on the geoeconomics of chokepoints and the strategy of Gulf powers
- DP World — Official Statement on Jebel Ali (2024)
- Lloyd’s List Top 100 Container Ports 2025 (via PortNews)
- IEA / Knowledge of Energies — Strait of Hormuz (March 2026)
- AD Ports Group — Aqaba Port Concession (February 2026)
- Wikipedia — Doraleh Chinese Base
- Sea and Marine — DP World and Tartus Port
- Perspectives Med — Riyadh-Doha Rail Corridor vs Riyadh-Haifa
- IRIS France — Legal Status of the Strait of Hormuz