IMEC During a Time of War
President Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz expires on April 8 at 8pm Eastern Time1. He promised that every power plant and every bridge in Iran will be destroyed by midnight if Tehran does not comply2.
Iran has rejected the ceasefire proposal and put forward its own ten-point plan3, demanding a permanent end to the war, a legal framework for charging transit fees on the strait, the lifting of sanctions, and reconstruction funding4.
Trump has extended the deadline several times already — from March 23 to March 26 to April 6, and now to April 856 — each time with stronger threats and heavier strikes. But two things suggest this round may be different.
On Monday, Israel struck Iran’s South Pars petrochemical complex at Asaluyeh7 without waiting for Trump’s timeline8. And Axios9, citing a defence official10, reported that a plan for a massive US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran’s energy facilities is ‘ready to go’11, with scepticism inside the administration about granting another extension12.
Whichever way it goes, the outcome for European energy leads to the same place.
Scenario one: escalation
If Trump follows through and destroys Iran’s power plants13, the crisis deepens on every front14. Iran has already shown it can hit Gulf energy facilities and further escalation would only increase its willingness to do so again15, leading to further Hormuz closure. Europe, already sitting on its lowest gas reserves in four years16, enters a full energy emergency. The EU Energy Commissioner has already said that fuel prices are ‘unlikely to go back to normal in a foreseeable future’17. Five European finance ministers have written to the European Commission warning of ‘market distortions’ caused by the price spike18.
Under these conditions, the pressure to find alternative energy routes becomes overwhelming. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor shifts from a long-term plan to an immediate strategic priority. The bypass pipelines already running in the UAE (Fujairah, built in 201219) and Saudi Arabia (the East-West pipeline20) become the only working routes out of the Gulf. Both countries are IMEC signatories, and both hold concessions along the corridor.
Escalation makes IMEC necessary faster.
Scenario two: another extension
If Trump extends the deadline again the Hormuz closure continues, and every week it stays shut, Europe’s energy situation gets worse21. Shell’s CEO warned last week that the disruptions have ‘moved to Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and then more so into Europe as we get into April’222324. The International Energy Agency has called this ‘the greatest global energy security challenge in history’25.
A prolonged closure does more than raise prices — it drains reserves. Europe went into this crisis with gas storage levels already well below the safety margin set after the 2022 Russian gas crisis26. The European Commission has told member states to start filling storage early27, but you cannot fill storage without supply — and the supply is stuck behind a closed strait. Every week the closure continues makes next winter harder to manage and the case for alternative routes harder to ignore.
Extension makes IMEC necessary gradually.
Scenario three: a deal with a toll
Iran’s ten-point counter-proposal28 includes a demand for a permanent legal framework that would allow it to charge transit fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz29, with the revenue used to pay for war damage. If any version of this demand is accepted — even in part — the strait stops being a free passage and becomes a toll route, under a legal arrangement that gives Iran permanent leverage over twenty per cent of the world’s seaborne oil.
A toll on Hormuz turns the strait into an expensive chokepoint. Insurance costs for shipping through dangerous waters have already risen up to 300% during the Red Sea crisis30, and a permanent toll regime would lock a similar risk premium into every Hormuz transit. Every tanker, every LNG carrier, every cargo ship passing through would pay Iran’s fee on top of the higher insurance.
The more expensive Hormuz becomes, the better the economics of the bypass route through Israel look — a route that avoids both Hormuz and Suez entirely.
A deal makes IMEC necessary permanently.
The negotiating table
The people around Trump’s negotiating table tell you where this leads. Axios names Vice President Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner31 — whose Affinity Partners fund, backed by $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund32, has grown to $6.2 billion under management since the inauguration. On the other side, Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, and the UAE leadership are reportedly urging Trump not to accept a ceasefire unless Iran makes major concessions33 — including reopening the strait and surrendering its enriched uranium.
These are the same three states that pre-built bypass infrastructure before the crisis — the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, the East-West pipeline to Yanbu, and the Fujairah pipeline. Israel and the UAE signed the Abraham Accords34. All three hold IMEC concessions. The states that built the alternative are the ones advising the president on how long to keep bombing the original.
The corridor states are not pushing for a quick end to the war. They are pushing to damage the competing route as much as possible before any deal is signed. If Hormuz reopens cheaply and with no conditions, it remains a rival to IMEC. If Hormuz reopens under a permanent toll, or stays closed long enough to force Europe into committing to alternative infrastructure, then IMEC becomes the default route.
France is working both sides at once. Macron agreed with South Korea on Saturday to ‘work together towards opening the strait’35, and France has appointed the first IMEC special envoy36. One policy reopens the strait, while the other develops the corridor that bypasses it.
The pattern
Stranded in Haifa traced a pattern that has repeated for a hundred years: the route through Israel only becomes operational after the alternatives have been removed. The Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline in 1932 became necessary after Iraq’s other oil export routes were cut. The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline in 1968 became necessary after the Suez Canal was closed and Soviet oil deliveries were cancelled. The EAPC-MED-RED agreement in 202037 became viable after the Abraham Accords reopened the route and Russian gas to Europe was about to be destroyed.
Trump’s current deadline is the latest chapter in the same pattern. The method changes each time, but the destination remains static.
The intellectual preparation
The institutions that were created to protect Western strategic interests are already publishing reports explaining why losing those interests is acceptable — or even a good thing.
In January 2026, a month before the war started, Chatham House published a report titled ‘Why Renewables and Electrification Hold the Keys to EU Energy Security’38. Its main argument was that Europe’s reliance on imported fossil fuels makes it economically and politically vulnerable, and that speeding up the green energy transition is the answer — not just for the climate, but for energy security.
It recommended cutting off all Russian gas imports by the end of 2026 and warned against depending too heavily on any single supplier, including the United States. Europe’s energy future, it argued, lies in renewables and electrification delivered through new infrastructure — the same type of infrastructure that IMEC’s energy pillar is designed to provide. A month later, the war began, and what had been a long-term recommendation became an immediate priority.
European banks cannot finance domestic oil and gas development at competitive rates, because the assets are ‘stranded’ — fossil fuel reserves are classified as ‘financial liabilities’ and made impossible to finance.
On March 5, the Council on Foreign Relations published ‘Strait-jacket: Global Energy Flows and the War with Iran’39. It documented the bypass routes through Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline and the UAE’s Fujairah pipeline as the only working alternatives — both operated by countries that signed the IMEC agreement. The piece then pointed to renewables and nuclear energy as the long-term solution, presenting the crisis as something that was simply speeding up a transition already under way. The financial regulations (stranded assets) that had made it nearly impossible for European banks to fund domestic oil and gas development before the war were now being proved right by it.
On April 3, the CFR president wrote a column called ‘Taking Stock of the War in Iran’40 that included a remarkable admission: ‘Prior to the attacks on Iran that began on February 28, the Strait of Hormuz was open. Now it’s broken.’ He pointed out that only two per cent of the oil passing through Hormuz goes to the United States, while eighty to eighty-five per cent goes to Asia and Europe depends heavily on the gas. In other words, America broke a chokepoint it barely uses, at the cost of everyone else’s energy supply.
The same column quoted a Chatham House fellow arguing that the United States should seize Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal to ‘stabilise global energy markets’41 — which would remove yet another piece of Iran’s export capacity and leave even fewer options outside the bypass routes controlled by the countries building IMEC.
The CFR’s guide to dollar dominance describes a future in which the dollar ‘slowly comes to share influence with other currencies’42, and notes that some economists think this would actually ‘benefit the United States’. A separate CFR report called ‘Managing the World’s Dollar Dependency’ goes further43, proposing a formal mechanism to discourage countries from holding too many dollars. Chatham House publishes similar frameworks calling for ‘reducing dependencies’ in defence, technology, energy, and trade44, and its March 2026 Global Trade conference described the current disruption as a threat to ‘the norms that have dominated this environment for decades’45. Both institutions present the decline of their own countries’ strategic advantages as rational, inevitable, and beneficial.
The Atlantic Council goes further. It runs the N7 Initiative4647 whose stated mission is to ‘broaden and deepen normalization between Israel and Arab and Muslim countries’48. Through this initiative, the Atlantic Council has published a series of reports making the case for IMEC across trade, energy, and digital infrastructure49.
In August 2025, it argued that IMEC ‘must be more than a trade route’50 and that customs systems across all corridor countries ‘must speak the same digital language’. In November 2025, its main report on the project described IMEC as ‘a strategic platform where infrastructure, energy, and digital networks become tools of statecraft’51.
The Atlantic Council also co-organises the Sir Bani Yas Forum with the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs52 — the annual sovereign diplomacy forum through which the Gulf contact book that now shapes IMEC policy was originally assembled.
On Wednesday April 8, at 8:30am Eastern Time, the Atlantic Council hosts a panel called ‘IMEC During a Time of War’53. Its stated purpose is to ‘identify what IMEC-associated projects could provide trade and energy alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz’.
At 8pm the same evening, Trump’s deadline to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges expires. The replacement corridor is being planned in the morning. The destruction of the competing route is scheduled for the evening.
On April 5, the Atlantic Council’s senior Middle East adviser told the Financial Times: ‘I sense a shift from hypothetical considerations to operational reality. Everyone is looking at the same map and reaching the same conclusions’54. The Financial Times article names IMEC as one of the bypass options now being actively revived55.
Yossi Abu, the chief executive of Israeli energy company NewMed Energy, told the paper56: ‘We need oil pipelines and rail connections across the region, over land, without giving others choke points to strangle us’.
The corridor is being sold as freedom from chokepoints — but its function is to become one.
In March 2025, Chatham House published a paper called ‘Competing Visions of International Order’57. It was originally written for the US National Intelligence Council and later rewritten for public release. The paper looks at how every major power is positioning itself in what it calls a ‘fracturing’ world order. Its chapter on Saudi Arabia states that ‘with its security still anchored in the West and its economy in the East, multipolarity is seen as a better outcome for Riyadh’.
It covers every country along the IMEC corridor: India pursuing a ‘non-Western, not anti-Western worldview’, Saudi Arabia pursuing ‘strategic autonomy’, Brazil seeing ‘opportunity in a multipolar order’58. India chose as its G20 presidency theme — at the same New Delhi summit where IMEC was announced59 — the Sanskrit phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’60.
Every one of these countries is hedging its bets — signing up to IMEC on the Western side while building financial ties through BRICS on the Eastern side. The paper’s own conclusion confirms the pattern without naming who benefits from it: ‘Few of these states agree on an alternative vision to give coherence and predictability to international relations’.
While the major powers hedge, the alternatives are being destroyed — by war, by regulation, by financial architecture — and the corridor that remains routes through a single node. The value flows to whoever built the clearing function before the crisis arrived.
The intellectual preparation is complete, and the crisis is providing the justification. And all three roads — escalation, extension, or a deal — lead to the same place: Haifa.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 191061, established the principle that peace must be built, governed, and maintained through infrastructure.
In practice, it functions as a war clearinghouse — the institution that determines the conditions on which hostilities end and the architecture that replaces them. Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations were founded after the Paris Peace Conference of 191962, in the same tradition63.
For over a century, their publications have preceded — not followed — the geopolitical shifts they describe. In the 1930s, the RIIA published three reports laying out the framework for countercyclical monetary policy, central bank coordination, and the end of the gold standard — years before Keynes published The General Theory and received credit for the ideas.
The same pattern is visible today: the energy transition framework, the managed dollar decline, and the IMEC corridor were all published before the crisis that made them urgent. These institutions do not react to events — they prepare the frameworks in advance.
And the frameworks define the conditions on which peace is offered.
Reports now emerge of US-Israeli airstrikes on Kharg Island6465 — the terminal through which ninety per cent of Iran's crude oil exports flow.
The strikes began hours before Trump's deadline — and before the Atlantic Council's Wednesday morning panel on replacing the Hormuz route with IMEC-linked alternatives.
The competing route is not being allowed to survive long enough for a deal to save it.
Surely, Iran is aware of IMEC; wouldn't Iran target the pipeline in critical places to eliminate the alternative to the Strait of Hormuz? Are the Israeli and American military forces actually able to defend the entire length of the pipeline from Iran's potential attacks? What am I missing here?
Is this unfolding world wide financial crisis how the BIS et al get to implement tokenisation of all assets? (except the 1% of course), and of course we will be more than willing to accept CDBCs as the unfolding crash materialises. I have long been puzzled as to how a Universal Basic Income could be paid for, is this how it is made possible? We do not get to vote for this, we just have all our freedoms removed to be able to survive. I wonder how compliant we will be!