A connected threat needs a connected framework
Omran Al‑Kuwari is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, CEO of Forta Advisors, and an honorary senior research fellow at University College London’s Bartlett School of Environment, Energy, and Resources. This essay is part of the 2026 Global Energy Agenda.
Nothing that has happened in the extremely tense weeks since the April 8 ceasefire in the US–Iran conflict has persuaded me that this is a global crisis the world can confidently put behind it.
As a Qatari with years of experience in the energy sector that included establishing Qatar Petroleum’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) trading venture, I understand well that whether or not the ceasefire holds, the structural conditions that produced this crisis remain in place. The Strait of Hormuz is still a single chokepoint. There is still no strategic LNG reserve and no pipeline bypass. Civilian energy infrastructure still sits outside protected status. The next disruption, when it comes, will travel the same channels as this one—and the institutions meant to govern those channels will still not be configured to act together. That is the problem a settlement cannot solve.
Sooner or later, this fragile veneer will crack and the question we all face—in the Gulf and around the world—is what are we doing to prepare for permacrisis? What frameworks are we putting in place to limit and mitigate the impact of a scenario that energy professionals and policymakers had dreaded for years?
In early March, the Gulf’s Achilles heel snapped. The Strait of Hormuz closed and Ras Laffan was hit. By April, there was a tenuous ceasefire. As I write in May, the strait remains impaired and the damage at Ras Laffan will take three to five years to repair. As world powers work to create a patchwork of post-conflict agreements, what’s really needed is a connected framework of international agencies to mitigate future threats and close the policy gaps that have allowed the current cracks in global protections.
The bystanders’ response cannot be to file this away as an accident of geopolitics, an extreme event, badly handled and eventually contained. The past two and a half months were not an accident. They were the predictable consequence of governing the world’s most critical infrastructure as if it were significantly less important.
The crisis was connected to the global economy in a way energy professionals had long warned about. Within days, pressure applied at the chokepoint propagated across markets with no formal connection: maritime insurance, sanctions enforcement, fertilizer feedstocks, helium for semiconductor fabrication, and LNG offtake in countries whose entire electricity generation mix depends on it. Demand from large emerging consumers kept sanctioned flows commercially viable; the shadow fleet carried them because the legal maritime system could not. Each market sits within a different governance regime—the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) for maritime conduct, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for financial flows, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for proliferation, and international humanitarian law for civilian infrastructure. Each is mature in its own remit. None is configured to act on the others. This is not drift but design: each regime was built for a different shock, and the focused remit that made each work is what now keeps them apart. The space between them is where this crisis operated and where the post‑conflict Connected Framework must do its work.
I have been making this argument, in print and at security conferences, since the beginning of the conflict because I believe it is critical to learning this conflict’s lessons. The Connected Framework is not a new institution; it is connective tissue between institutions that already exist.
Five gaps need closing to protect the market from future shocks. This requires
- A standing coordination function across the IMO, the FATF, the IAEA, and the sanctions architecture that is able to act when stress crosses multiple domains;
- Joint response protocols integrating maritime, financial, and proliferation responses to chokepoint events;
- Protected status for civilian energy infrastructure under international humanitarian law, meaning refineries, terminals, and gas plants should not be treated as conventional military targets;
- Shared maritime domain awareness across the relevant regimes; and
- A producer–consumer forum bridging the institutional divide between the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and others (OPEC+) and the International Energy Agency.
What will bind them is a coordinating instrument under which the existing regimes commit to joint action when stress crosses their domains. Built properly, it will let a chip fab in Hsinchu, Taiwan, a fertilizer plant in Jorf Lasfar, Morocco, and a household in Dhaka, Bangladesh, keep functioning when a missile is fired in the Gulf.
None of this can be built by any single state. The framework must be globally built from the start—not as a matter of legitimacy but because the system it must govern is itself global. The Gulf states as producers; the European Union as the largest single demand bloc; the United States as the principal underwriter of present maritime security; Japan, Korea, India, and China as co‑architects. The four largest LNG‑importing nations all sit east of Suez. Any future framework that treats the Asian demand bloc as a late addition will reproduce the gap it is meant to close.
Qatar has had a difficult spring; two of its LNG trains and a gas‑to‑liquids facility at Ras Laffan are out of service and will take years to bring back. But this is not a Qatari argument. Countries cannot allow the strait to be weaponized against any producer. Qatar sits in an unusual position across the regimes the framework would connect, making credible an otherwise abstract point: a producer state can be a co‑architect of the system that governs its infrastructure, not only a supplier into it. The point applies to any producer or consumer willing to commit.
Such a connected framework would achieve a long-elusive aspiration: readiness. Readiness, properly understood, is not a posture adopted in response to one conflict. It is the architecture in place before one. Even in the unlikely event that the current ceasefire holds, the temptation when this war is declared over will be to regard the danger as past and to let the system relax back into the assumptions that produced the crisis. That would be a grave error. This war was foreseeable. The next is too. A settlement will end the war. A framework is what protects us all by breaking the pattern of repetition.
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