Five countries retained access through Hormuz while most did not. These relationships were built on varying logic and timelines. This piece explains how.
Excellent analysis and clearly well-presented! A useful extension of this argument is that what we are witnessing is not just a shift from alliances to relationships, but a shift from security guarantees to access guarantees. For decades, states assumed that being inside a US-led security architecture would implicitly ensure continuity of trade and energy flows. The Hormuz crisis breaks that linkage. Security alignment did not translate into supply access when it mattered most. That forces a deeper recalibration. States will increasingly hedge not just militarily, but economically and diplomatically, building parallel channels of access even with adversarial actors. The emerging order, therefore, is not only multipolar, it is multi-aligned, where resilience depends less on who protects you and more on who will still transact with you under maximum pressure.
Thank you, and I agree. The crisis revealed that protection and access are no longer the same promise. A state can remain inside a security architecture and still find itself outside the flow of energy, trade, or logistics when pressure peaks.
If it is a choice between leaning towards either the architecture of alliance or of access, where does that leave nations that are either small or do not have the wherewithals to invest in the access route?
Thank you and I'm glad you enjoyed reading it. You've posed a really sharp question and it goes directly to the heart of the trade-off. Smaller states often don’t get to choose between alliance and access; they have to extract access from alliances, manufacture it through narrow indispensability, or hedge quietly enough to avoid being excluded when systems break, accepting that exposure may still follow.
For example, Japan stretches alliances to secure access. Singapore becomes too useful to exclude. The UAE hedges just enough to retain optionality, but recent targeting shows that hedging reduces risk, it does not eliminate exposure. Replication is significantly harder for structural reasons, but each demonstrates a viable adaptation for states that cannot.
Yr views are both interesting and educational in getting a broader, deeper perspective or underlying system forces at work in day-to-day events.
With regard to small nations, I think many, if not most, may not have what it needs or takes to secure access. Singapore is blessed with geographical location and a natural seaport (and her very accidental fortune to have a team of extraordinarily competent and honest leadership post independence) to harness and then build upon. UAE has petrodollars to hedge with.
What do, say, NZ or Sri Lanka, have to work with? Can NZ attract enough multimillionaires with political access/influence to plunk down money into fixed assets to make her worthy of ease of access when push comes to shove? Or what?
Regardless, with building access whether it's structural or accidental, cultivated or hedged, or whatever, the common thread running through them all is the eternal truth; "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
The corollary to that for small nations is the need to understand where other nations' interests lie. As an e.g., SIngapore whilst currently appearing to be useful, has her work cut out for her. Her interests may be consistent but those of others (as so well demonstrated by Trump's USA) may change.
Watching carefully how the future may change - suddenly or slowly - is as important as staying useful to others in the past and currently.
If your approach is to "to identify the structural forces shaping the world before they become obvious headlines", may I request you to share your views on how you see the system w.r.t. to the architecture of alliance and access evolving given current events? Being able to peer into the future matters very much, more so now with the speed of change upon us.
Thank you so much. Your comment is a sharp way of pushing the argument forward and it’s hard not to think of Lee Kuan Yew here. Particularly, some of his earlier interviews where he shared his opinions on the foreseeable economic & strategic alignments of NZ, Singapore, and even the EU. He was very clear in his interviews that small states have to make themselves continuously useful, or they get ignored when pressure builds. Singapore is probably the cleanest execution of that idea.
I think the constraint you’re pointing to is real. Smaller states don’t get to build broad access architectures. The viable path is narrower - becoming useful enough in a specific function that exclusion carries a cost. Not immunity, but some friction against being cut off. New Zealand is the harder case, as you point out. The margin is thinner, and the pathway is less obvious - which is exactly why the constraint matters.
On where this is going - I don’t see alliances disappearing, but I do see their role separating from access. Alliances will still organise security, but they’re no longer reliable for continuity under stress. That layer is increasingly being handled through quieter, bilateral relationships that don’t always align cleanly with formal commitments. For larger states, that creates room to operate across both. For smaller ones, the space is tighter than it looks.
Your last point is a precise extension. It’s not just about understanding where interests lie, but watching when they become strong enough to override prior alignments. That’s usually when the system reveals itself.
Again nothing to do eith russia. In fact all these insurances are western based for and from private companies like Brookings to run the only economy west ever had, rentier economy. In fact it is a way for further control of countries.if smaller power. Firs you flood turkish economy eith inflation which is unbelievable since it self sustaining way more than any westen country, and a production giant, then you give them the chance to counter this inflation by using their sea/land to rebrand the oil/lng... So no, no russian shadow fleet. This is narrative meant for russia and china after us so all nato countries named every chinese ship as potential war platform. West is in nned of russian oil even us for diesel, so this way they make sure they get it and it doesnt go elsewhere. They also make sure. They also thus try to control the russian national income.
There are a few different arguments getting bundled together here, and they need to be separated to be useful.
First, on insurance and Western financial infrastructure: yes, a large share of marine insurance, underwriting, and risk pricing has historically been dominated by Western institutions. That is not in dispute. However, insurance dominance describes financial architecture, not the operational mechanics of how sanctioned crude physically moves across sea routes under altered compliance conditions.
Second, on “no Russian shadow fleet”: this is a definitional disagreement, not a factual one. No serious analysis is claiming Russia built a single state-owned fleet. The term refers to a dispersed set of vessels operating under changing flags, ownership structures, and insurance arrangements to move sanctioned cargo. Whether one prefers to call that a “shadow fleet,” “parallel fleet,” or “sanctions-avoidance logistics layer,” the underlying pattern is independently tracked in shipping data and policy reporting. The disagreement is over terminology, not the existence of routing and compliance adaptation.
Third, the broader geopolitical interpretation being proposed — what is observable is more constrained and more mechanical: states, firms, and intermediaries adapting to sanctions, price caps, and enforcement gaps in a fragmented global shipping system. The outcomes are emergent.
Finally, it’s worth separating two different levels of analysis that are being collapsed here. One is structural critique of Western financial dominance — which is a valid and longstanding debate in political economy. The other is the empirical question of how sanctioned commodities are currently transported. The article is addressing the second. Conflating them leads to conclusions that sound coherent but don’t actually follow from the underlying logistics reality.
The core point in the piece is not attribution to a single actor, but how crisis conditions reorganize access, routing, and dependency across multiple overlapping systems. I hope that helps.
you are reamining on generalizations when reality proves you wrong. you propagate western narratives of russian showdow fleet when it is a western fleet. the insurances are entirely western based, and the smaller countries in terms of economic power at least are controlled by the architecture I mention. literally I am offering the actual reality but you stick with abstract generalizations and western false-language. By the way no such thing as political economy. economy is natural as natural is the city, proven by Aristotle and other. Economy is the same since the creation of the human soscieties this is proven by many works, none of them adheres to idiocies like liberalism or marxism, see Hudson, Graeber. The problem is the western false and always unsuccesfull economies which have always been rentier economies. I understand reality is difficult for colonized minds.
I think we’re now talking past each other, so let me close this out with one clarification.
The article is not making a civilisational argument about “Western” versus “non-Western” systems, nor is it attempting to resolve larger philosophical questions about how economies should be understood. It is making a narrower, empirical claim about how oil and gas continued to move under sanctions pressure — specifically, that a less transparent, sanctions-adapted logistics layer expanded after 2022.
You’re right that Western-linked shipping, insurance, and financial infrastructure remain deeply embedded in global trade. That continuity is real. Where we disagree is on whether that continuity means no structural change occurred. The evidence suggests that it did — in flagging, routing, intermediaries, and compliance regimes — regardless of how one chooses to label it.
If you revisit my earlier response with a bit more distance, you’ll notice I explicitly acknowledged parts of your point — particularly on the continued role of Western-linked shipping and insurance. The disagreement was never absolute; it’s about how to interpret what changed alongside that continuity.
At that point, the disagreement becomes one of interpretation rather than access to “reality.” The piece is written from one analytical frame; you’re approaching it from another that emphasises systemic control and continuity. Both are internally coherent, but they are not addressing the same level of the problem.
On tone: I’m happy to engage substantive disagreement, but not framing that reduces it to “colonised minds” or similar characterisations. That doesn’t move the analysis forward.
I’ll leave it there — appreciate you taking the time to engage.
why dont you people do any research. russia has not created any shadow fleet. the vast majority of shipping is done by western already existing fleet especially of greek ownership. westen narrative all around.
The point about Greek-owned shipping capacity is broadly correct in one narrow sense, but it doesn’t invalidate the argument in the article.
There is a difference between ownership of tonnage in the global tanker market and the emergence of a parallel logistics system shaped by sanctions pressure. The piece is referring to the second, not claiming Russia “built” a vertically integrated fleet from scratch.
Since 2022, what changed in practice was not simply who owns ships, but how oil is moved: re-flagging, changing insurers, ship-to-ship transfers, routing through intermediaries, and the gradual formation of a sanctions-adapted trading layer. Greek-owned vessels and Western maritime capital remain part of that ecosystem — but so do opaque ownership structures and non-Western compliance channels that would not have existed in the same form before.
So the disagreement is less about fact and more about framing. Calling it a “shadow fleet” is shorthand for a western compliance-evading logistics layer, not a claim of exclusive Russian ownership.
The core argument in the article stands on dependency and system adaptation, not on who owns each hull.
Excellent analysis and clearly well-presented! A useful extension of this argument is that what we are witnessing is not just a shift from alliances to relationships, but a shift from security guarantees to access guarantees. For decades, states assumed that being inside a US-led security architecture would implicitly ensure continuity of trade and energy flows. The Hormuz crisis breaks that linkage. Security alignment did not translate into supply access when it mattered most. That forces a deeper recalibration. States will increasingly hedge not just militarily, but economically and diplomatically, building parallel channels of access even with adversarial actors. The emerging order, therefore, is not only multipolar, it is multi-aligned, where resilience depends less on who protects you and more on who will still transact with you under maximum pressure.
Thank you, and I agree. The crisis revealed that protection and access are no longer the same promise. A state can remain inside a security architecture and still find itself outside the flow of energy, trade, or logistics when pressure peaks.
Another noteworthy analysis. Kudos!
Sir,
If it is a choice between leaning towards either the architecture of alliance or of access, where does that leave nations that are either small or do not have the wherewithals to invest in the access route?
Thank you and I'm glad you enjoyed reading it. You've posed a really sharp question and it goes directly to the heart of the trade-off. Smaller states often don’t get to choose between alliance and access; they have to extract access from alliances, manufacture it through narrow indispensability, or hedge quietly enough to avoid being excluded when systems break, accepting that exposure may still follow.
For example, Japan stretches alliances to secure access. Singapore becomes too useful to exclude. The UAE hedges just enough to retain optionality, but recent targeting shows that hedging reduces risk, it does not eliminate exposure. Replication is significantly harder for structural reasons, but each demonstrates a viable adaptation for states that cannot.
Yr views are both interesting and educational in getting a broader, deeper perspective or underlying system forces at work in day-to-day events.
With regard to small nations, I think many, if not most, may not have what it needs or takes to secure access. Singapore is blessed with geographical location and a natural seaport (and her very accidental fortune to have a team of extraordinarily competent and honest leadership post independence) to harness and then build upon. UAE has petrodollars to hedge with.
What do, say, NZ or Sri Lanka, have to work with? Can NZ attract enough multimillionaires with political access/influence to plunk down money into fixed assets to make her worthy of ease of access when push comes to shove? Or what?
Regardless, with building access whether it's structural or accidental, cultivated or hedged, or whatever, the common thread running through them all is the eternal truth; "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
The corollary to that for small nations is the need to understand where other nations' interests lie. As an e.g., SIngapore whilst currently appearing to be useful, has her work cut out for her. Her interests may be consistent but those of others (as so well demonstrated by Trump's USA) may change.
Watching carefully how the future may change - suddenly or slowly - is as important as staying useful to others in the past and currently.
If your approach is to "to identify the structural forces shaping the world before they become obvious headlines", may I request you to share your views on how you see the system w.r.t. to the architecture of alliance and access evolving given current events? Being able to peer into the future matters very much, more so now with the speed of change upon us.
Thank you!
Thank you so much. Your comment is a sharp way of pushing the argument forward and it’s hard not to think of Lee Kuan Yew here. Particularly, some of his earlier interviews where he shared his opinions on the foreseeable economic & strategic alignments of NZ, Singapore, and even the EU. He was very clear in his interviews that small states have to make themselves continuously useful, or they get ignored when pressure builds. Singapore is probably the cleanest execution of that idea.
I think the constraint you’re pointing to is real. Smaller states don’t get to build broad access architectures. The viable path is narrower - becoming useful enough in a specific function that exclusion carries a cost. Not immunity, but some friction against being cut off. New Zealand is the harder case, as you point out. The margin is thinner, and the pathway is less obvious - which is exactly why the constraint matters.
On where this is going - I don’t see alliances disappearing, but I do see their role separating from access. Alliances will still organise security, but they’re no longer reliable for continuity under stress. That layer is increasingly being handled through quieter, bilateral relationships that don’t always align cleanly with formal commitments. For larger states, that creates room to operate across both. For smaller ones, the space is tighter than it looks.
Your last point is a precise extension. It’s not just about understanding where interests lie, but watching when they become strong enough to override prior alignments. That’s usually when the system reveals itself.
Again nothing to do eith russia. In fact all these insurances are western based for and from private companies like Brookings to run the only economy west ever had, rentier economy. In fact it is a way for further control of countries.if smaller power. Firs you flood turkish economy eith inflation which is unbelievable since it self sustaining way more than any westen country, and a production giant, then you give them the chance to counter this inflation by using their sea/land to rebrand the oil/lng... So no, no russian shadow fleet. This is narrative meant for russia and china after us so all nato countries named every chinese ship as potential war platform. West is in nned of russian oil even us for diesel, so this way they make sure they get it and it doesnt go elsewhere. They also make sure. They also thus try to control the russian national income.
There are a few different arguments getting bundled together here, and they need to be separated to be useful.
First, on insurance and Western financial infrastructure: yes, a large share of marine insurance, underwriting, and risk pricing has historically been dominated by Western institutions. That is not in dispute. However, insurance dominance describes financial architecture, not the operational mechanics of how sanctioned crude physically moves across sea routes under altered compliance conditions.
Second, on “no Russian shadow fleet”: this is a definitional disagreement, not a factual one. No serious analysis is claiming Russia built a single state-owned fleet. The term refers to a dispersed set of vessels operating under changing flags, ownership structures, and insurance arrangements to move sanctioned cargo. Whether one prefers to call that a “shadow fleet,” “parallel fleet,” or “sanctions-avoidance logistics layer,” the underlying pattern is independently tracked in shipping data and policy reporting. The disagreement is over terminology, not the existence of routing and compliance adaptation.
Third, the broader geopolitical interpretation being proposed — what is observable is more constrained and more mechanical: states, firms, and intermediaries adapting to sanctions, price caps, and enforcement gaps in a fragmented global shipping system. The outcomes are emergent.
Finally, it’s worth separating two different levels of analysis that are being collapsed here. One is structural critique of Western financial dominance — which is a valid and longstanding debate in political economy. The other is the empirical question of how sanctioned commodities are currently transported. The article is addressing the second. Conflating them leads to conclusions that sound coherent but don’t actually follow from the underlying logistics reality.
The core point in the piece is not attribution to a single actor, but how crisis conditions reorganize access, routing, and dependency across multiple overlapping systems. I hope that helps.
you are reamining on generalizations when reality proves you wrong. you propagate western narratives of russian showdow fleet when it is a western fleet. the insurances are entirely western based, and the smaller countries in terms of economic power at least are controlled by the architecture I mention. literally I am offering the actual reality but you stick with abstract generalizations and western false-language. By the way no such thing as political economy. economy is natural as natural is the city, proven by Aristotle and other. Economy is the same since the creation of the human soscieties this is proven by many works, none of them adheres to idiocies like liberalism or marxism, see Hudson, Graeber. The problem is the western false and always unsuccesfull economies which have always been rentier economies. I understand reality is difficult for colonized minds.
I think we’re now talking past each other, so let me close this out with one clarification.
The article is not making a civilisational argument about “Western” versus “non-Western” systems, nor is it attempting to resolve larger philosophical questions about how economies should be understood. It is making a narrower, empirical claim about how oil and gas continued to move under sanctions pressure — specifically, that a less transparent, sanctions-adapted logistics layer expanded after 2022.
You’re right that Western-linked shipping, insurance, and financial infrastructure remain deeply embedded in global trade. That continuity is real. Where we disagree is on whether that continuity means no structural change occurred. The evidence suggests that it did — in flagging, routing, intermediaries, and compliance regimes — regardless of how one chooses to label it.
If you revisit my earlier response with a bit more distance, you’ll notice I explicitly acknowledged parts of your point — particularly on the continued role of Western-linked shipping and insurance. The disagreement was never absolute; it’s about how to interpret what changed alongside that continuity.
At that point, the disagreement becomes one of interpretation rather than access to “reality.” The piece is written from one analytical frame; you’re approaching it from another that emphasises systemic control and continuity. Both are internally coherent, but they are not addressing the same level of the problem.
On tone: I’m happy to engage substantive disagreement, but not framing that reduces it to “colonised minds” or similar characterisations. That doesn’t move the analysis forward.
I’ll leave it there — appreciate you taking the time to engage.
why dont you people do any research. russia has not created any shadow fleet. the vast majority of shipping is done by western already existing fleet especially of greek ownership. westen narrative all around.
The point about Greek-owned shipping capacity is broadly correct in one narrow sense, but it doesn’t invalidate the argument in the article.
There is a difference between ownership of tonnage in the global tanker market and the emergence of a parallel logistics system shaped by sanctions pressure. The piece is referring to the second, not claiming Russia “built” a vertically integrated fleet from scratch.
Since 2022, what changed in practice was not simply who owns ships, but how oil is moved: re-flagging, changing insurers, ship-to-ship transfers, routing through intermediaries, and the gradual formation of a sanctions-adapted trading layer. Greek-owned vessels and Western maritime capital remain part of that ecosystem — but so do opaque ownership structures and non-Western compliance channels that would not have existed in the same form before.
So the disagreement is less about fact and more about framing. Calling it a “shadow fleet” is shorthand for a western compliance-evading logistics layer, not a claim of exclusive Russian ownership.
The core argument in the article stands on dependency and system adaptation, not on who owns each hull.