Iran has its eye on the pipeline that fuels Israel and supplies Europe. Washington should defend it before Tehran tests it. The U.S. has spent eight months trying to pry open the Strait of Hormuz.
It needs to start guarding the next chokepoint Tehran has picked out. Iranian commentators close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now describe the energy corridor running from Baku through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean coast as a "Strait of Hormuz 2.0." Washington can deny Iran that lever at modest cost, and it should do so before the next round of fighting. The comparison sounds inflated.
Before the war, about 20 million barrels a day moved through Hormuz, while the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline can carry about a twentieth of that. But Iran's leverage over the Caucasus route comes from scarcity rather than volume. With Gulf exports throttled, BTC is one of the few sources of crude that touch neither Iranian waters nor Russian territory.
Israel draws 46.4 percent of its oil imports from Azerbaijan through this pipeline. Italy buys more than half of Azerbaijan's crude exports. A gas line laid alongside it feeds southern Europe, which is legally bound to stop buying Russian gas by late 2027 and can't count on Gulf LNG to make up the difference.
Kazakhstan has turned the corridor into its own escape route. Ukrainian drones keep striking the Russian terminal that handles about 80 percent of Kazakh oil exports, so Astana is shipping crude across the Caspian into BTC and aims to move 7 million tons a year that way. Buyers pay for that security: in late September, Azeri Light traded about $14 a barrel above Kazakh crude shipped through Russia.
That premium is exactly what Iran wants to hold hostage. A strike on the corridor wouldn't need to cut much supply to rattle a market already short of oil. It would only need to convince traders that no route out of the region is safe.
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