Gargash says UAE energy exports will not be held hostage to Hormuz

Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, told the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi on Monday that the Emirates is building other paths for oil, gas and cargo so that neither energy exports nor trade sit hostage to the war with Iran. He named east-coast port capacity, pipelines, railways and alternative corridors as the works already under way.

"Our energy exports will not be held hostage, nor will our trade and economic activity," he said. He added that freedom of navigation is not a concession and not a principle to be rewritten under fire. Any long settlement, he said, needs credible guarantees against further Iranian attacks on Gulf Arab states.

Gargash put the scale of those attacks in a single figure. Iran, he said, fired about 3,300 missiles and drones at the UAE. Most, in his account, were aimed at civilian sites. Most were intercepted. The UAE still took hits on its energy system and on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. In August Abu Dhabi suspended all financial and economic transactions with Iran, cutting a channel that had long been a lifeline for Iranian trade.

Ports on the other side of the peninsula

The UAE's main export habit has been simple. Load on the Gulf coast, sail west through Hormuz, deliver. Hormuz is the choke. Fujairah and the rest of the eastern seaboard sit on the Gulf of Oman. Oil that reaches those berths by pipeline never has to pass the strait. Expanding that option is not a new idea. Making it the default after 3,300 incoming weapons is a change of weight, not of map.

Rail and pipeline projects do the same job inland. They move crude, products and containers to a coast Iran does not scan with the same ease. They also cost years. Gargash's point was that the years have started. He described the last six months as an unprecedented test and said the response is advance planning plus speed of build.

He was sharper on collective Gulf action than on Iranian intent. Gulf states, he said, understood the Iranian challenge for years and still failed to turn that shared reading into a united strategic reply. Individual air defences worked. A joint plan did not. That sentence is aimed at Riyadh, Kuwait, Doha and Muscat as much as at Tehran.

Trust as a separate file from relations

Gargash split two words that usually travel together. Relations with Iran can be restored, he said. Trust is another matter and may take decades. "Trust is a mountain we will have to climb." He called Iran's attacks on its neighbours a strategic miscalculation that deepened isolation. The way out, in his telling, is not more threats. It is de-escalation and a political settlement judged by acts, not statements.

He listed four priorities: stability through de-escalation; Hormuz treated as a global waterway; an economic approach that comes with real guarantees; and talks that start from sovereignty and non-interference. Those are standard headings. The operational line underneath them is the east-coast build. If Fujairah and the pipelines take a larger share of UAE barrels, Tehran loses a lever even if the strait stays dangerous.

That is the information that matters for buyers. A barrel that can leave Fujairah is a barrel that does not wait on a US-Iran ceasefire. A container that can ride a rail to the Indian Ocean coast is a container that does not sit in Jebel Ali while missiles fly. Gargash did not give tonnage targets or completion dates. He gave a doctrine. The doctrine says the UAE will spend concrete to stop a strait from setting its export calendar.

Whether neighbours copy that doctrine is the open question he left on the table. Qatar is gathering empty LNG ships outside Hormuz. Saudi tankers have already been hit. Oman is pulling crews off damaged hulls. If those capitals treat Gargash's speech as a briefing rather than a speech, the next year on the eastern shore of the peninsula will look like a construction site. If they do not, the strait remains the gate, and the gate remains under fire.