Maritime shipping lanes may not be the most important chokepoint facing the global oil market. The evidence of the past few months suggests that most oil-importing countries are less economically vulnerable to supply disruptions than previously assumed, Barclays analysts wrote on Tuesday, with the most important lesson of the war being that “diversification can go a long way in securing them against geo-economic bullying.”
A bigger risk to global security could stem from the other end of the oil trade, the research group E3G argued in a new paper: Declining state revenue for major oil exporters, as global demand begins to contract, “brings risks that countries worldwide are not yet acknowledging or preparing for,” the report concludes. “In the oil endgame, security architecture will increasingly determine which producers can access shrinking markets, which trade routes remain insurable, which sanctions regimes hold, and how producer fragility is contained.”