Reflections on war, energy, human nature, and the civilisations.

When the Map Lies
By José Parejo, Founding Partner, Jose Parejo & Associates

I. The Twenty-One Miles: The Strait of Hormuz as an Energy Chokepoint

There is a stretch of water twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point.

On one shore: Persia. The civilisation that built Persepolis, that gave the world its first empire of continental scale, that absorbed Alexander and outlasted Rome, that produced mathematicians and poets while Europe was still sorting out its alphabets. A civilisation that measures its history in millennia and its humiliations in centuries — the Arab conquest of the seventh century, the Mongol destruction of the thirteenth, the colonial carve-up of the twentieth, and the sanctions architecture of the twenty-first.

On the other shore: the Arab Gulf states. Newer as nation-states — most of them independent only since 1971 — but ancient as peoples and trading cultures. Societies that transformed desert and seabed into some of the most concentrated accumulations of sovereign wealth in human history within a single generation. States that learned, faster than almost anyone in the post-colonial world, how to convert a geological accident into geopolitical leverage.

Between them: the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty-one miles of water through which, on any given day, passes approximately 20% of the world's oil and a disproportionate share of the global LNG market.

The energy markets model this as an energy chokepoint. A risk variable. A line on a map.

What the maps do not show is that this strait is not primarily a shipping lane. It is a civilisational border — one of the oldest and most psychologically loaded on earth — that has been temporarily organised into nation-states, treaty frameworks, and export contracts. The current crisis at Ras Laffan is not an interruption of a stable system. It is the system expressing what it has always been.

II. The Field Beneath the Water: The Structural Core of the Global LNG Market

Before there was a crisis, there was a reservoir.

In 1971 — the same year Bahrain declared independence, the same year the British left the Gulf, the same year the modern map of the region was drawn — Qatar discovered an enormous gas reservoir beneath its territorial waters. They called it the North Dome.

Two decades later, Iran found the southern extension of the same structure. They called it South Pars.

It is the same field. One reservoir. Nine thousand seven hundred square kilometres of Permian-Triassic carbonate stretching beneath the waters that both nations claim, contest, and extract from simultaneously. It holds approximately one fifth of the world's total discovered gas reserves — an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.

The geology does not recognise the maritime boundary.

Gas is fluid. Aggressive extraction on one side affects pressure and output on the other. When Qatar began developing its North Dome section aggressively in the 1990s, leveraging TotalEnergies, Shell, and ExxonMobil to build the liquefaction infrastructure that would become Ras Laffan, it was extracting gas from a shared structure — faster, more efficiently, and with far greater export capacity than Iran could manage under sanctions.

Iran watched Qatar become the world's largest LNG exporter on the back of a reservoir that Iran also owns. It watched Western capital flow to Doha while Tehran was locked out of international finance. It watched Ras Laffan become the industrial city that South Pars never quite became.

That history does not cause this crisis. But it is the sediment beneath it — the layer of accumulated grievance that shapes strategic behaviour over time.

III. The Province That Is No Longer

In 1957, the government of Iran formally declared Bahrain its fourteenth province. It sent deputies to the parliament in Tehran. It printed maps that showed the island archipelago, forty kilometres off the Saudi coast, as Iranian territory.

Fourteen years later, under British orchestration and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's acquiescence, Bahrain became an independent state. Iran recognised it on 15 August 1971 — the day after Bahrain's declaration.

The Iranian regime has argued ever since that the Shah gave away Iranian territory. The debate inside Iran about how Bahrain was lost — incompetence, conspiracy, geopolitical trade-off — continues today, with billboards in Tehran accusing the Pahlavi dynasty of selling the homeland.

What matters for our purposes is not who is historically correct. What matters is that within living memory, Iran held formal sovereign claim over territory that is now an Arab state — and that this is one episode in a longer catalogue of territorial losses that Iranian political culture carries as a continuous wound.

The three islands in the Strait of Hormuz — Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs — were seized by Iran in 1971, the same week Britain left. They remain under Iranian control, claimed by the UAE, unresolved.

The name of the water itself is contested. The term Persian Gulf has been in use since at least the tenth century, documented in Arab geographical texts before pan-Arabism made the renaming a political project. When Arab states refer to it as the Arabian Gulf, Iran does not experience this as a linguistic preference. It experiences it as the ongoing erasure of Persian presence from waters that Persian civilisation named.

These are not talking points. They are the operating system.

When Iran develops its A2/AD architecture in the Strait of Hormuz — the missile batteries, the mine capability, the fast-attack vessel doctrine, the drone integration — it is not only building a military instrument. It is reasserting presence in a body of water whose very name is a battlefield. The Hormuz doctrine is not separable from the civilisational context that produced it.IV. What Qatar Learned from Geography

V. The Variable the Markets Cannot Price

Energy markets are extraordinarily good at pricing scarcity. They are less good at pricing duration. And they are almost entirely unprepared to price geopolitical energy risk at a structural level.

Energy crises are not only functions of supply disruption, but of the structural interaction between geography, sovereignty, and time.

The forward curve for TTF through winter 2026-27 reflects a market that has absorbed the scale of the disruption and is attempting to model its length. It is doing so with the tools available: storage levels, alternative supply routes, demand elasticity, US LNG ramp-up capacity. These are the right tools for a supply shock with a recovery curve.

They are the wrong tools for a confrontation embedded in the structure of the global energy system — where one actor measures strategic patience in decades and another cannot afford to wait a quarter.

The closest historical reference point is not the 2019 Abqaiq strikes, which lasted weeks. It is not the 2011 Arab Spring disruptions, which were managed within months. The closest reference point is the 1987-88 tanker war — a sustained campaign of attrition in the same waters that required direct US naval intervention, Operation Earnest Will, to prevent full Hormuz closure.

History does not repeat in energy markets. But it rhymes with remarkable precision.

What the Ras Laffan crisis has exposed — and what no energy dashboard currently measures — is the gap between the formal architecture of the global LNG market and the civilisational geometry beneath it.

That is the structure.

The crisis at Ras Laffan did not create it. It revealed it.

VI. What Persists

I have spent years working the intersection of political risk and energy markets in regions where formal resolution consistently lags structural reality. Where signed agreements follow, rather than cause, the end of underlying tension. Where the announcement of a solution and the actual resolution of the conditions that produced the problem are separated by months, sometimes years, sometimes decades.

The Strait of Hormuz has been managed — imperfectly, expensively, intermittently — for fifty years. The mechanism of management has been US naval presence, the implicit threat of overwhelming force, and the economic interdependence that makes full closure mutually catastrophic.

None of those conditions have been removed by the current crisis. The management architecture still exists.

But managed is not resolved. And the difference between those two words is where risk lives — not in the forward curve, not in the restoration timeline, not in the diplomatic communiqués that will eventually emerge from this confrontation.

The risk lives in the twenty-one miles. In the shared reservoir beneath the maritime boundary. In the province that is no longer on any map. In the name of the water that both sides refuse to concede.

Those are not risks that a ceasefire retires.

They are risks that a ceasefire postpones.

Understanding the difference is not a detail. It is the analysis.

— José Parejo

Founding Partner, Jose Parejo & Associates (JPA)

Sunday CEO Strategic Insights | March 22, 2026

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