From Asia to the Arctic, How Trump’s War Is Pushing His Rivals Closer
Almost six months on from the outbreak of war with Iran, the consequences of the conflict for the U.S. and its allies are plain to see.
The U.S. military is burning through stocks of offensive and defensive missiles, the flow of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains a trickle, and oil markets are still trading on fears that the shaky reprieve in fighting could end at any moment.
In painting himself into this corner, Donald Trump has left more space for America’s competitors and adversaries to redraw the map of world trade in their favor, seeking out new routes and methods to strengthen their commercial links beyond the tumult of the Middle East and the reach of Washington.
His campaign has also pushed Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s key regional allies, into joining a NATO-style defense coalition to which the White House is not invited.
From Moscow to Mumbai
Though the U.S. and Europe refused to confront Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine directly, Western governments quickly moved to engage the Kremlin in economic warfare.
They severed Moscow’s connection to the global financial system, and have rolled out a torrent of sanctions packages designed to constrict revenues from oil and gas exports; the fuel on which Vladimir Putin’s war machine continues to churn.
These sanctions have certainly had an effect. After an initial period of explosive growth due to the pivot of Russian industry to war footing, Russia’s GDP growth outlook for 2026 sits between zero and one percent, inflation continues to inch toward 7 percent, and businesses are straining under harsh new taxes.
They’ve also driven Putin away from Europe and into the arms of the titans of the East: China and India. Hungry for Russian hydrocarbons to power their industrial and economic development, these nations collectively purchased more than $400 billion of Russian oil between February 2022 and January 2026, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
The Kremlin has kept much of that trade moving through its shadow fleet—an opaque network of aging tankers shipping sanctioned oil beyond the reach of Western price caps and insurance rules—but the will of Western governments to forcibly stop these tankers has increased. British forces boarded the sanctioned tanker Smyrtos in the Channel in June, France intercepted and boarded a suspected shadow-fleet tanker in the Mediterranean, and the EU’s latest sanctions package targeted dozens more vessels accused of helping Moscow evade the oil cap.
Russia’s deputy prime minister, Marat Khusnullin, last week came up with a new solution to secure its trade links with Eastern partners, telling reporters from the TASS news service that Moscow would explore building permanent rail links to the Indian Ocean through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Iran.
Russia already has partial workarounds: The International North-South Transport Corridor already links Moscow to the Indian Ocean through Iran, while the trans-Caspian International Transport Route gives Eurasian trade another path across Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus.
Now, both routes are vulnerable. Iran is a war zone, while Ukraine’s formidable deep-strike capabilities and seafaring attack drones have struck Iranian ships in the Caspian Sea and Russian vessels near the Bosphorus Strait, through which they must travel to exit the Black Sea.
The proposed rail routes would take years to build and have not yet been agreed. But if Moscow can turn them from lines on a map into a functioning trade corridor, Putin will gain a new trade lifeline to Asia largely shielded from Ukrainian and Western interference.
As Khusnullin declared: “Any options providing access to India are acceptable.”
From Ningbo to Felixstowe
The U.S., Europe and their global partners can impose whatever restrictions they like upon Russia, but there are some geographic advantages enjoyed by Russia that Western partners are powerless to affect.
Along Russia’s northern coastline runs the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a sea lane measuring more than 3,000 miles and one of three Arctic shipping routes that, thanks to the melting of the ice, become more accessible with each passing year.
This route has become attractive to Russian and Asian shippers looking for ways to avoid sensitive choke-points like the Suez Canal and the Red Sea without having to transit around the southernmost tip of South Africa; a route which adds hundreds of hours, thousands of miles and millions of dollars to the cost of shipping.
Until now, Russian tankers carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) or metals have constituted the only regular traffic through the NSR, with a few one-off chartered voyages for small volumes of bilateral trade with China.
No more. This week, China’s Sea Legend Shipping company will launch a regular service between China’s Ningbo port and the United Kingdom’s Felixstowe, with stops at various Chinese and European ports.
For Beijing, the route dramatically shortens delivery times of Chinese exports to Europe and reduces its dependence on waters affected by the Iran war. Because the NSR sits well within Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), Moscow’s Rosatom controls transit permits and charges tolls for the passage of foreign vessels, and rakes in additional fees for icebreaking assistance.
It’s not just China looking to benefit from the new trade route across the top of the world, either. Days after Sea Legend Shipping’s vessel sets out on the first of many voyages, South Korea’s PanStar Line will send its recently purchased cargo ship, the PanStar Acro, on a demonstration voyage to navigate the NSR from the port of Busan, testing the viability of the route for Seoul.
A Middle Eastern NATO moment
Unsurprisingly, the consequences of war land hardest for Iran’s neighbors. Iran is now fully aware of the leverage afforded by its ability to force shut the Strait of Hormuz, and has shown no hesitation in striking U.S military bases and key energy infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states.
These actions have shattered the “safe haven” illusion painstakingly created by the likes of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar as part of their efforts to diversify their economies away from oil, and forced their rulers to confront a troubling question: can America alone be relied upon to guarantee our security?
Riyadh has already decided. On August 7, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement—a collective security treaty modeled upon the NATO credo that an armed attack against one will be regarded as an attack against them all. The signatories also acknowledged other regional powers may be invited to join the pact.
This is not a literal Middle Eastern NATO, not yet. The agreement does not publicly spell out the military obligations of each country, and is not rooted in a robust, shared identity developed over decades like that of the transatlantic alliance.
It does, however, suggest that a new day is dawning over the complex, torrid Middle Eastern security landscape that could see more regional powers unite for mutual benefit beyond Washington’s influence.