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By Joseph Epstein
Director of the Turan Research Center and Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute
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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.
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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.
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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.
Tehran has already moved beyond rhetoric. In early March, an adviser to an IRGC commander threatened "enemy oil lines," a phrase regional officials read as a reference to BTC. On March 5, Iranian drones hit the passenger terminal of Nakhchivan's airport in Azerbaijan. Days later, Azerbaijan's security service said it had disrupted an IRGC-linked plot against the pipeline and Israeli and Jewish targets in Baku. Since then, the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency and a parade of regime-connected commentators have described the Caucasus corridor as a card Iran has yet to play. In Iran's media environment, analysts don't float attacks on a neighbor's infrastructure without sanction from the security establishment, so the drumbeat is a signal.
America's stake runs deeper than Israeli fuel and European heating bills. The administration's signature project in the region, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, would link Azerbaijan to Turkey across southern Armenia, through the same neighborhood. If Iran can coerce the energy corridor without paying a price, Central Asian capitals will conclude that routes built under American sponsorship can't be protected. Moscow and Beijing will be glad to offer alternatives.
Washington can raise that price in three ways.
First, help Azerbaijan defend the infrastructure Iran is threatening. That means short-range air defense and counter-drone systems around the Sangachal terminal outside Baku and the pipeline's pumping stations, early warning radar along the southern border, and patrol vessels to protect tankers carrying Kazakh crude across the Caspian. Vice President JD Vance already pledged U.S. ships for Azerbaijan's maritime security in February.
Making those sales dependable requires one legislative fix. Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, a 1992 restriction on aid to Azerbaijan, has been suspended by presidential waiver but remains on the books. Neither Baku nor the Pentagon can plan multiyear programs around a waiver a future president could let lapse. Congress should repeal it through H.R. 6534. Interceptors and counter-drone systems are poor tools for seizing territory, and tying sales to progress on the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement would answer critics who fear for Yerevan.
Second, build redundancy so that no single strike can shut the corridor. Washington and Brussels should help Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan expand Caspian tanker and port capacity. They should also back the restoration of the idle Baku-Supsa pipeline to Georgia's Black Sea coast as a fallback outlet. Europe should finance the expansion of the Southern Gas Corridor it has endorsed for years. A chokepoint with alternatives is a far weaker weapon.
Third, make deterrence explicit. Ceyhan sits on NATO soil, and alliance air defenses over Turkey has already shot down four Iranian ballistic missiles this year. Washington and Ankara should declare now, before the next round of fighting, that an attack on the Caspian energy corridor will be treated as an attack on Western energy security.
Hormuz showed what happens when a chokepoint has no defenders. The Caucasus corridor still has time to get some.
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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