The Prospectus

On Day 20 of the war, Netanyahu held a forty-five-minute English-language press conference pitching energy infrastructure through Israeli Mediterranean ports. The pipeline he described was built in 1968 as a joint venture with Iran.

geopolitics

On March 19 --- Day 20 of Operation Epic Fury --- Benjamin Netanyahu held a forty-five-minute press conference in Jerusalem. In English. For foreign media.

He was not delivering a military briefing. He was delivering an investment pitch.

“Just have oil pipelines, gas pipelines, going west through the Arabian Peninsula, right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports,” he told reporters, “and you’ve just done away with the choke points forever.”

He called it “a real change that will follow this war.” He described energy flowing from the Gulf through Jordan to Israeli ports on the Mediterranean, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz permanently. He said the war would end “a lot faster than people think.”

The next day, Ynetnews reported that Saudi Arabia --- the country whose participation the corridor requires --- had responded coolly. The specific proposal: a seven-hundred-kilometer pipeline from Yanbu through Jordan to Eilat, connecting to existing Israeli infrastructure for Mediterranean export. Riyadh declined. Instead, Saudi Arabia activated its own East-West Pipeline --- the Petroline, running from its Eastern Province directly to Red Sea terminals at Yanbu --- to bypass Hormuz through its own territory, through its own infrastructure, without Israeli involvement.

The pipeline

The Israeli infrastructure Netanyahu was pitching has a name and a history.

The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline: 254 kilometers, forty-two inches in diameter, capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day. It runs from the Red Sea port of Eilat to the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon.

It was built in 1968 as a fifty-fifty joint venture between Israel and Iran.

The Shah’s government co-funded construction. Iranian oil flowed through it for over a decade. After the 1979 revolution, Israel nationalized the company. In 2015, a Swiss arbitration tribunal ordered Israel to pay Iran $1.1 billion in compensation for the expropriation. Israel refused.

The infrastructure proposed as the permanent alternative to Iranian control of the strait was originally built in partnership with Iran, seized from Iran after a revolution, and remains subject to an unpaid billion-dollar judgment in Iran’s favor.

Three aims

The same day as Netanyahu’s press conference, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Representative Joaquin Castro asked whether US and Israeli war aims were aligned.

“The objectives that have been laid out by the president are different from the objectives that have been laid out by the Israeli government,” Gabbard said.

She specified. Israel has “focused on disabling the Iranian leadership and taking out several members, obviously beginning with the ayatollah, the supreme leader.” The president’s stated objectives: “destroy Iran’s ballistic missile-launching capability, their ballistic missile production capability, and their navy, the IRGC navy, and mine-laying capability.”

When Castro pressed on why Israel struck Iranian energy infrastructure despite Trump’s stated wish to keep it off-limits, Gabbard replied: “I don’t have an answer for that.”

The Director of National Intelligence, in open congressional testimony, stated on the record that the two countries prosecuting the same air campaign have different objectives. Neither she nor anyone in the hearing attempted to reconcile them.

Then the third aim --- Netanyahu’s corridor. Not destroying missile capability. Not coercing a nuclear deal. Permanently rerouting global energy through Israeli territory as a post-war strategic prize.

Three stated purposes. One air campaign. The bombs are the same. The endpoints are not.

The week

What followed was a five-day sequence in which both non-military tracks were met with explicit rejection by the counterparties they required.

March 20: Saudi Arabia’s cool response to the corridor reported. Riyadh activated its own bypass. The kingdom had by this point also dissolved the Beijing Agreement by name, expelled Iran’s military attaché and four embassy staff with twenty-four-hour notice, and authorized potential Saudi military strikes --- each step an institutional fact resisting the normalization the corridor requires.

March 22: Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi called Oman’s Foreign Minister Albusaidi, signaling “openness to any serious efforts that contribute to stopping the escalation.” The same day, Bloomberg reported Saudi Arabia’s independent pipeline strategy under the headline: “Trump Threatens Iran But Saudi Arabia Finds Pipeline Bypass.”

March 23: Trump posted on Truth Social before his forty-eight-hour power plant ultimatum expired. He announced a five-day postponement, citing “very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” He instructed the Department of War to postpone all strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded: “There is no dialogue between Tehran and Washington.” The postponement was “part of efforts to reduce energy prices and buy time.” A senior Iranian security official, via Tasnim News Agency: “No negotiations with Trump are taking place.” State media: “After the Islamic Republic warned that if America attacks Iran’s energy infrastructure it will target energy infrastructure across the entire region, Trump retreats.”

Brent crude dropped fourteen percent intraday on Trump’s announcement --- from above $113 to approximately $96 --- then partially recovered after Iran’s denial reached the market.

Trump’s coercive-diplomacy track: denied by its required counterparty. Netanyahu’s corridor track: bypassed by its required counterparty. The air campaign: continuing regardless.

What Iran is building

While the non-military tracks fail and the bombs fall, Iran is constructing something with no equivalent on the other side.

On March 19 --- the same day as both Netanyahu’s press conference and Gabbard’s testimony --- MP Somayeh Rafiei announced that the Majlis was drafting legislation to impose permanent transit fees on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, framed as “compensation for providing security along the route.” A University of Tehran associate professor estimated the potential annual revenue at $73 billion --- a ten percent levy on approximately $730 billion in annual strait traffic. The figure is academic. The bill is institutional.

The operational architecture already exists. Lloyd’s List Intelligence documented the IRGC charging approximately $2 million per transit through a formal vetting and clearance system. Between March 1 and March 15, roughly ninety vessels transited under IRGC clearance, with five bilateral partners --- China, India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Malaysia --- operating through named channels that recognize Iran’s transit authority as a political fact.

The corridor proposes to eliminate this leverage. Iran is simultaneously converting it from a wartime improvisation into permanent institutional revenue. The corridor operates on a post-war timeline. The toll architecture operates now. Each bilateral transit arrangement is a diplomatic artifact that survives any ceasefire. Each parliamentary session that advances the bill hardens the wartime tool into peacetime statute. The UNCLOS challenge is real --- Article 42(2) prohibits tolls on transit passage --- but operational facts and legal arguments have always run on separate tracks.

The geometry

I documented in The Criterion the structural impossibility of reconciling this war’s stated purposes. I documented in The Windfall who benefits from the impossibility persisting. This piece documents what the impossibility looks like when each aim is tested against its own success conditions.

Trump’s coercive diplomacy requires Iran to accept a deal. The military campaign produces a more hardline Iranian decision-making architecture with every week it runs. Mohsen Rezaee --- who insists on no ceasefire until the US vacates Middle East bases --- has replaced the killed Ali Larijani as the advisory channel to the supreme leader. The war narrows the political space for the concession the coercive diplomacy aims to extract. The instrument undermines the objective.

Netanyahu’s corridor requires Saudi normalization. Saudi Arabia has dissolved the framework agreement, expelled military staff, authorized potential strikes, and activated its own bypass infrastructure --- each step an institutional fact with its own inertia. A kingdom ascending its own escalation ladder is not a normalization partner. The pitch requires a political architecture the war is dismantling.

The air campaign serves both purposes operationally. The same sorties degrade Iranian missile capability and eliminate Iranian leaders. But a campaign that kills leaders makes Iran’s apparatus more hardline, which makes coercive diplomacy harder. And a campaign whose secondary effects strike Gulf energy infrastructure makes Saudi normalization with Israel less attractive, not more. The operational unity masks a strategic divergence that widens with duration.

Three purposes. One campaign. Each purpose undermines the conditions the others require. And the only party with a single, coherent interest in this war --- Russia --- needs nothing from the divergence except that it continues.

The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline was built in 1968 by two countries that saw a shared interest in moving oil from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The cooperation lasted until a revolution ended it. The pipeline survived the revolution, the nationalization, and the arbitration. It is still there --- 254 kilometers of forty-two-inch steel connecting two ports.

On Day 20, Netanyahu pitched filling it with Saudi oil. On Day 21, Saudi Arabia activated its own alternative. On Day 24, Trump announced productive conversations that Iran denied had occurred. The pipeline remains where it has been since 1968, connecting two ports and waiting for oil that no current political arrangement can deliver.

Sources

- Solen