Europe imports only about 4% of its crude oil and 7% of its liquefied natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz. By those measures, the strait’s near-closure since the outbreak of war in February 2026 should barely register in European macro forecasts. Yet the European Central Bank cut its 2026 growth projection by 0.3 percentage points and raised its inflation projection by 0.7 points.
The column traces this discrepancy to a tug-of-war between a bottleneck amplifier and a substitution attenuator: while Europe’s post-2022 energy diversification cushions the direct shock, vulnerabilities persist in critical inputs such as nitrogen fertilizers, jet fuel and petrochemicals, where substitution is slow or nonexistent. What Europe needs is not another energy-crisis playbook but a critical-inputs playbook — serious monitoring and stress testing, strategic reserves for the few inputs that matter most, and a trade and industrial policy that treats chokepoint exposure as a primary parameter.
@article{critical_inputs_playbook_2026,
title = {A Critical-Inputs Playbook: What the Strait of Hormuz Tells Europe},
author = {Julian Hinz},
journal = {Intereconomics},
volume = {61},
number = {3},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2026/number/3/article/a-critical-inputs-playbook-what-the-strait-of-hormuz-tells-europe.html}
}