Seoul Green-Lights Crisis Envoys to Saudi, Oman, Algeria After Hormuz Shutdown

South Korea’s scramble echoes Tokyo’s 1973 ‘oil shock’ mission when Japan sent Vice-Minister Sadanori Yamanaka to Riyadh on 25 December 1973 to secure barrels after the Arab embargo, and Washington’s 1990 emergency drawdown during Iraq’s Kuwait invasion. The common thread: chokepoints—then the Suez and Hormuz, now Hormuz again—turn energy importers into diplomatic mendicants. For decades Seoul has diversified on paper yet still moves 70 % of its crude through a single 39-km strait; crises in 1984 (Tanker War), 2019 (Iranian seizures) and now 2026 show the structural vulnerability of maritime oil logistics. This envoy gambit matters chiefly as another data point in the long decline of fossil-fuel security: over a 100-year arc, each shock nudges import-dependent nations toward strategic stocks, multiple suppliers, and ultimately post-oil energy systems. Whether this dispatch succeeds or flounders, the underlying lesson—that carbon supply lines are geopolitical fault lines—will persist far longer than the current firefight in the Gulf.