Part I — Situation overview

On 22 August the new secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei — a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, appointed this month as part of a series of appointments signalling a harder line — openly threatened Iran’s neighbours in an interview given to state television. According to the report of AP News he said that if the neighbouring states join the American economic action they will be regarded as enemies and “we will attack their interests”; he also added that in that case Iran would target the oil shipping routes leading out of the Persian Gulf that bypass the Strait of Hormuz. His message to the American president was the following:

“If (Trump) wants to do something, we will retaliate in a seismic manner.”

Rezaei also spoke of talks under way with Oman on the management of the strait, and said that transit charges will be levied. Iran announced control over the strait — previously regarded as an international waterway — after the American and Israeli attack, after 28 February. The blockade has therefore lasted half a year, and it has now not eased but acquired a new dimension: the addressee of the threat is no longer the United States but those third states that join the sanctions circle.

Practical operation is contradictory. On the same day the Iranian state news agency and the Iraqi head of state, Nizar Amidi, both confirmed that Iran had permitted the passage of some Iraqi oil tankers, after repeated requests presented by Baghdad through several channels. At the Baghdad policy conference Amidi also stated that Iraqi territory will not be allowed to be used for launching an attack against another state, and that the matter of the strait “concerns the whole world, not only Iraq”. According to Al Jazeera’s Tehran correspondent the situation is “in a holding pattern”: the talks with Oman have so far not led to an agreement, and as long as the naval blockade persists, according to the Iranian statement the strait remains closed. According to the communication of the Egyptian foreign ministry, the Egyptian and Iranian foreign ministers discussed how Tehran and Washington could be brought back to the negotiating table.

In parallel the building of bypass routes has accelerated. According to briefings by French presidential officials, the development of alternative routes replacing the Strait of Hormuz is on the agenda of the Saudi crown prince’s two-day visit to Paris: increasing the traffic of Omani ports outside the Gulf, the expansion or duplication of Saudi Arabian and other pipelines, and new rail connections. France and Saudi Arabia have set up a joint working group on Middle Eastern and European energy and logistics connections, which meets at ministerial level. The Central European dimension is supplied by the analysis of Visegrad Insight: the Dubrovnik summit of the Three Seas Initiative consolidates American energy deliveries in the region, while the European Commission has announced a toolbox under the name AccelerateEU for managing the supply crisis triggered by the Middle Eastern war. The same analysis records that from 1 May Russia halted the transit of Kazakh crude oil heading to Germany through the northern branch of the Druzhba pipeline, citing “technical” reasons. Kazakh exports on this route amounted to some 2.1 million tonnes in 2025, and a further 730,000 tonnes in the first quarter of 2026 — which is about seventeen per cent of the throughput capacity of the Schwedt refinery supplying the Berlin and Brandenburg region.

MIAK’s reading is that the nature of the Hungarian stake has changed. As long as the blockade appeared as a price effect, the answer was technical: reserves, price regulation instruments, compensation. Now, however, Iran itself has created a forced situation of choice by distinguishing the addressees of the threat on the basis of accession. In this situation “we take no position” is not a neutral stance but is itself a decision — only one whose criteria nobody can verify. The president of one EU member state, Bulgaria, has already come under domestic political pressure because of his response to the Iranian threat; the question is therefore not theoretical.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

The conceptual framework of the situation comes together in three sources. In his volume World Order, Henry Kissinger (German-born American diplomat and thinker on international politics, Secretary of State of the United States between 1973 and 1977) devotes a separate chapter to the American and the Iranian conception of order, and there he gives the distinction that is most important for interpreting the present threat: Iran has to decide whether it is a country or a cause. The two mean different behaviour in the international order, and partners can handle each differently. The European Union’s 2016 base document Global Strategy — the referenced basis of the KP4 principled-pragmatism doctrine and the KP11 strategic balance policy — expressly treats energy security as a foreign policy question: in its view the internal and external sides of the Energy Union operate together, and the diversification of sources, routes and suppliers is not commercial optimisation but a diplomatic task. The World Economic Outlook publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides the third framework: the measurable structure of the inflationary pass-through of oil price shocks, and the documentation of the scale and persistence of the price volatility triggered by earlier phases of the conflict around Iran. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. All three start from the premise that the decision is unavoidable, so the real question is not whether we take a position but whether we do so according to verifiable criteria or without them.

3.1 A set of accession criteria announced in advance (before the next relevant EU Council meeting)

MIAK asks that, still before the substantive EU decision, the government make public the set of criteria on the basis of which it decides on joining the sanctions and joint energy procurement action. The set of criteria should contain at least four items: the quantified exposure of Hungarian energy supply, the international law position on free passage through straits, the extent of EU solidarity obligations, and the compensation that Hungary extracts in return for accession. This is the practical application of the KP4 principled-pragmatism doctrine: the essence of the doctrine is precisely that the position follows neither from ideological rigidity nor from mere interest maximisation, but from transparent deliberation knowable in advance. Announcing it in advance achieves two things. On the one hand it protects the decision from being justifiable afterwards by any set of criteria at all — a set of criteria is a yardstick only if it is known before the decision. On the other hand it creates a negotiating position: if partners see on what condition they can count on Hungarian accession, the condition itself becomes a negotiating stake. The proposal expressly does not prescribe what the decision should be — it prescribes that the reason for the decision be public.

3.2 Compensation for accession: participation in the alternative route programmes, with concrete requests (by the end of 2026)

The second proposal is substantive. In MIAK’s view, if Hungary joins the common EU action it has to tie that to concrete, quantified compensation, and this request has to be formulated at the start of the negotiation, not at its end. Three items come into consideration. The first is the booking of capacity at the Croatian liquefied natural gas terminal: a longer-term, fixed-price booking that secures a quantity interpretable in relation to the entry points of the Hungarian system. The second is fixing the Adriatic pipeline transport tariff, because the quantity in itself is worth nothing if the transport tariff can rise freely during the crisis. The third is access to the routes being built within the framework of the French–Saudi logistics working group and the Three Seas Initiative: the pipeline and rail connections now being planned fix a structure for decades, and whoever does not take part in the planning can later only buy access at a price. This is the joint application of the KP11 strategic balance policy and the K7 energy market shock resilience programme points. The example of the Schwedt refinery shows what is at stake: the unilateral halting of the Kazakh transit took away, with a single decision, about a sixth of the throughput capacity of a large refinery, and this loss could not be quickly made good afterwards.

3.3 A monthly exposure register on the routes of Hungarian energy imports (from the fourth quarter of 2026)

The third proposal makes the other two verifiable. MIAK asks that the government publish monthly a simple, machine-readable exposure register: what quantity of natural gas, crude oil and fuel arrived in the country, at which entry point and by which route, what the storage level is, and how large the strategic stock is expressed in days. The register contains no business secret if it is aggregated and retrospective: entry-point level data looking back over a month are already available today in the European transparency systems, only not in a single, readable Hungarian statement. This is the application of the logic of the G1 data-driven budget and the G25 energy price shock preparedness plan to foreign policy decision support. The benefit is twofold: the first item of the set of criteria under point 3.1 — the quantified exposure — becomes a verifiable statement only in this way, and the public too can judge how large in reality is the risk on which the government bases its position. The same data is also the input of the scenario analysis under the KP7 foreign policy crisis management protocol.

The three proposals are held together by a single principle: a foreign policy position has force if it follows from knowable criteria. Kissinger’s distinction between an actor behaving as a country and one behaving as a cause (see 6.4.1) makes it clear that from the partners’ point of view the present Iranian threat is precisely a question of predictability; and the energy diplomacy proposition of the EU base document (see 6.4.2) makes it clear that diversification is not a procurement task but a negotiating programme. From the two together follows MIAK’s position: “neutrality” in this situation is not a lower-risk path, only a less verifiable one.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Foreign policy The set of criteria announced in advance creates a negotiating position and protects the decision from after-the-fact justification A public set of criteria also means a constraint: if the situation changes, the earlier yardstick requires explanation
Energy security Participation in the alternative route programmes fixes long-term access, not an ad hoc purchase The pipelines and rail connections now being planned come on stream years later; they give no answer for short-term supply
Economy The monthly exposure register gives data for planning the utility protection budget line and for forecasting the price effect Public storage and stock data are market information which, at a time of scarcity, can in itself push prices up
Security The publicity of the position reduces the risk of misunderstanding towards allies and partners The Iranian threat expressly targets the interests of the acceding states; public accession is assumed, not concealed, exposure
EU coordination A concrete, quantified Hungarian request gives a measurable bargaining position within the common action too If the request is too high, the Hungarian position appears as obstruction and the negotiating capital is lost

The main question for deliberation is the price of publicity. The Iranian threat targets precisely the interests of the acceding states, so taking a public position means assumed exposure — this is an actual, not a theoretical, risk. In MIAK’s view this is nevertheless the smaller cost, for two reasons. On the one hand the fact of accession or non-accession emerges from Council decisions anyway; what can be concealed is not the decision, only its reason. On the other hand a public set of criteria protects precisely that room for manoeuvre which the KP11 strategic balance policy aims at: if the yardstick of the decision is known, then partners calculate not the Hungarian intention but the Hungarian condition. The proposal tips over to the risk side if the set of criteria appears but the exposure data behind it does not: in that case the set of criteria becomes a rhetorical instrument and its first item an unverifiable claim.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (proposed KPIs)

The performance indicators below (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators) will show in 6 and 12 months’ time whether the Hungarian position was built on transparent criteria. These are proposed yardsticks, not government commitments.

  • Appearance of the set of criteria: does the government publish the criteria of the accession decision before the relevant EU Council meeting, and does it contain all four items.
  • Regularity of the exposure register: does the statement of import route, storage level and stock day-count appear monthly, in machine-readable form.
  • Extracted compensation: what quantity and what price structure of capacity booking has been created at the Croatian terminal, and has the Adriatic transport tariff been fixed.
  • Participation in route planning: does a Hungarian party appear on the energy project list of the French–Saudi logistics working group or of the Three Seas Initiative.
  • Measuring the price effect: how domestic fuel and gas prices develop in regional comparison, and with what deviation from plan the utility protection budget line is performing.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request to the decision-maker can be summed up in a single sentence: before the next relevant EU Council meeting the set of accession criteria should be made public, accession should be accompanied by a concrete request for compensation — capacity booking and a fixed transport tariff — and from the fourth quarter of 2026 there should be a monthly exposure register. And to the public, a request in outlook: the matter of the Strait of Hormuz today is not a question of the fuel price. The price effect is measurable and manageable; what is not manageable is a decision situation in which Iran sorts the addressees of its threat on the basis of accession, while nobody knows the criteria of the Hungarian decision.

Two MIAK foundational values are directly in play here. Openness, because the core of the proposal is not the content of the decision but the knowability of the decision criteria — foreign policy is the field where this is least customary, even though the exposure burdens the population. And data-drivenness, because without the exposure register the sentence “our interest dictates something different for us” is not a claim but an invocation: it becomes measurable only through how many days of stock there are and by which route the gas comes.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The framing of the press, spectrum by spectrum

The international news agency band carried the event as a statement of facts, along several threads. AP News placed the Iranian threat in its daily Middle East round-up, and this is the only source that quoted the statements verbatim and also put the political significance of the appointment in context. Al Jazeera published two pieces: one carried the threat as a news programme summary, while the other carried the easing simultaneous with the threat — the permitting of the passage of Iraqi tankers. The two pieces together give the post’s key observation: the blockade is at once a threat and a negotiating instrument, and the two operate on the same day.

The European policy band concentrated on the consequence for decision-making. Of Euractiv’s two pieces, one tied the Iranian reaction to the American president’s statement on the strait, and the other covered the domestic political difficulty of the president of one EU member state — Bulgaria — because of his response. This is the only framing that carried the story not as an energy question but as a question of taking a position; MIAK’s reading follows from this. Both pieces were accessible only at the level of the title, so the post does not build on their content.

The Central European analytical band measured regional exposure. The Visegrad Insight piece connected the Dubrovnik summit and the Commission toolbox with the differing degrees of vulnerability of the Visegrád countries, and was alone in carrying the quantified consequence of the halting of the Kazakh transit for a specific German refinery. This is the framing that gives the factual basis of the Hungarian decision — and that did not appear in the Hungarian press on this day.

6.2 Facts and data

Data Value Source
Start of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz the days after 28 February 2026 AP News, 22 August 2026
The new secretary of the Iranian security council Mohsen Rezaei, former commander of the Revolutionary Guard AP News, 22 August 2026
The object of the threat the interests of the neighbouring states, and the alternative oil shipping routes leading out of the Gulf AP News, 22 August 2026
The subject of the Iranian–Omani talks the management of the strait and the levying of transit charges AP News, 22 August 2026
Passage of Iraqi tankers permitted for a few vessels, at Baghdad’s request IRNA, Iraqi head of state (Al Jazeera, 22 August 2026)
The subject of the French–Saudi working group Omani ports, pipeline expansion and duplication, new rail connections French presidential officials (AP News, 22 August 2026)
Halting of Kazakh crude oil transit on the northern branch of the Druzhba pipeline 1 May 2026 Visegrad Insight, August 2026
Kazakh exports to Germany on this route in 2025 approx. 2.1 million tonnes (approx. 43,000 barrels/day) Visegrad Insight, August 2026
Kazakh exports in the first quarter of 2026 730,000 tonnes Visegrad Insight, August 2026
Share of the loss in the throughput capacity of the Schwedt refinery approx. 17 per cent Visegrad Insight, August 2026
Name of the Commission’s crisis management toolbox AccelerateEU Visegrad Insight, August 2026

The three rows of the table concerning Kazakh transit give the post’s non-obvious conclusion. The Schwedt case is instructive from the point of view of the Hungarian decision because it was caused neither by war nor by blockade: the unilateral decision of a single supplier, invoking a “technical” reason, took away about a sixth of the throughput capacity of a large refinery, and the loss could not be quickly made good afterwards. This is the type of risk that the exposure register under point 3.3 makes visible: the critical indicator is not average import dependence but how large a share the loss of one specific route takes away — and this can only be known from regular data publication at route level.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Foreign policy (programme points) — the doctrine of taking a transparent position, the protection of room for manoeuvre and the protocol of crisis decision-making: KP4, KP11, KP7;
  • Economy (programme points) — the energy price shock preparedness plan and the data publicity underpinning the decision: G25, G1;
  • Environment and climate (programme points) — strategic reserves and procurement diversification: K7;
  • Defence (background material) — assessment of the threat to critical energy infrastructure and alliance coordination.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Henry Kissinger: World Order

Kissinger’s volume treats the relationship of the United States and Iran in a separate chapter, and there it places at the centre the distinction that is most useful for interpreting the present situation: whether an actor behaves in the international order as a state or as the representative of a cause.

“But whatever face Iran presents to the outside world, it does not alter the reality that Iran needs to make a choice. It must decide whether it is a country or a cause.”

The distinction is not moral but practical. An actor behaving as a state is predictable: it has interests, these can be assessed, and its threats can be measured against them. The behaviour of an actor representing a cause, however, does not follow from its interests, and therefore partners cannot calculate it. Present Iranian conduct shows in this framework precisely the transition between the two: the same power simultaneously threatens retaliation against every acceding neighbour and permits specific Iraqi tanker passages at the request of a neighbouring state. In Kissinger’s reading this is not inconsistency but the symptom of an undecided choice. The Hungarian policy consequence of this is that the position should not be built on calculating Iranian intent — that is not calculable in the present situation — but on measuring one’s own exposure and on the publicity of one’s own decision yardstick.

📖 Source: Henry Kissinger: World Order

6.4.2 European Union: Global Strategy (2016)

The EU base document devotes a separate section to energy security, and formulates it there not as a procurement but as a foreign policy task.

“In line with the goals of the Energy Union, the EU will seek to diversify its energy sources, routes and suppliers, particularly in the gas domain (…) Through our energy diplomacy, we will strengthen relations worldwide with reliable energy-producing and transit countries, and support the establishment of infrastructure to allow diversified sources to reach European markets.”

Three elements deserve attention in the Hungarian situation. The first is the triple enumeration: it is not enough to diversify the source — the route and the supplier too — the Schwedt case shows precisely that even with an identical source it is the route that falls out. The second is the use of the term “energy diplomacy”: the document regards the support of infrastructure building as a diplomatic task, which directly underpins proposal 3.2 — one has to be present in the planning phase of alternative routes, not on the market for finished capacity. The third is that the document mentions hybrid threats and energy security together within the circle of mutual assistance and solidarity obligations: the accession decision is therefore not a matter of free deliberation within a solidarity framework, but a decision whose omission also has to be justified.

📖 Source: European Union: Shared Vision, Common Action — A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (2016)

6.4.3 IMF: World Economic Outlook

The IMF publication documents the development of the oil price and the inflationary pass-through of shocks. The 2025 edition expressly names the price volatility around the conflict with Iran, and also gives the reference band: in the period indicated prices remained in the band between sixty and seventy dollars, the only departure from this being the temporary spike caused by the conflict, while the futures market priced an average of sixty-eight to sixty-nine dollars for the coming years. The methodological part of the publication describes the mechanism by which an energy price shock passes through into consumer inflation: the extent of the effect depends on the energy intensity and the import share of the economy, and it is typically spread over several quarters. From the Hungarian point of view the usable conclusion is that a price effect deriving from a blockade of the strait is not a one-off price increase but a process extending over several quarters with decreasing intensity — and therefore for planning the utility protection budget line the current price is not enough; a time-series knowledge of route exposure is needed. This is the quantified justification of proposal 3.3.

📖 Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF): World Economic Outlook (2025)

6.5 International comparison

The Bulgarian case is the closest parallel: there the presidential response to the Iranian threat itself became a domestic political question. The lesson is not that silence would have been better, but that the criteria of the response were not announced in advance, so afterwards it was the person of the respondent rather than the content of the response that moved to the centre of the debate. Alongside a set of criteria published in advance, the same answer is a verifiable decision, not a personal utterance.

French practice is instructive from the other direction. Paris has set up a joint working group with the Saudi side whose express task is to identify the most important projects, secure the financing and designate the role of French companies. This is the structure that proposal 3.2 asks to be adopted: not a negotiating stance but institutionalised participation in the planning. The growth of Poland’s role as a gas hub shows the same thing at regional level: security of supply is provided not by a one-off good purchase but by where a country stands in the structure of the network.

Foreign policy

  • KP4 — Principled-pragmatism doctrine
  • KP11 — Strategic balance policy
  • KP7 — Foreign policy crisis management protocol

Economy

  • G25 — Energy price shock preparedness plan
  • G1 — Data-driven budget

Environment and climate

  • K7 — Energy market shock resilience

Proposed new programme point: Monthly published energy import exposure register — for the Economy area.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK foreign press monitor, 23 August 2026 — topic 1):

Knowledge base references (literature):

  • 📖 Henry Kissinger: World Order
  • 📖 European Union: Shared Vision, Common Action — A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (2016)
  • 📖 International Monetary Fund (IMF): World Economic Outlook (2025)

Note: the local file path of the books does not appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Foreign policy (programme points; programme point ID: KP4, KP11, KP7)
  • MIAK policy area: Economy (programme points; programme point ID: G25, G1)
  • MIAK policy area: Environment and climate (programme points; programme point ID: K7)
  • MIAK policy area: Defence (background material)
  • MIAK foreign press monitor, 23 August 2026 — topic 1, score: 92/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority — monthly gas and electricity balance
  • ENTSOG transparency platform — Hungarian entry points
  • Eurostat — energy import dependency indicator
  • TTF and Brent futures quotations

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