A recurring theme at this year’s General Debate at the UN has been how the costs of wars are transmitted to countries that have no part in them. Amir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar told the Assembly that instability in the Gulf raises the prices of food and medicine for people far beyond the region. President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic said wars in Europe and the Middle East, “far away from our coasts,” directly affect the prices his country pays for food and energy. Latvia’s Edgars Rinkevics stressed: “What happens in Ukraine does not stay in Ukraine; what happens in the Middle East, in the Red Sea and in Sudan does not stay there.”

The straits were named repeatedly. President Azali Assoumani of the Comoros told the Assembly that the war’s paralysis of the Strait of Hormuz threatens food and energy security in import-dependent countries like his own. Prime Minister Luis Montenegro of Portugal called for the blockade of Hormuz to end and said of the resulting energy and fuel crisis: “Everyone is being harmed.” He went further than any other speaker toward a remedy, saying, “We must put an end to this collective masochism,” and suggesting that the mechanisms determining the price of oil could themselves be discussed. Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said non-state armed groups have grown to the point of threatening “the world’s maritime corridors and straits,” and called for responsibility to be assigned to the states that finance and shelter them.