Six of the Gulf foreign ministries are quietly considering a course of action that has not been seen since the shooting began more than six months ago: sitting in the same room as their Iranian counterpart. Oman is attempting to rally a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Salalah on Monday which also includes Iran and Iraq, as per Tehran's foreign ministry. No one, so far, is asserting that it is confirmed. It is not clear yet whether Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar will all be present, alongside the host, and two people briefed on the planning say it is not too early to be worried that the escalating battle between Saudi-backed forces and the Houthis in Yemen might yet prove to be a disruption.

It's the content of this, not the dance. Muscat has been busily travelling between Washington, Riyadh and Tehran for weeks in a bid to find a formula for regulating shipping across the Hormuz strait over the past few weeks, where he has been attempting to work out a framework for managing shipping that carries something close to a fifth of the world's seaborne crude. Iran is eager to have a fee charged on ships when they're in waters where they're considered Iranian territory, and some control over which ships can pass. They have been rejected outright by Washington and the Gulf states, who say it would give Tehran a lasting US bargaining chip in global energy markets instead of ending the deadlock. The meeting on Monday is intended to see if there is agreement within the bloc on the outline Oman and Iran have been pushing for, or if it melts as soon as it is brought to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

The timing is no coincidence. This week alone has provided new cause for gloom and doom. Saudi Arabia already had rerouted some of its crude from the export port in the Hormuz to the Red Sea by pipelines to bypass the strait, and now it has closed its East-West pipeline to avoid another crises. That ends one of the workarounds that the kingdom was relying on. Meanwhile, Houthis have advanced towards Yemen's Perim Island at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the other choke point connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden. If it gets even tighter, the operators of the tankers lose their second escape valve, not the first.

Traders have noticed. The price of Brent crude, which has risen from about the 80s in mid-August and the high nineties in early September, rose by more than 9 percent in the week, finishing near 104 dollars a barrel on Friday. It's a tall order for a market that briefly cooled over the summer, when Washington and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding, but then fell apart a few weeks ago over a dispute regarding which routes tankers are allowed to use.

In the latest forecast, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reduced its global oil demand growth projections by two and a half million bpd, the largest cut since the pandemic, reflecting the impact that continued high prices are having on demand. On the supply side, the American Energy Information Administration (AEA) made the opposite move, increasing its forecast for US crude production to 14.3 million barrels per day in 2027, which suggests that shale producers are bracing themselves to make up for the shortfall caused by Gulf supply disruptions. Meanwhile, China's crude imports are holding fairly steady into September after finding their feet after sliding back from a decade low in June, implying Beijing had made a few adjustments in its sourcing rather than simply absorbing the impact.

The shock landing is especially pronounced in India, the world's third largest oil importer, which traditionally bought a significant portion of its daily consumption of five and a half million barrels of crude from Hormuz. New Delhi has been diversifying for a while, relying on some forty suppliers, and has been sourcing more Russian and lately Venezuelan barrels; officials say the reserves are in great shape. Diversification hasn't been without cost, though.

Since the war erupted at the end of February, freight charges have quadrupled in the main line between Ras Tanura and India, and a loose estimate of Indian fossil fuel import costs before Russian barrels are discounted is at least twenty-two billion dollars between March and August, or fourteen billion dollars around four tenths of a percentage point of GDP as a net increase. The Reserve Bank of India has already warned that a prolonged closure may compel it to take a hawkish stance on monetary policy, while foreign portfolio investors have withdrawn billions from the Indian stock market this year as the rupee takes the beating. Rating agencies monitoring the overall region have already downgraded India's growth forecast, due to such an energy shock.

Step back and the pattern you get is familiar from all previous Gulf crises, but a compressed and repeated version at an unusual tempo: a chokepoint is closed or narrowed, shipping and insurance prices surge before the oil price even hit the news, economies in Tokyo to Ahmedabad feel the pain in different ways according to how diversified their oil supplies were, and diplomacy lags months behind the military and economic reality on the ground.

The difference this time is two chokepoints are emerging, and that's why Oman's initiative is important, whether or not ministers will meet on Monday. A solution that just solves the problem in the Hormuz and leaves the Bab el-Mandeb aspect untouched is half the solution. Markets, meantime, have no agenda waiting for them. They're already factoring in the possibility that the talks will break down, and, since the first memorandum this summer failed to last the night, that's a good guess.