GPS – Global Perspectives & Strategy
1. From Sea Lanes to Balance Sheets The concept of the chokepoint is as old as trade itself, but its meaning has evolved. Traditionally, a chokepoint referred to a narrow geographic passage — a strait or canal — through which commerce, energy, and power must pass. Control, disruption, or insecurity at such points shaped empires and wars. What has changed in the modern era is not the relevance of chokepoints, but the speed and manner in which their effects are transmitted. Today, chokepoints are no longer episodic military concerns; they function as continuous economic variables, priced daily by markets and embedded into corporate balance sheets, logistics models, and national policy assumptions.
It is this evolution that Chokepoints explicitly sets out to capture. Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (2025) examines how economic warfare has become a defining feature of twenty-first-century geopolitics, as the United States and its allies wield control over what Fishman terms critical nodes of interdependence. His central argument is that power today flows less through territorial conquest or military occupation and more through the ability to shape access, impose costs, and constrain behaviour within tightly integrated global systems. To that end, Fishman distinguishes three broad categories of chokepoints, each with distinct strategic significance.
The first category is physical chokepoints — canals, straits, ports, and transport corridors — where geography concentrates flows of energy, goods, and trade. These remain the most visible and intuitive because disruption is immediate and tangible. Instability here translates directly into delays, shortages, higher freight rates, and rising insurance premia.
The second category is financial chokepoints, centred on currencies, payment systems, clearing mechanisms, insurance markets, and access to global capital. These are less visible but often more potent. By constraining access to finance, settlement, or insurance, states can impose economy-wide costs without deploying force. In Fishman's telling, denying access to dollar clearing, correspondent banking, or insurance coverage can be as strategically consequential as blocking a canal.
The third category is technological and regulatory chokepoints, including advanced manufacturing nodes, critical technologies, standards-setting bodies, and export control regimes. Control here shapes long-term competitiveness rather than immediate flows. By limiting access to key technologies or setting rules that others must comply with, states influence industrial trajectories, supply-chain geography, and strategic autonomy over decades, not months.
In Fishman's framing, these chokepoints converge in function even if they differ in form. All are points where access can be denied, behaviour shaped, and costs imposed — often without a single shot being fired. Maritime geography therefore does not sit apart from economic statecraft; it intersects with it. The control of a canal and the control of a financial clearing system belong to the same strategic family. Together, they explain why modern power is exercised less through dramatic confrontation and more through the quiet management — and manipulation — of interdependence itself.
2. How Risk Became a Permanent Cost of Globalisation
Against this conceptual backdrop, the Western maritime system comes into focus. The Strait of Hormuz functions as the world's primary energy valve: roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG flows transit this narrow passage each year. Any disruption there immediately reverberates through energy prices, shipping insurance, and inflation expectations. The Red Sea has emerged as the most conflict-exposed passage in the global trade system, where security incidents rapidly translate into rerouting decisions and higher freight costs. These pressures converge at the Suez Canal, which carries about 12 per cent of global trade and serves as the hinge connecting Europe and Asia. Suez is not merely a canal; it is a multiplier. When it functions smoothly, global trade remains efficient. When it is stressed, delays, costs, and uncertainty propagate across continents. These are not independent routes but sequential dependencies within a single integrated western chokepoint cluster.
The same logic applies in the eastern system, centred on manufacturing and Asian trade. The South China Sea acts as the principal trade funnel for East Asia, carrying the bulk of intermediate and finished goods that underpin global supply chains. The Strait of Malacca is the efficiency chokepoint that makes this system commercially viable — narrow, crowded, and indispensable. When Malacca becomes constrained, traffic shifts to the Sunda and Lombok Straits, which serve as necessary but costlier fallbacks, adding distance, fuel consumption, and insurance exposure. Beyond these lies the last-resort contingency: detours south of Australia. At that point, disruption ceases to be temporary. Time, fuel, crew, insurance, and opportunity costs hard-wire inflation into the structure of trade itself.
3. Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, and the New Grammar of Power
What unites these western and eastern systems is not geography alone, but economics. This is where global business, economics, and politics converge into a single operating domain. Geopolitics determines who can coerce, deny access, or protect sea lanes. Geoeconomics translates insecurity into price — freight rates, insurance premia, inventory buffers, and competitiveness. Geostrategy governs how states and firms respond: by repositioning supply chains, diversifying routes, adjusting stockpiles, securing partnerships, and planning contingencies.
In this environment, the central question is no longer, "Will the strait close?" That is a binary, crisis-era framing. The more relevant question is, "What is the new baseline cost of assurance across the entire chain of chokepoints?" This is the defining shift of the mid-2020s. Risk is no longer an exception to be managed episodically; it has become a permanent budget line. Strategic clarity, therefore, does not mean predicting crises. It means recognising that chokepoints — physical and economic alike — now structure everyday decision-making. For trade-dependent economies and globally integrated firms, success lies in disciplined exposure management: diversification without panic, resilience without illusion, and policy choices grounded in the sober translation of security dynamics into balance sheet realities. That is the grammar of power in the current era, and it is the lens through which chokepoints must now be understood. In a world of chokepoints, power is no longer measured by who moves fastest in a crisis but by who prices risk most accurately before one arrives.
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Samirul Ariff Othman is an analyst of global politics, business and economics. He is an adjunct lecturer at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) and a senior consultant with Global Asia Consulting. He writes on global perspectives, strategy and statecraft, offering strategic insights for a complex world. The views expressed here are entirely his own.