World

Opinion | Chokepoints and the cost of cutting off access

Economy World



In 2022, Ukraine asked SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to activate Starlink coverage around Sevastopol to support an attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. He refused, saying SpaceX would become “explicitly complicit in a major act of war”; he later also cited US sanctions covering Crimea. At the moment that mattered, one private actor had the final say.

It exposed a question hidden inside every chokepoint. We usually ask where dependence is concentrated: a strait, mineral, technology, network. But three simpler questions matter. How much depends on it? What does it take to use it? Who decides?

The threshold of a chokepoint lies in the second question: what someone must risk, in blood, money, law or reputation, before leverage becomes action.

China has lived with the first question for more than two decades. In 2003, then president Hu Jintao warned that “certain major powers” could control the Strait of Malacca, exposing China’s dependence on imported energy. Beijing gave the anxiety a name: the “Malacca dilemma”.

Twenty years on, that fear has bought a navy. Malacca did not by itself drive Beijing’s naval build-up; Taiwan, territorial disputes and great-power competition all mattered. But vulnerability at sea helped define the problem. If you cannot control the passage, build enough capability to make anyone contemplating its closure think harder about the consequences.

The Strait of Hormuz showed why geography carries such a high threshold. Iran blocked the strait after US and Israeli attacks, disrupting a waterway that normally carries about a fifth of global oil and gas shipments. Months later, traffic remains heavily constrained as Iran and Oman negotiate new shipping lanes and Tehran attaches wider political conditions to reopening.