The Strait of Hormuz Is Not a Metaphor
Twenty percent of the world's oil supply transits through a waterway twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. The Strait of Hormuz. You probably learned about it in high school geography and forgot it by lunch. But the governments of every major economy in the world have not forgotten it — and right now, with Iranian tensions at levels not seen since 2019, the question of who controls that narrow passage is no longer academic.
Chokepoints are back. They never really left, but the globalization consensus of the 1990s and 2000s convinced an entire generation of trade economists that geography had been transcended by technology and open markets. Containers and cargo planes and digital logistics made the physical world irrelevant. Supply chains were just-in-time. Borders were anachronisms.
COVID blew that up. Russian gas pipelines to Europe blew it up again. And now the combination of Red Sea shipping attacks, Iranian nuclear brinksmanship, and Chinese pressure in the South China Sea is making a point that should have been obvious all along: geography still wins.
What a Chokepoint Actually Costs You When You Lose It
When Houthi attacks started targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea in late 2023, the immediate cost was measurable. Container shipping rates from Asia to Europe jumped over 300% in six weeks. Vessels rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly fourteen days to transit times. European manufacturers started warning about parts shortages before the headlines even caught up to what was happening at the docks.
That's one chokepoint, partially disrupted, for a matter of months. The Suez Canal — the other end of that Red Sea passage — handles roughly 12% of global trade. Not a majority. Not everything. Just twelve percent.
The disruption cost billions.
Now think about the Taiwan Strait. Think about the South China Sea. Think about what a serious Chinese blockade of Taiwan does to global semiconductor supply — not 12% of some commodity, but a dominant share of the advanced chips that run every modern economy. Apple, NVIDIA, defense contractors, hospitals. All of it.
The chokepoint problem isn't geographic nostalgia. It's the architecture of the modern economy running straight through physical passages that a handful of nations can threaten on any given Tuesday.
The Libertarian Case for Hard Power at Sea
I'll admit: as someone who believes fundamentally that government should do less and markets should do more, the argument for naval dominance and forward military posture sits uncomfortably alongside my general philosophy.
But there's a coherent libertarian case for it.
Free trade requires free passage. The global market that allows an American consumer to buy a shirt made in Vietnam depends on the US Navy maintaining open sea lanes that nobody in Vietnam's government could maintain themselves. The liberal international order — whatever its many flaws — rested on a military guarantee that commerce could move without being held hostage to the geography it had to cross.
The moment America retreats from that guarantee, the chokepoints don't become free. They become owned. By someone else. By Iran at Hormuz, by China at the Taiwan Strait, by Russia at the Turkish Straits if they ever decide to push that particular button.
And an owned chokepoint is a tax on every American consumer who buys anything that was made somewhere else or made of something that was extracted somewhere else. Which is most things.
The free market argument for military presence at critical sea lanes is actually stronger than the nationalist one. It's not about flag-waving. It's about keeping the lanes open so prices don't get set by whoever has a missile battery on a nearby peninsula.
The Chokepoints America Doesn't Control Anymore
Here's the honest part of this conversation that most foreign policy analysts won't say directly: America has ceded effective control of several critical chokepoints over the past decade, and we've done it through a combination of budget constraints, strategic distraction, and a bipartisan consensus that nation-building was more important than sea control.
The Red Sea is contested. The South China Sea is Chinese-dominated in practice even if not in law. The Arctic shipping routes that are opening as ice recedes are being staked out by Russian and Chinese icebreaker fleets while the US scrambles to build a single polar-capable vessel.
Reclaiming that posture isn't a one-administration fix. It's a decade of procurement, basing agreements, and alliance maintenance — the unglamorous work of great power competition that doesn't fit in a tweet but determines whether American manufacturers can get their inputs at a price that lets them compete.
The world rediscovering chokepoints is not a trend piece. It's the bill coming due on twenty years of strategic drift. The question isn't whether geography matters. It always did. The question is whether we're going to act like it does before someone else makes the answer for us.
