Beyond Hormuz: The Future of Maritime Chokepoints

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and efforts to extract payments for safe passage — plus, more recently, the Houthis’ move to attack Saudi shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — have highlighted the risks of maritime chokepoints to global shipping and raised questions about the future for freedom of navigation. The impacts extend beyond the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, so we asked five experts to consider the implications for several other crucial waterways: the Strait of Malacca, the Taiwan Strait, the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, and the Turkish Straits.

Can China escape the “Malacca dilemma” while preparing to disrupt U.S. naval and commercial shipping in a crisis? That is Beijing’s strategic challenge. Modern technology has made global shipping increasingly vulnerable. For the engineers who dominate today’s party-state, maritime chokepoints reverse the Venturi effect: Instead of accelerating flow through a narrow passage, military threats slow or halt commercial and naval traffic, magnifying gray-zone coercion and wartime costs.

The Strait of Hormuz’s leverage stems from Gulf energy exports to Asia, much of which transits through the Malacca Strait. That vulnerability has long shaped Beijing’s strategy. Since 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has sought to reduce China’s reliance on Malacca through diversified supply routes, larger strategic reserves, renewable energy, and overland corridors. Yet, overland alternatives cannot fully replace maritime transport, leaving Beijing to hedge across multiple networks. The result is a strategy of asymmetry designed to preserve open sea lanes in peacetime while retaining the ability to threaten chokepoints in wartime.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not significantly altered the level of geopolitical and geoeconomic risk in the Taiwan Strait — but it has put a spotlight on that risk. Analysts have long warned that maritime chokepoints are vulnerable to weaponization during times of conflict. With the Iran war as a backdrop, organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House have explained in detail what a similar conflict in the Taiwan Strait would mean for neighboring and extra-regional states alike. They paint a grim picture. Curiously, however, there is not much in the public domain to suggest that national governments or private companies are busy updating their plans for coping with the economic impact of a blockade of the Taiwan Strait. The notable exception is Taiwan itself: Next month, Taipei is scheduled to conduct a series of military drills to strengthen its resilience to Chinese maritime coercion.

Managing Director of the Johns Hopkins SAIS Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs

Amid disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, and with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait emerging as a secondary pressure point, shipping has surged toward the Panama Canal, with daily traffic up roughly 20 percent since late February. This has been lucrative for Panama, with canal revenues rising by up to 15 percent. Auction bids for transit slots jumped over the past months, including a staggering $4 million bid for a Neopanamax slot in April. But the surge has also strained the canal’s infrastructure. And its lock system, which depends on heavy freshwater use, could come under further strain amid a forecasted “super El Niño” this year. The war with Iran has exposed inadequacies in global maritime transport infrastructure. Closing one chokepoint can quickly overload another. An overloaded Panama Canal will be most impactful for the United States, which relies on the waterway for about 40 percent of its container traffic.

The threat to the Suez Canal isn’t actually closure — that’s incredibly unlikely. More problematic is the erosion of confidence: every Bab el-Mandeb incident, however contained, raises insurance premiums, lengthens transit calculations, and nudges carriers toward treating the situation in the Red Sea as structurally contested rather than a passing crisis. If that kind of assessment persists, shipowners will soon start shifting to the route around the Cape of Good Hope.

The long-term impacts mean that Egypt will absorb a strategic cost it wasn’t responsible for — at a moment when the country’s finances can ill afford it. It’s also why Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb can’t be read in isolation: Every time an escalation of some sort occurs in one, it affects risk assessments of the other — and further beyond. Iran and its allies can now impose durable costs on global maritime arteries, without ever needing to close them outright.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis inevitably raises questions about Turkey’s control of the Turkish Straits — the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. However, the comparison is misleading. Unlike the Strait of Hormuz, where transit has become subject to unilateral Iranian decisions, Turkey’s authority over the straits is governed by the 1936 Montreux Convention, which establishes clear rules for merchant and military vessels, differentiates between Black Sea and non-Black Sea states, and specifies the circumstances under which Ankara may restrict warship passage. Although Turkey retains some discretion, it is constrained by treaty, making the regime far more predictable than Hormuz. The two cases also differ on tolls: While Iran has imposed transit fees, Turkey charges only for services such as navigation, traffic management, environmental protection, and emergency response.

The Montreux Convention has endured for nearly nine decades. Its longevity reflects a durable compromise reached during an era of great-power rivalry that also aligned with the new Turkish Republic’s interest in stability. Furthermore, the convention’s legal clarity has minimized ambiguity, constrained competing interpretations, and helped preserve a rules-based regime.