Geopolitics of Chokepoints

The Eastern Caribbean island chain forms a natural barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, punctuated by a series of deep-water passages that function as the maritime gateways of the western hemisphere. The most significant are the Anegada Passage, running 100 kilometers wide and 1,800 meters deep between the Virgin Islands and Anguilla, and the Dominica Passage between Martinique and Dominica. The Windward Passage, separating Cuba from Haiti in the northwest, completes the strategic triad. Together these corridors handle the bulk of vessel traffic entering and exiting the Caribbean from the Atlantic United States Coast Guard, Caribbean Operations, 2024.

The passages carry a dual burden. Legitimate container, cruise, and energy traffic coexists with the hemisphere's primary cocaine transshipment corridor. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 80 to 90 percent of cocaine reaching North America and Europe passes through Caribbean maritime routes, with the Eastern Caribbean islands serving as intermediary hubs for onward transfer to smaller vessels bound for Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Canaries UNODC, World Drug Report 2024. The Martinique and Guadeloupe passages are of particular concern because those islands are French overseas departments, placing EU territory and Schengen-adjacent customs jurisdiction in direct adjacency to the transshipment network.

The geopolitical overlay intensifies toward the southern passages. Venezuela's territorial claim to the Essequibo region of Guyana, which encompasses two-thirds of Guyanese territory and its major offshore oil fields, has produced sustained naval posturing since 2023, with Venezuelan vessels conducting patrols in waters disputed with CARICOM member states. The United States Southern Command maintains forward-deployed assets in Puerto Rico and operates joint surveillance missions over the Anegada and Dominica corridors, producing a low-intensity great-power competition corridor running from Trinidad and Tobago north to the Virgin Islands Council on Foreign Relations, Venezuela's Essequibo Dispute, 2024.

The failure mode in the Eastern Caribbean is meteorological as much as political. Hurricane Maria in 2017 rendered Dominica inaccessible by sea for weeks, disrupting all passage transit and demonstrating that a single Category 5 storm can effectively close these corridors to non-military vessels. The 2024 and 2025 Atlantic seasons produced two major strikes on the Lesser Antilles, each requiring United States Coast Guard and French Navy coordination to restore passage safety World Meteorological Organization, Atlantic Hurricane Season Report, 2024. CARICOM has not developed a unified maritime security framework capable of coordinating passage governance across its 15 member states. That gap remains the region's most consequential institutional chokepoint.

The Panama Canal cuts 82 kilometers through the Continental Divide, lifting vessels 26 meters above sea level through a system of locks fed by Gatun Lake. At its narrowest the Culebra Cut runs roughly 192 meters wide. Under normal conditions the waterway handles 34 to 40 transits per day, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and carrying roughly 5 percent of global maritime trade by volume Lloyd's List, July 2025.

For more than a century the canal has functioned as the single most consequential artificial waterway in the Western Hemisphere. The United States built it between 1904 and 1914, maintained sovereign control over the Canal Zone until 1979, and transferred full operational authority to Panama on 31 December 1999 under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. That handover did not end Washington's strategic interest. The canal remains the fastest route between the United States East Coast and the Pacific Rim, and any disruption forces vessels onto the 12,875-kilometer Cape Horn alternative US Naval Institute, Reinventing the Panama Canal, January 2026.

Two overlapping crises define the canal's 2026 posture. The first is climatic. A severe El Nino drought in 2023 and 2024 dropped Gatun Lake to historic lows, cutting daily transits to as few as 22 and forcing the Panama Canal Authority to impose surcharges and booking auctions that added hundreds of thousands of dollars per crossing. Revenue recovered to 5.7 billion dollars in fiscal year 2025 with 13,404 transits, and the Authority announced an 8.5 billion dollar infrastructure plan to deepen Gatun Lake and build a new reservoir on the Rio Indio FreightWaves, 2025. In May 2026 the Authority ruled out transit restrictions for the remainder of the year despite a new El Nino watch from NOAA gCaptain, El Nino Watch, 2026.

The second crisis is geopolitical. In early 2026 Panama's Supreme Court voided the port concessions held by CK Hutchison Holdings, the Hong Kong conglomerate that had operated container terminals at Balboa and Cristobal since 1997 Bloomberg, 23 February 2026. The ruling came amid sustained pressure from the Trump administration, which had publicly demanded the canal's return and framed Hutchison's presence as a vector of Chinese influence. Panama handed interim control of the terminals to Maersk and MSC while Hutchison launched international arbitration CNBC, 24 February 2026. The failure modes compound: drought can return in any El Nino cycle, the arbitration exposes Panama to billions in liability, and the contest between Washington and Beijing over influence in the isthmus shows no sign of cooling, leaving shippers to price political risk into a route that was, until recently, considered infrastructurally stable CNBC, US-China power struggle, 6 February 2026.

The Suez Canal connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea across 193 kilometers of Egyptian territory, eliminating the need for vessels to circumnavigate Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. Approximately 12 to 15 percent of global trade passes through the canal annually, and in pre-crisis years the waterway generated over 9 billion dollars in transit fees for Egypt Suez Canal Authority via Anadolu Agency, 8 February 2026.

The canal's recent disruption stems from the Houthi campaign against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Between November 2023 and September 2025, Houthi forces attacked or attempted to attack commercial vessels 99 times, targeting ships perceived as linked to Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The last confirmed attack struck the vessel Minervagracht on 29 September 2025. The Houthis announced a suspension of attacks on 11 November 2025, following the Israel-Hamas ceasefire gCaptain, Suez Canal Traffic Stalls, January 2026.

The suspension did not produce an immediate recovery. By the first week of 2026, Suez Canal traffic remained 60 percent below the corresponding period in 2023. Container shipping was hit hardest, with fourth-quarter 2025 transits down 86 percent compared to 2023 levels. Most major carriers had rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly 3,500 nautical miles and 10 to 14 days per voyage but avoiding war-risk insurance premiums that peaked at 0.5 percent of hull value Coface, Houthi Attacks Analysis, 2025.

Maersk became the first major line to return, sending the Maersk Sebarok through the canal on 19 December 2025. CMA CGM announced a partial resumption in January 2026. However, the broader recovery stalled when renewed hostilities between Iran, Israel, and the United States in early 2026 raised the prospect of further Houthi escalation. In late March 2026, the Houthis launched their first ballistic missile at Israel since the ceasefire and warned that closure of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait remained possible Fortune, 28 March 2026. Container lines that had begun repositioning for a return abandoned those plans Air Cargo News, March 2026. The canal's core vulnerability lies in its dependence on a single approach corridor through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, just 29 kilometers wide. The Houthi campaign demonstrated that even a non-state militia with relatively modest missile and drone capabilities could divert the majority of global container traffic for over a year, without touching Egyptian territory itself.

The Strait of Hormuz separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula at a width of roughly 34 kilometers at its narrowest point. Two inbound and two outbound shipping lanes, each about 3.2 kilometers wide, are separated by a 3.2-kilometer buffer zone. Before the 2026 crisis, the strait handled 130 to 160 vessel transits per day and carried approximately 20 million barrels of oil daily, roughly one-fifth of global petroleum consumption International Energy Agency, The Middle East and Global Energy Markets, 2026.

The strait's modern strategic significance crystallized during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War, when both belligerents targeted tankers in what became known as the Tanker War. The United States responded with Operation Earnest Will, the largest naval convoy operation since the Second World War, establishing a permanent Fifth Fleet presence in Bahrain that persists to this day. Every subsequent escalation cycle between Washington and Tehran, from the 1988 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 to the 2019 tanker seizures, has returned to the same geographic bottleneck Council on Foreign Relations, The Strait of Hormuz, 2026.

The 2026 crisis represents the most severe disruption to Hormuz transit on record. On 28 February 2026, United States and Israeli forces launched strikes against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy declared the strait closed on 4 March and began interdicting commercial vessels, seizing the Panama-flagged tanker Niovi and detaining two additional foreign-flagged cargo ships CNBC, 20 April 2026. Crude oil and fuel flows through the strait fell by nearly 6 million barrels per day in the first quarter alone Bloomberg, 13 May 2026.

The Trump administration responded with Project Freedom, a military escort operation providing zone defense for commercial vessels willing to attempt the crossing. As of May 2026, shipping remains in what the United States Naval Institute describes as a state of confusion, with insurers unable to price transit risk and seafarers stranded aboard vessels in the Gulf of Oman USNI News, 8 May 2026. The UN Conference on Trade and Development has published an assessment of the disruption's implications for global trade and development UNCTAD, Hormuz Disruptions Assessment, 2026. The failure modes are existential for global energy markets. Any sustained closure forces Gulf oil producers onto pipeline alternatives with roughly one-third the capacity, while liquefied natural gas exports from Qatar, the world's largest LNG exporter, have no viable bypass.

The Strait of Malacca runs roughly 800 kilometers between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, narrowing to about 2.8 kilometers at the Phillips Channel near Singapore. The waterway is the single most consequential maritime artery in Asia, connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and carrying upward of one-quarter of global seaborne trade. In 2025 the strait crossed an inflection point: vessel transits exceeded 100,000 for the first time, reaching 102,525 according to Malaysia's Marine Department, an average of 281 reports per day to the Klang vessel traffic service Seatrade Maritime News, 2026.

Jurisdiction is split three ways. Singapore controls the eastern approaches through the Singapore Strait. Malaysia administers the northern shore and the Klang traffic service. Indonesia holds the southern shore and the deeper waters off Sumatra. The three littoral states have coordinated since 2004 through the Malacca Straits Patrol, a trilateral air and surface enforcement framework, but capacity remains uneven, and the territorial seam at the southern strait remains the most contested patch.

Security conditions deteriorated sharply in 2025. The Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia recorded 108 incidents in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, a 74 percent jump over 2024 and the highest annual total in the 19-year history of the agreement ReCAAP ISC, Annual Report 2025. Indonesian arrests in July and August 2025 broke up the principal cell, and ReCAAP recorded zero piracy incidents in Asia during the first quarter of 2026, although the bureau cautioned that residual perpetrators remain active in the strait.

The strategic alternative debate continues to circle Thailand. In April 2026 Deputy Prime Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn announced an accelerated push for the 1 trillion baht Kra land bridge, framing the project as a response to Middle East shipping disruptions and a hedge against single-chokepoint dependence The Diplomat, April 2026. The full Kra Canal proposal, long studied by Chinese institutes as a Belt and Road option to bypass the Malacca chokehold, remains politically blocked. Washington supports the overland alternative, which preserves Singapore's transshipment role while reducing China's strategic exposure. The failure modes are layered. A single sinking or grounding at the Phillips Channel could close traffic for days. The 2025 piracy surge demonstrates that enforcement capacity is fragile and reversible. And the strait sits adjacent to the South China Sea, where United States Seventh Fleet freedom of navigation operations and Chinese coast guard responses produce a permanent low-level confrontation that any wider regional crisis would route through Malacca first CSIS, U.S. Freedom of Navigation in the South China Sea, 2025.