The 5 Maritime Chokepoints That Move the World Economy

The world’s oceans look vast on a map; the places that actually matter are narrow. A handful of straits, canals and channels carry almost all seaborne commerce, and five of them stand out. The Strait of Hormuz funnels hydrocarbons. The Strait of Malacca carries the energy that fires East Asia and the manufactured goods that pay for it. Bab el-Mandeb is the southern gate to the Suez Canal. The Turkish Straits move Black Sea grain and oil. The Taiwan Strait shuttles the silicon and electronics that run the digital economy. Each is currently shadowed by a political dispute that could narrow or close it.

Yet the past two years contain a useful surprise. The Houthi campaign in the Red Sea diverted most container shipping from Bab el-Mandeb for the better part of two years, and the world economy absorbed it. Freight rates spiked. Egypt’s canal revenues halved. Insurers raised premia. But global trade kept moving, inflation barely twitched, and Asia did not slow.

The lesson is that the world has more shipping slack, more inventory and more capacity for rerouting than worst-case rhetoric assumes. The chokepoints to worry about are the ones for which detour is harder, or where the cargo cannot be substituted. Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait both qualify. The others matter less than their headlines suggest.

Hormuz: the World’s Hydrocarbon Artery

No waterway pays a higher energy dividend than the slim passage between Iran and Oman. Around 20m barrels of crude and refined product moved through it each day in 2025, by the EIA’s count, roughly a quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of global liquids consumption.

The strait also carries about a fifth of global LNG trade, almost all of it Qatari or Emirati cargo bound for Asia. Saudi Arabia accounts for around 38% of the crude transiting Hormuz, Iraq for 22%, the UAE for 13%. The destination mix is overwhelmingly Asian: China and India alone take about 44% of crude exports, with Japan and South Korea close behind. America imports under 0.5m b/d through the strait, around 2% of its petroleum needs.

What makes Hormuz exceptional among the five is the absence of meaningful workaround. Only Saudi Arabia and the UAE operate pipelines that could shift oil around the strait, with roughly 3.5m to 5.5m b/d of usable bypass capacity between them.

That covers a fraction of the daily flow, and none of the LNG. Iranian harassment of tankers has continued in spurts since 2019, including the seizure of the MSC Aries in April 2024. After Israeli and American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, transits paused briefly, freight insurance ticked up, and Brent rose for several sessions before settling. Tehran’s standing threat to close the strait has never been carried out, and most analysts judge a full closure unlikely; Iran would gut its own oil exports first. A partial disruption, by contrast, is the kind of risk markets have learned to price.

Two diplomatic developments cushion the threat. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China in March 2023 has held. The October 2025 Gaza ceasefire has steadied the wider region. Neither has changed the underlying arithmetic: a sustained closure would force a deep drawdown of strategic petroleum reserves, lift prices sharply and squeeze Asian refining margins for as long as it lasted. America would feel it through prices, not volumes.

Malacca: Where Asia Funds its Growth

If Hormuz is the world’s filling station, the Strait of Malacca is its supermarket aisle. The 900-kilometre channel separating Sumatra from peninsular Malaysia is the single busiest maritime corridor on the planet. By the EIA’s accounting it handled 23.2m barrels of oil per day in the first half of 2025, the largest of any chokepoint, including 9.2 billion cubic feet of LNG.

Estimates of how much of global trade by value passes through Malacca vary widely, from a fifth to a third depending on definitions; even the lower number is enormous. Its narrowest point, the Phillips Channel, measures just 1.7 miles across. Tens of thousands of vessels squeeze through each year.

The most exposed customer is China. Around 48% of the crude entering Malacca is bound for Chinese refineries, and roughly four-fifths of China’s oil imports must transit this strait. Hu Jintao referred to this as China’s ‘Malacca dilemma’ as early as 2003; Beijing has been working to ease it since.

The Kyaukpyu pipeline through Myanmar, Pakistan’s Gwadar port, the Hambantota terminal in Sri Lanka and overland Russian crude all chip away at the share funnelled through the strait. None comes close to replacing it. Japan and South Korea import a comparable share of their energy by this route. Coordinated patrols by Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia have suppressed piracy to a fraction of its 2000-era peak.

The peacetime threat is…