The Choke Point Economy: Infrastructure, Straits, and the Future of Global Risk

Introduction: The Age of Precision Risk

Global risk is entering a new era of precision. Instead of the broad, system-wide shocks that defined past crises, today’s vulnerabilities are increasingly concentrated in critical bottlenecks – from narrow shipping lanes to single-points-of-failure in supply chains. Modern geopolitical and economic conflicts are often waged not by outright destruction but by disruption: targeted interference in these choke points that causes outsized ripple effectsthecipherbrief.comhbr.org. Countries and even non-state actors have learned to turn infrastructure into strategic leverage, exploiting the hidden fragility of a world optimized for efficiency. The result is an international system less prone to total collapse, but acutely susceptible to pinpoint failures. A severed fiber-optic cable or disabled pipeline may not grab headlines like a traditional military attack, yet it can quietly paralyze commerce and erode trust in global networks. Adversaries understand this asymmetry well – as one analyst observes, “They aren’t planning to storm Washington or London. They’re aiming to quietly unplug them.”thecipherbrief.com Deniability is an added weapon: a covert sabotage or export restriction can inflict strategic damage while obscuring the perpetrator. From anonymous cyber intrusions to unclaimed attacks on energy infrastructure, the gray zone of conflict is expanding. In this fragmenting world, power gravitates to those who control or can disrupt the chokepoints. This piece examines how these vulnerabilities shape 21st-century risk – and whether the response will be to fortify and diversify, or to see the global system splinter along its pressure points.

Physical Infrastructure as Leverage

Certain physical corridors and facilities have long been recognized as strategic chokepoints – but in today’s geopolitical climate they carry unprecedented leverage. Maritime straits are prime examples. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage between Iran and Oman, channels roughly 20% of global oil and a significant share of liquefied natural gas exportseia.govrystadenergy.com. In 2024 it carried about 20 million barrels of oil per dayeia.gov. There are almost no viable alternatives if Hormuz is blocked, so even a temporary disruption sends shockwaves through energy marketseia.gov. Recent regional tensions underscored this: when Iranian officials floated plans to close Hormuz amid the late-2023 Israel–Gaza conflict, Brent crude oil prices instantly spikedeia.govrystadenergy.com. The mere threat of a blockade can be a powerful deterrent or bargaining chip. Similarly, the Strait of Malacca between the Indian and Pacific Oceans handles an estimated 24 million barrels per day of oil and gas – about a quarter of global maritime trade in those commoditiesrystadenergy.com. It is the critical artery feeding energy to East Asia’s economies, especially China and Japan. Any disruption there (from accidents, piracy, or conflict) would force ships to detour thousands of miles, imposing severe delays and costs. The world was reminded of how a single mishap can halt trade when the Suez Canal, which carries ~12% of all global commerceweforum.org, was blocked for six days in 2021 by a grounded mega-ship. That accident – though unintentional – cost billions in trade losses and backlog. It demonstrated that even in peacetime, the “choke point effect” is real: one stuck ship in a narrow canal can freeze $9 billion in global trade per day across supply chainsmfat.govt.nz. Other corridors like the Panama Canal, while handling a smaller share of world trade, are linchpins for specific routes (notably Asia–U.S. East Coast container traffic). In 2023, an historic drought in Panama forced authorities to restrict transits; as water levels fell, daily crossings were cut and ships had to lighten loadsreuters.comreuters.com. Within weeks, over 160 vessels were backed up awaiting passage and freight rates surged by a thirdreuters.com. This climate-induced choke point crisis – with some ships delayed up to 21 days – highlighted yet another risk: environmental stress threatening critical infrastructure. Whether caused by politics or nature, bottlenecks like Suez and Panama offer single points where leverage can be exerted over vast flows of goods.

Beyond sea lanes, specialized industrial nodes have become geopolitical pressure points. Chief among these is Taiwan’s semiconductor fabrication industry – the silicon “heart” of modern electronics. Taiwan (led by TSMC) accounts for around 92% of the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing capacityusitc.gov and over half of total global foundry output. In other words, a huge fraction of the microprocessors and memory that drive cars, smartphones, data centers, and military systems flow out of a few giant fabs on one island. This concentration has been described as a “silicon chokehold” giving Taiwan outsized strategic importancecsis.org. It also poses a nightmare scenario: any disruption – be it from natural disaster or military conflict – could freeze the global tech supply chain. The 2020–2021 chip shortage gave a small taste of the stakes: when a single fire in a Japanese plant and a storm in Texas knocked out two suppliers, auto manufacturing worldwide ground to a halt for months due to lack of chips. A cross-Strait crisis that halts Taiwan’s fabs would be orders of magnitude more severe, inflicting targeted economic damage far beyond Asia. Both Beijing and Washington recognize the leverage implicit in this choke point. China’s military planners have weighed that Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance might deter intervention – a “silicon shield” – while the U.S. is rushing to onshore more chip production to reduce its exposurebrookings.edu. In a fragmenting world, controlling (or threatening) the semiconductor supply has become a form of power projection.

Even seemingly prosaic pieces of infrastructure can serve as strategic bottlenecks. Electrical power transformers, especially the large high-voltage units in national grids, are a case in point. These massive transformers – often weighing hundreds of tons – are indispensable for power transmission, yet they are few in number, custom-built, and not quickly replaced. The U.S. power grid, for example, relies on thousands of aging transformers with replacement lead times now exceeding 120 weeks (over 2 years) for new unitswarontherocks.com. Only a handful of manufacturers globally can produce them, creating a thin supply chain. This makes the grid a tempting leverage point: disable a small number of critical transformers and you can black out a region for days or weeks. In 2022, intruders armed with rifles attacked two substations in North Carolina, knocking out power to 45,000 people for five dayswarontherocks.com. That local incident proved how “quickly, cheaply, and devastatingly” transformers can be taken downwarontherocks.com. Security experts note that just a few well-coordinated attacks on key nodes could trigger cascading outages on a national scalewarontherocks.com. Adversaries have taken notice. Reports indicate that nations like China and Iran have developed capabilities to target U.S. electric infrastructure – and U.S. officials discovered hidden “backdoor” electronics in a Chinese-made high-voltage transformer shipped to the gridwarontherocks.com. This raised alarms that foreign components could enable remote sabotage of critical grid equipmentwarontherocks.com. Meanwhile, Russia’s repeated strikes on Ukraine’s power grid – systematically disabling transformers to cause widespread blackouts – offer a live demonstration of choke point warfare in the electricity domainwarontherocks.com. Thus, whether it’s a narrow strait or a niche manufacturing line, physical infrastructure bottlenecks have become levers of coercion. States and non-states alike understand that holding a choke point at risk can yield outsized influence – potentially bringing a rival to the negotiating table without a shot fired in anger.

The Digital Chokeholds

The world’s digital infrastructure may seem diffuse and cloud-like, but it too is built on concentrated chokepoints – ones that adversaries are probing as intently as ships in a strait. Undersea fiber-optic cables are a prime example of a hidden chokehold in the global economy. These cables carry an estimated 95% of international internet and telecom trafficcsis.org, forming the backbone of finance, communications, and data exchange. Some 600+ subsea cables crisscross 1.2 million kilometers of ocean, but their capacity is funneled through a limited number of landing stations and routescsis.org. Damage to a single key cable can thus sever connectivity to entire regions. In fact, cable cuts happen regularly – between 100 to 150 per year – mostly by accident (fishing trawlers and ship anchors are common culprits)csis.org. Normally these are repaired within days, but the frequency highlights how exposed this infrastructure is. Sabotage is no longer a theoretical concern; it has already occurred in the gray zone of great-power rivalry. As a 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies report noted, the vast, unguarded expanse of undersea cables makes them “easy targets for saboteurs” conducting deniable attacks short of warcsis.org. Recent incidents bear this out. In February 2023, Taiwan’s outlying Matsu islands lost internet access when both of the undersea cables connecting them to the mainland were mysteriously severed. An investigation pointed to two passing Chinese vessels and a pattern of similar outages in preceding years, suggesting a deliberate “gray-zone” harassment campaign against the island’s communicationscsis.org. And in October 2023, a subsea telecom cable between Sweden and Estonia was torn at the same time a nearby gas pipeline was damaged; Swedish officials concluded external tampering was likely and linked the incidents, hinting at hostile state involvementcsis.org. Each of these cases was below the threshold of an overt attack, yet had outsized disruptive impact – exactly the appeal of cable sabotage. A well-timed fiber cut can cut off financial markets, black out internet service, and sow confusion far from any battlefield. Military strategists are increasingly concerned that in a crisis, adversaries might “hobble the internet” by going after a handful of strategic cableseconomist.com. The fear is not only losing communication itself but losing confidence in the digital plumbing of globalization.

Beyond cables, the cloud infrastructure and data centers that store and process data globally have consolidated into another set of choke points. Enormous “hyperscale” data centers – typically clustered in tech hubs like Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, or major EU and Asian cities – now anchor everything from commerce to national security operationswarontherocks.comwarontherocks.com. A handful of tech firms control much of this infrastructure: four companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) own or lease about half of all international bandwidth on undersea cablescsis.org, and Amazon, Microsoft, and Google together account for roughly two-thirds of global cloud computing market share. This market concentration means that an outage or compromise at one of these providers can have systemic effects. For instance, a widespread Amazon Web Services outage in 2022 abruptly halted portions of U.S. banking, transportation, and government services, as countless dependent systems went offlinethecipherbrief.com. What looked like a routine technical failure revealed how deeply everyday operations rely on one company’s cloud. It is not lost on adversaries that cloud data centers are becoming strategic targets. As one analysis put it, these facilities “now anchor military power, economic clout, and geopolitical leverage” – but were never hardened for an age of cyber sabotage and great-power competitionwarontherocks.com. In Ukraine’s current war with Russia, we have already seen digital strikes on data centers: in 2024, pro-Ukraine hackers infiltrated and destroyed 300 terabytes of data on a Russian commercial data center, disrupting oil, telecom, and aerospace services in retaliation for Russian cyberattackswarontherocks.com. This kind of attack – effectively data center warfare – shows how cloud infrastructure can be “operational terrain to be seized” in conflict, as well as a vulnerability to be exploitedwarontherocks.com. On the flip side, Ukraine’s reliance on Elon Musk’s privately owned Starlink satellite network for battlefield connectivity illustrates a different digital chokehold: critical systems resting in the hands of a single private actorthecipherbrief.com. With Starlink, a geopolitical chokepoint lies in one company’s discretion – a fact laid bare when Musk at times threatened to restrict the service, prompting debates over control of such vital linksthecipherbrief.com.

Physical damage is another concern. Data centers concentrate massive computing power and consume enormous energy – making them hot, power-hungry fortresses that are not invulnerable to accidents or attack. A vivid example occurred in March 2021 when a fire broke out at an OVHcloud data center in France. The blaze knocked out 3.6 million websites and countless services for dayswarontherocks.com, illustrating that a single-site failure (even accidental) can cascade through the internet. Now imagine a coordinated physical attack on a major data hub – something security experts warn is foreseeable in a future conflictwarontherocks.com. Thus far, there is little precedent (no one has yet blown up a data center in anger), but it is “not hard to imagine” scenarios where state operatives or terrorists do exactly thatwarontherocks.com. The potential impact could be sweeping – taking down cloud regions, wiping out critical databases, and hampering everything from military logistics to healthcare records. And just as with undersea cables, attribution could be murky, raising the prospect of anonymous cyber militias or proxy groups attacking infrastructure while states deny involvement. Finally, the computing hardware supply chain itself forms a digital choke point. The most advanced AI and high-performance computing clusters rely on specialized chips (GPUs, TPUs, etc.) that only a couple of firms in the U.S. and Taiwan design and manufacture. Moreover, these chips require raw materials (like rare earth elements and specialty metals) that are concentrated in a few countries. Control over compute is translating into geopolitical power – countries are pouring billions into supercomputing centers filled with AI accelerators, knowing that leadership in machine learning and cyber capabilities depends on access to those clusterswarontherocks.com. The U.S. move to restrict exports of cutting-edge chips to China in 2022-2023 was explicitly an attempt to choke off China’s access to top-tier computing for AI and military uselawfaremedia.org. In turn, China has accelerated efforts to develop indigenous chip capacity and could target the West’s chip supply chain in creative ways (for instance, by withholding certain semiconductor manufacturing equipment or materials). In the digital arena, the chokepoints may be invisible – a secret backdoor in software, a few critical cloud regions, a handful of undersea fibers – but they are no less potent. The emerging risk is that an enemy doesn’t need to bomb cities or occupy territory; they can cripple an economy by hitting its digital pressure points. A severed cable here, a hacked data center there, and a modern nation could struggle to function in the manner its people expectthecipherbrief.com.

Economic Infrastructure and Financial Friction

Power over chokepoints is not limited to the physical or digital realms – it extends into the economic infrastructure that underpins global trade and finance. In an era of weaponized interdependence, mechanisms of commerce themselves can become strategic weapons. The clearest example is the international payment system. In early 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western governments wielded a financial choke point with dramatic effect: they cut key Russian banks off from SWIFT, the secure messaging network that banks use to route payments worldwideconsilium.europa.eu. Suddenly, dozens of major Russian institutions were unable to transact cross-border in the normal way, freezing them out of much of the global financial system. This move – unprecedented in scale – was dubbed the “financial nuclear option,” and it highlighted how concentrated control of financial rails can be leveraged for geopolitical ends. SWIFT itself, based in Belgium, is technically just a messaging service, but its ubiquity (connecting 11,000 banks) makes it integral to global money flows. Exclusion from SWIFT is effectively a financial chokehold: for Russia it meant delays or halts in everything from oil export payments to foreign debt servicing. Complementing SWIFT are U.S.-centric dollar clearing systems (like CHIPS and Fedwire), which clear the bulk of the world’s USD transactions. By controlling these hubs, the United States wields outsize influence – it can sanction banks, freeze reserves, and block access to the dollar pipeline with a few keystrokeslawfaremedia.org. Over the past two decades the U.S. has repeatedly used this leverage in what some call “economic warfare”lawfaremedia.org. Iran, for example, was severed from SWIFT in 2012 and again in 2018 as part of sanctions over its nuclear program, crippling its ability to sell oil. North Korea has been largely isolated from global banking through similar means. Edward Fishman, a former U.S. State Department official, aptly terms these nodes “chokepoints” in the global financial network – pressure points where a dominant state can “deny adversaries access to the U.S.-dominated global financial system”lawfaremedia.org. The appeal of such tools is their precision: they target an opponent’s economic lifelines without involving military force. But the risk is also clear. As more countries resort to financial chokeholds, there is impetus for targeted nations to build alternative networks or fragmentation. Indeed, since being sanctioned, Russia has expanded its own messaging system (SPFS) and China is promoting its CIPS network for yuan paymentsatlanticcouncil.org. These are still minor compared to SWIFT, but the trend suggests a future where financial flows could splinter into rival blocs – each guarded by its owners as strategic infrastructure.

Trade dependencies and resource supply chains present another theater of choke point risk. Control over a critical raw material can be a powerful lever – one that China, in particular, has shown willingness to use. Consider the case of rare earth elements, the group of metals vital to high-tech manufacturing (from smartphones and wind turbines to missile guidance systems). China dominates rare earth mining and processing, accounting for the majority of global output. In 2010, during a diplomatic spat with Japan, Beijing reportedly halted rare earth exports to Japan for two months as retaliationcepr.org. Though Chinese officials never officially announced an embargo, Japanese import data showed a sharp fall, and the message was received loud and clear in Tokyo: a single supplier (China) could squeeze Japan’s high-tech industries by denying them essential inputs. This incident spurred Japan and other nations to diversify sources, but China’s grip remained strong. Fast-forward to 2023, and we see a similar dynamic with different minerals: gallium and germanium, obscure metals used in semiconductor chips, infrared sensors, and other electronics. In July 2023, China’s government imposed sweeping export controls on gallium and germanium products, in what was widely interpreted as a “calibrated response” to U.S. curbs on China’s access to advanced chip technologyreuters.com. The move was symbolically announced right before America’s Independence Day – a pointed reminder of Western dependence on Chinese suppliesreuters.com. Since China produces around 98% of the world’s primary gallium and about 60% of global germaniumreuters.comreuters.com, these export restrictions immediately choked off international shipments, forcing companies in the U.S., Japan, and Europe to scramble for alternative sourcesreuters.com. Prices for these niche metals spiked, and though Western governments can eventually secure new suppliers or recycling streams, the short-term impact underscored China’s muscle. As one Reuters analysis noted, Beijing’s gallium/germanium curbs mark an escalation in the critical minerals contest – a warning that China could flex its dominance over other materials if tech tensions continuereuters.com. Similar concerns swirl around cobalt (mostly mined in Congo, largely controlled by Chinese firms) and lithium (key to batteries, with supply concentrated in a few countries). In each case, the country or entity controlling the bottleneck can exert geo-economic leverage that far exceeds the commodity’s dollar value.

Energy trade provides yet more examples of economic choke points being weaponized. Pipeline politics in particular have been front and center in recent years. Europe’s heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, funneled through a handful of major pipelines, turned into a liability when relations soured. In 2022, as war raged in Ukraine, Russia sharply cut gas flows to Europe and then one of its major export pipelines – Nord Stream under the Baltic Sea – was wracked by mysterious explosions. European authorities concluded the pipeline blasts were “an act of sabotage”, though investigations did not definitively pin the culpritreuters.com. The Nord Stream incident was a stark case of targeted, deniable disruption: in one night, three of the four parallel pipes were ruptured by underwater charges, severing a key energy link. Methane gushed to the surface and a vital gas route was rendered unusablereuters.com. No group claimed responsibility, and competing theories blamed Russian operatives, Ukrainian partisans, or other clandestine actors. Whomever was behind it, the message was unmistakable – even submerged infrastructure in international waters is not safe from covert attack. The episode sent European gas markets into turmoil and forced a hurried reconfiguration of supply chains. It also showed how asymmetric sabotage of energy chokepoints can be leveraged to intimidate or punish without direct confrontation. With pipelines cut and Russian gas largely off the table, Europe pivoted to importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) by sea – alleviating the immediate crisis but introducing new choke point dependencies. Now Europe’s gas security rides on a flotilla of LNG tankers sailing from a few exporters (the U.S., Qatar) through narrow maritime routes like the Strait of Hormuz, Suez Canal, and the Turkish Straits. Those very chokepoints, as discussed earlier, are vulnerable to interference. Late 2023 offered a telling example: a surge of Houthi rebel attacks near Yemen made the Bab al-Mandeb strait (gateway between the Red Sea and Arabian Sea) a danger zone, causing tanker traffic to plummet and forcing shippers to reroute around the Cape of Good Hoperystadenergy.comrystadenergy.com. Rystad Energy noted that after a series of attacks on vessels, daily oil flows through Bab al-Mandeb dropped by nearly 50% within six monthsrystadenergy.com. Insurance premiums for transiting the Red Sea soared, and by 2024 many cargoes bound for Europe were taking the long way around Africarystadenergy.com. This not only adds weeks of delay; it raises costs and squeezes supply – effectively a tax on the world economy by way of a choke point. The interplay of these factors suggests that oil, gas, and commodity flows can be instrumentalized in conflict far short of an embargo. A few mines shuttered here, a key export license revoked there, a pipeline mysteriously “malfunctioning,” and global markets can be roiled. Each tactic exploits a lack of redundancy. And each highlights a broader theme: economic globalization has created hub-and-spoke networks for finance, trade, and resources – hubs that impart efficiency in normal times, but become glaring liabilities in times of frictionthecipherbrief.com.

Strategic Futures: Redundancy or Fragmentation?

As choke point vulnerabilities become more evident, the strategic question facing governments and businesses is how to respond. Will the coming decades be defined by a push for redundancy and resilience in global infrastructure, or by a breakdown into fragmented blocs each trying to secure its own bottlenecks? In many ways, both trends are already underway. On one side, there is a growing recognition that resilience is national security. Western policymakers and analysts increasingly call for a doctrine of infrastructure survivability: building in backups, diversifying supply routes, and planning for graceful degradation when (not if) disruptions occurthecipherbrief.comthecipherbrief.com. For example, NATO and EU members are investing in mapping their undersea cable networks and deploying sensors or naval patrols to guard against tamperingthecipherbrief.com. Governments are funding secondary or “backup” data centers in secure locations – as Estonia famously did with its “digital twin” government servers maintained offshore for continuitythecipherbrief.com. Some countries are also creating strategic stockpiles or reserves for choke point equipment: the U.S. Department of Energy, alarmed by transformer shortages, has proposed a national reserve of spare large transformers to speed recovery from grid attackswarontherocks.com. In manufacturing, firms are adopting China+1 or “friend-shoring” strategies to ensure that no single country (especially a geopolitical rival) controls their entire supply of critical inputs. The 2022–2023 semiconductor export battles spurred the U.S., EU, Japan, and others to plow tens of billions into new chip fabs closer to home, explicitly to dilute the Taiwan chokehold in chipmaking. Likewise, Japan, Europe, and America have launched joint initiatives to secure rare earth supply chains – reopening mines, funding recycling programs, and teaming with ally countries – in direct response to China’s past dominance and choke-point signalingcepr.orgreuters.com. In short, a concerted effort is underway in many sectors to add slack back into the system, even at the expense of some efficiency. The mantra might well be: redundancy is not waste, it’s defensethecipherbrief.com. Just as companies learned after the 2011 Fukushima disaster (which cut off key auto parts supplies) that just-in-time can backfire, nations are learning that just-in-time geopolitics is risky. A world of precision risk demands precision backups.

Opposing these moves toward resilience, however, is a powerful centrifugal force: geopolitical fragmentation and the pursuit of self-reliance at the bloc level. Great power competition is incentivizing countries to double down on controlling chokepoints rather than sharing them. We see this in China’s strategy to gain near-monopoly positions in certain arenas – from its Belt and Road port investments (securing influence over maritime passages) to its push to dominate subsea cable construction and ownershipcsis.orgcsis.org. By one estimate, Chinese firms now have built or operate nearly 20% of the world’s undersea cable length laid in the last four yearscsis.org. This could give Beijing both surveillance opportunities and potential sabotage access in a crisis. Russia, for its part, has openly used Europe’s energy dependence as leverage, and having been forced to find new buyers, is now aligning its pipeline and rail networks toward Asia. The risk is that global networks could bifurcate: for instance, a splinternet where Chinese-controlled cables and Western-controlled cables form parallel, minimally connected internets – each hardened against the other’s interference. The financial system, too, could splinter if trust in neutral intermediaries like SWIFT erodes; we could see a yuan zone and a dollar zone with limited interaction, each fortifying its own payment rails against exclusion by the other. Strategically, countries may start viewing choke point interdependence not as a mutual benefit but as a vulnerability to escape. For example, some in Europe debate alternatives to the Turkey-controlled Bosporus strait (through which 5% of global oil passesrystadenergy.com) due to worries about Ankara’s political tilt. And in Asia, China’s military expansion in the South China Sea suggests it wants the ability to deny adversaries passage through waters like the Malacca Strait if needed – effectively turning a shared global artery into a national-controlled valve. Choke point warfare, in the purest sense, envisions each side positioning to hold the other’s lifelines at risk while securing its own. It is a scenario of mutual strategic hostage-taking, which could be highly destabilizing in a crisis.

The likely reality is a bit of both futures. We can expect selective redundancy – investments in backup systems for the most critical choke points – alongside creeping regionalization of supply chains. The global system may not collapse outright, but it could reconfigure into clusters of resilience. Nations might negotiate agreements to protect certain shared chokepoints (for instance, an international treaty on cable protection akin to how we treat undersea pipelines), but at the same time, they will pursue hedges like new overland routes, alternative suppliers, and domestic capacity for essentials. In essence, the world is waking up from an era of unbridled efficiency to an era of strategic slack. Investors and corporations are already factoring this into risk management, reassessing exposures to single points of failure – whether that’s a sole-source supplier, a single critical factory, or a particular shipping lane. For policymakers, the task ahead is twofold: shore up the weak links through which an adversary could wield outsized influence, and diplomatically engage rivals to prevent a slide into choke point brinkmanship. The choke point economy of the 21st century does not necessarily portend global calamity; more often it will be a series of contained shocks and contests in the shadows. But as these case studies show, the impacts of narrow disruptions can be widespread. A local outage can become a global incident overnight. In the end, those nations and firms that succeed will be those who internalize a paradoxical wisdom: to preserve an open, thriving global system, you must prepare to compartmentalize and survive without it. In a fragmenting world held together by fragile nodes, resilience is the new realism.

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