Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

How the Slow Strangulation of Global Trade Became the Defining Battle of a New Cold War

By Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) In 1883, Alfred Thayer Mahan laid out the brutal truth of global power: Whoever rules the waves rules the world. He wasn’t just talking about fleets of warships. He was talking about chokepoints—the narrow passages through which the vast majority of the world’s trade must pass. Control them, and you don’t need to launch an invasion. You can starve an economy and restrict military sealift without ever firing a shot.

For most of the past century, the United States understood this. Today, it acts as if it has forgotten. Its adversaries have not.

China, Russia, and Iran have spent the past two decades turning these strategic passageways into shadow war control points, quietly reshaping global trade in ways that benefit them and undermine the U.S. The Biden administration treated the problem like an abstraction. The Trump administration has recognized it as an emergency.

And now, the battle over the world’s shipping lanes is fully underway.

The Crisis No One Noticed Last night President Trump published a strong statement of rebuke and commenced a large-scale military strike against the Houthis with the goal of reopening the Bab–el–Mandeb chokepoint to US ships and international trade.

But if history marks a turning point, it wasn’t a missile launch or a military standoff. It was an American-flagged oil tanker, limping into Gibraltar in July 2024, low on fuel after a transatlantic journey from Texas to Israel. A routine stop. A simple request for fuel by the captain of the M/V Overseas Santorini.

The British—ostensibly one of America’s closest allies—downplayed the incident, brushing it off as a bureaucratic non-issue. But within certain naval circles, particularly among those with an eye on great-power competition, the alarm bells were deafening.

This is the defining pattern of the new Cold War at sea: seemingly minor transgressions against American maritime interests are dismissed as isolated events—mere commercial hiccups in a complex global system. In the shipping world, particularly in Europe, these incidents are met with a shrug, chalked up to regulatory quirks or corporate discretion. But deep in the Pentagon, the calculus is different.

Someone is taking notes.

Because history doesn’t turn on dramatic declarations. It turns on the accumulation of small, ignored shifts—a denied refueling request here, a preferential port agreement there, a slow but steady reshuffling of maritime control. And by the time those patterns become impossible to ignore, the balance of power has already changed.

Officially, the M/V Overseas Santorini was not a crisis. The Keir Starmer UK government brushed it off, claiming it doesn’t dictate the decisions of private companies. But the decision, as later investigations showed, originated from a small faction of British parliamentarians who had their own pro-Palestine agenda. And the ship in question, Overseas Santorini, wasn’t just another commercial tanker. It was a U.S. military-designated strategic asset under the MARAD Tanker Security Program.

In the past, an incident like this would have sparked diplomatic uproar. The Biden administration let it pass, barely even acknowledging the problem.

Seven months later, history repeated itself—but this time, the response was different. When Norwegian bunker company Haltbakk Bunkers announced it would refuse to fuel U.S.-affiliated ships in protest of President Trump’s meeting with Zelensky, the White House immediately pushed back. Within hours, the Norwegian embassy issued a statement ensuring that U.S. vessels would have unrestricted access to bunkering services.

The contrast was staggering. If Norway could resolve the issue in a matter of hours, why couldn’t the UK address it at all? The answer was bigger than a single ship.

This wasn’t just a question of diplomatic foot-dragging. This was a test of leverage over global chokepoints—and America failed the first round.

Related Article: Book Review – Mahan And The Economics Of Seapower

The Weaponization of Chokepoints Chokepoints aren’t just strategic concerns for military planners. They’re the fault lines of economic power, the pressure points that determine who controls the movement of oil, food, and raw materials.

China understands this. It has spent decades systematically acquiring stakes in ports, cutting long-term strategic deals, and building a navy capable of enforcing its economic dominance.

Iran and Russia understand it too. The threat isn’t just blockades—it’s disruption, slowdowns, and selective enforcement of unwritten rules. If a nation can’t move goods freely, its economy is at the mercy of whoever controls the lanes of transit.

Meanwhile, the United States, convinced that naval supremacy alone was enough, has allowed its merchant fleet to wither. The assumption that commercial shipping would always function as a neutral, market-driven force is collapsing under the weight of realpolitik.

The next global crisis won’t start with a missile strike or a naval battle. It will start when a strategic waterway is cut off, or when the slow grind of regulatory restrictions and hostile port policies make trade routes functionally unusable.

The Silent War on Trade The new map of global maritime influence tells the story:

As President Trump took office China now controlled ports at both ends of the Panama Canal and held major stakes in terminals at the Suez Canal, the Bosporus, and the English Channel. It has placed a naval base at the entrance to the Red Sea, turning a critical corridor into contested waters.

In the Pacific, the Luzon Strait—one of the most vital shipping lanes in the world—is under near-constant surveillance by the Chinese Navy, Coast Guard, and maritime militia.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, is one Iranian move away from closure. The Korean Strait, the critical transit point between the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, is well within missile range of North Korea’s erratic leadership.

At the same time, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), now heavily influenced by Panama, has begun reshaping global shipping regulations in ways that disproportionately favor China. The Biden administration – which closed the maritime desk at the NSC/NEC – largely ignored the problem. Trump’s advisers see it as economic warfare in disguise.

Chokepoints: Trump’s Global Maritime Counteroffensive In Washington, the game is moving fast. The Biden years treated global shipping as a background concern, a tangle of free-market logistics left to self-regulate. The Trump administration sees something else entirely: a battleground.

The fight over chokepoints—the narrow straits and canals that dictate the flow of global trade—is no longer theoretical. It’s happening now, playing out in port buyouts, regulatory chokeholds, and economic warfare disguised as environmental policy. And this time, the White House isn’t sitting back.

A Maritime War Room in the West Wing Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) has a new weapon in its arsenal: Jerry Hendrix, a naval historian with a deep understanding of Mahanian strategy—the doctrine that shaped America’s past dominance of the seas. Hendrix isn’t there to write think pieces. He’s there to provide National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with options and help the President draft the Executive Order to Make Shipbuilding Great Again, a document that, if signed, could be the biggest shift in U.S. maritime policy in decades.

Leaked details of the draft order, obtained by gCaptain, reveal an aggressive strategy aimed at breaking China’s economic grip on global shipping routes. This isn’t just about rebuilding American shipyards. It’s an international counteroffensive designed to erode Beijing’s hold over the world’s most vital waterways.

The core mandate of the executive order is simple: force allies to choose a side.

Under the new directive, the State Department will lean hard on treaty partners like the UK, Singapore, Taiwan and Egypt, to impose tariffs and trade restrictions on Chinese-built ships and cargo-handling equipment. The idea is to cripple China’s ability to manipulate global trade through port ownership and logistical strangleholds. The message to allies is clear: Get on board, or risk U.S. economic retaliation.

At the same time, the EO funnels revenue from new tariffs and port fees directly into a U.S. shipbuilding revival, ensuring that when the next global crisis hits, America has the ships to move goods without relying on foreign-controlled fleets.

The most controversial provision? A harbor tax on foreign cargo entering North America through Canada and Mexico—a move aimed at closing loopholes that have siphoned trade away from U.S. ports.

This isn’t just a protectionist maneuver. It’s a warning shot. And it comes at a moment when the stakes have never been higher.

The Real Front Lines: The Federal Maritime Commission Goes to War If policy is a hammer, regulation is a scalpel.

On Friday, the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) launched an investigation that could redraw the map of global shipping.

For decades, the FMC has been little more than a bureaucratic backwater—a slow-moving regulator focused on niche disputes between shipping firms. But under the Biden administration, it was radically expanded, and under Trump it’s being empowered to oversee not just U.S. ports but the entire global trade ecosystem.

Its new target? Foreign governments and corporations weaponizing maritime chokepoints.

The investigation focuses on seven of the world’s most critical chokepoints: The English Channel, Malacca Strait, Northern Sea Passage, Singapore Strait, Panama CanaL, Strait of Gibraltar, Suez Canal

Each of these corridors is a potential flashpoint, where geopolitics and economic leverage intertwine in ways that could cripple global commerce overnight.

The FMC’s mandate under Trump is to determine how foreign regulations, laws, and corporate policies create artificial constraints on U.S. trade. The commission is gathering testimony from shipping executives, bulk cargo operators, port authorities, and national security officials, looking for patterns of intentional trade disruption—whether through strategic slowdowns, hidden fees, or backroom agreements that grant Chinese and Russian interests preferential access to vital trade lanes.

What Comes Next? For now, the FMC’s inquiry is in the fact-finding stage, and technically the FMC is non-partisan, but make no mistake: the potential consequences are massive.

If the commission determines that foreign governments or corporations are intentionally restricting U.S. trade, it has the power to issue retaliatory regulations, including:

• Banning vessels from U.S. ports if they’re registered in nations engaged in economic warfare.

• Levying penalties against shipping firms that participate in restrictive chokepoint practices.

• Imposing direct tariffs on cargo moving through specific foreign-controlled ports.

This kind of escalation hasn’t been seen in modern shipping history. But Trump’s White House seems to be betting that it’s better to fight now than wait for the noose to tighten further.

Chokepoints: The New Cold War’s Pressure Points For decades, America assumed that global trade was too big, too decentralized, too essential to be manipulated. That assumption is dead.

The fight for the world’s trade routes is already happening, not just with warships and missiles fired at Houthi militants, but also through economic pressure, port acquisitions, and regulatory chokeholds. And for the first time in decades, the U.S. is playing offense.

The Trump administration’s plan isn’t subtle. It’s not polite. But for the first time in a long time, it’s a strategy. A secret strategy.

It’s not a secret because Trump is hiding his actions (although clandestine actions under former Green Beret Mike Waltz cannot be ruled out). It’s a secret because shipowners and trade analysts are so busy with the Trump tariff news they have failed to see what’s going on. They have failed to report on the FMC’s broadening scope far from US shores. They fail to see that the new Maritime Desk at the White House is not run by a trade or economics professor at the National Economic Council. It’s run by a naval historian in the National Security Council.

The Navy and national security are in the lead. Not shipping and trade.

The question is whether it’s too little, too late.