Chokepoints: How Five Waterways Quietly Rule the World

Current Book Project

In 2021, a single container ship turned sideways in a canal and the global economy seized up. In 2024, a militia in one of the world's poorest countries began firing missiles at commercial tankers, and within months a third of the traffic that normally passed through the southern Red Sea had rerouted around the entire continent of Africa. In 2025, drought in a tropical isthmus forced the operator of one of the world's two interoceanic canals to ration the number of ships allowed through, reshaping shipping schedules from Shanghai to Savannah. None of these events made sense as stories about politics, economics, or technology alone. They were stories about geography: about the simple, stubborn fact that the planet has a small number of narrow places through which an enormous share of its trade, energy, and military power must pass.

Chokepoints (working title) is a project about those narrow places, and about why the discipline best equipped to explain them, namely geography,  has nearly vanished from the toolkit of the foreign policy experts, journalists, and educators who shape how we understand the world. It tells the story of the 21st century through five waterways: the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, the Baltic Sea, and the South China Sea. Each has its own history, its own legal regime, and its own live crisis. Together, they reveal a pattern that geopolitical analysis keeps missing: that control of space, not just ideology or economics, is still the foundation of hegemonic power.

Written for general readers rather than specialists, Chokepoints moves between geography, history, current events, and accessible explanations of international maritime law, including why the United States, alone among major powers, has never ratified the treaty that governs the world's oceans.

This book is a work in progress. 

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