“Five strategic keys lock up the world”. That was a statement from Sir Jacky Fisher, a Victorian admiral, spoken over a century ago. He cited Singapore, Cape Town, Alexandria, Gibraltar and Dover. Today, you would certainly add the Straits of Hormuz, even though that is not the world’s most vital sea-lane by most measures of today’s maritime commerce.
Most estimates put the percentage of world trade that travels by ship at approximately 85%, with the value of that trade that travels by ship being approximately 55% of the total – the difference is explained by the fact that cell phones and gold bars travelling by air are much more valuable than a few lumps of coal traveling by ship.
We tend to think of trade in terms of trucks/lorries, trains, cargo planes and pipelines. Although we are aware of shipping, it tends to be “out-of-sight, out-of-mind”. However, when threats to trade routes emerge, ships immediately rise to the top of the concern list simply because of the volume they carry. As Admiral Fisher stated, there are at least five, now six and more, potentially vulnerable locations in the world. The map above gives you some idea of the complexity of maritime trade routes and today’s “choke points”.
Malignant forces, currently like Russia and China, are rapidly developing their capabilities to threaten ships and shipping lanes, anywhere in the world; Russia’s current initiative of covertly mapping undersea pipeline and communication cables in the North Sea and the Baltic is just one example. China’s construction of bases on atolls through the South China Sea is another.
As a commentary on these types of activities, there can be no other reason for doing this except for planned sabotage in preparation for war. “A lot of people are going to wake up to the fact that maritime trade is of great value and has to be protected”, says Steven Wills of the Center for Maritime Strategy, an American think tank.
Many countries, and even more people, are hoping that “freedom of navigation”, a diplomatic principle that has held true for more than a century, will survive the current threats and will continue to do so into the future. However, as I have said in other contexts, “hope” is a naïve, even stupid, principle on which to base world trade’s continued operations. Any rational person has to believe Steven Wills when he stated “it must be protected”. The question is how, and how can that protection be enforced, and by whom.
Realistically, it has to be by full international agreement and treaty, with strict, punitively enforceable, sanctions on those that violate those accords.
I realise that that sounds virtually impossible it today’s environment, when rogue nations like Iran can hold the world economy to hostage by closing one small choke-point, and even when world super-powers, like the United States, can unilaterally blockade the same choke-point just because its President feels like it.
It’s time to wake up to the potential, and real, results of this cavalier attitude towards our (all human beings) grocery bills and gas prices and even, our actual food supply chains – cutting off the supply of fertilizer through the Straits of Hormuz, right before food planting season in most of world, is an almost guarantee of starvation in many parts of the world this coming year.
Global irresponsibility is one thing, indirect genocide is quite another, and current world leadership at all levels seem oblivious to, if not dismissive, of the consequences of their self-centered actions.
It would seem that the only existing body that could even attempt to impose strict, punitively enforceable, regulations on maritime trade, would be the United Nations, and they don’t have an enforcement arm. Maybe, in this case, they need to mount one, to which all members would contribute. A pipe dream, certainly, but what’s the alternative?
