Hormuz blockade may herald end of American globalization

Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval strategist and historian, once said: “Whoever rules the waves rules the world.”

Mahan believed that national greatness was inextricably linked to the sea. The American naval strategist argued that control of sea lanes creates natural advantages in trade, reach and strategic influence, and that national prosperity and power depended on command of the world’s maritime routes.

The idea was inspired by the British Empire. For Britain, control of the sea was not optional — it was existential. As an island nation, its security depended on preventing invasion and sustaining maritime trade, imperatives that gave rise to the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy became both shield and sword: protecting the homeland while enabling the empire to expand.

The US inherited and adapted this logic. Inspired by Mahan, the US built a global maritime order after World War II, establishing naval bases from the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. To this day, the US Navy acts as guarantor of open navigation — not as an act of charity, but as a cornerstone of its power.

Globalization was never just about markets. It was about order — built, quite literally, on water. Mahan envisioned this even before the age of container ships, before the rise of Asia and before the term “globalization” existed.

He understood that those who control the sea lanes control the possibilities. Mahan’s framework offered a blueprint for an empire built on control of maritime highways and critical chokepoints — the Strait of Malacca, the Suez Canal and others — ensuring that oil, goods and capital could move with predictable regularity. This was the quiet foundation of what we now call American globalization.

Even rivals such as China benefited from this maritime stability as a major export nation. It remains America’s greatest legacy — and now its greatest challenge.

All global shipping — oil tankers from the Gulf, bulk carriers and electronics from Asia, grains from America — still depends on a handful of narrow chokepoints: the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and others.

Any disruption to these routes can trigger shocks across the global economy, as we are seeing today through Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Ironically, the very system that enabled American globalization is revealing its own fragility.

Iran’s military has responded to US-Israeli airstrikes by leveraging its most powerful strategic asset: geography. By closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has demonstrated that a narrow waterway can threaten the stability of the entire global economy.

More than 20% of the world’s oil supply and 25% of its natural gas pass through it annually — not only from Iran, but from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It also serves as a vital passage for fertilizers: roughly one-third of global supply, some 16 million tonnes, moves through the strait each year.

Since the blockade began earlier this month, crude oil prices have surged and now hover around US$116 per barrel, nearly double their historical moving average. Meanwhile, urea prices had risen 26% as of March 19.

Yet despite decades of US dominance, the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the limits of that supremacy. The strait has thus emerged as a strategic pressure point where economics, geography and power converge in a volatile mix, and as a potential bargaining chip that Iran may use in future negotiations to extract war reparations.

These events raise questions about whether US President Donald Trump had anticipated such consequences. Launching military strikes while diplomatic talks were underway in Oman has created mistrust and cast doubt on American leadership.

More broadly, they expose a strategic paradox: the US-led global system depends heavily on secure sea lanes, yet that very reliance has become a vulnerability — one the US left unaddressed by failing to diversify its strategic options.

China is pursuing a different approach through the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast network of land and maritime routes connecting more than 140 countries through trillions of dollars in investment. Often described as an infrastructure project, it is in reality a geopolitical redesign of Eurasian connectivity.

China has built rail links connecting inland China to Europe in roughly two weeks, cutting transit times in half compared to maritime shipping. China has also built ports stretching from Gwadar in Pakistan to Piraeus in Greece, constructing a parallel connectivity network linking Asia to Europe and Africa.

This poses a direct challenge to Western-controlled chokepoints — particularly maritime ones such as the Suez and Panama canals — as it is Beijing, not Washington, that will set the terms of these systems. The world may thus be witnessing a fundamental shift from control of sea lanes to control of land routes, with power shifting from the US to China.

Indeed, this aligns with Halford Mackinder’s “Heartland Theory“, which was first formally published in 1919. Mackinder, a renowned British geographer and political theorist, argued that future global power struggles would be fought between land powers and sea powers, and that control of Eurasia — the “Heartland” — would determine the global balance of power.

That prediction now appears prescient. The central question becomes: who serves as the link between Eurasian land trade and the sea? Geographically, Iran is that hinge — a bridge between Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, connecting the heartland to the ocean.

In this context, Iran functions as a continental hinge. It also holds the largest combined oil and gas reserves in the region, making it simultaneously a major producer and a critical transit state. Should Iran align with any particular geopolitical bloc, the balance of power would shift considerably.

According to reports, Iran is considering yuan-based oil payments to allow vessels to transit the Strait of Hormuz — a move that, if effective over the medium or long term, could accelerate de-dollarization. The strait has thus become a pivot point not only for the flow of oil but possibly for the future shape of globalization itself.

In a fractured world, companies and countries are no longer seeking the cheapest route but the safest one. That calculus alone may reshape globalization as we know it.