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Chokepoints: The Hidden Infrastructure of Global Power · Global Insights

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's either economic pressure or military force, really.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so I uh most governments, despite the downsides that I think are very easy to see, have found the use of this sort of choke point-oriented coercion irresistible once they discover how to use it.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: This year, Iran shut the straight aforemost.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: American and Israeli strikes had hit Iran, a country the United States had spent years squeezing with sanctions.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Then Iran squeezed back.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: And within weeks, Washington was easing many of those sanctions.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Iran had found something America couldn't do without.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: It forced a deal.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Factories went quiet, and Washington made a deal then, too.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: So the message I think to Americans is it's no longer possible to imagine that you can live in the United States under the conditions that you historically have.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, who holds the next choke point?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: It could be closer than you think.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oil chips medications are all the target.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: And if this is simply how power works in the world now, with one country choking another, what happens next?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: There are a substantial number of medications that we rely on, critical medicines in the United States, that have at least one essential ingredient that is solely made in China.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Solely.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Joining us today is Edward Fishman, who wrote Choke Points, the book on economic warfare, Professor Monica Hakimi of Columbia Law School, who studies how international law governs war and force, and Professor James Holmes, the Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Moderating the conversation is Courtney Doggard, the president of Network 2020.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Network 2020's discussion about geopolitical choke points.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's a pleasure to have each of you here today.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_03: So with this, Eddie, I wanted to start with you because you have written the best-selling book about choke points.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: The crisis around the Strait of Hormuz has really brought up geographical choke points to the forefront of the news cycle.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: And it's really highlighting how a narrow passage can have very far-reaching consequences for global trade, for energy markets, for international security.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yet you've written that choke points are not limited to geography and they can be found in financial systems, supply chains, and critical technologies.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: So could you just set the stage for us, please, by defining what a choke point is?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: What are some of the different types of choke points and what makes them significant?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you, Courtney.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's an honor to be back with Network 2020 and to be joined by such uh distinguished co-panelists, uh Monica and Jim.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: So look, any anyone who's studied history understands the importance of maritime choke points, be it the Strait of Hormuz or the Bosphorus, uh, the Panama Canal, narrow waterways that are indispensable for international commerce.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Largely speaking, that same phenomenon does exist in economic systems, in financial networks.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's really the primary focus of my book, Choke Points.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's about the choke points that emerge from the hyperglobalization period of the 1990s, where in the wake of the Cold War, really for the first time in history, we have an entire global economy centered around a single currency, the US dollar.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: We have transnational supply chains that cut across the entire globe.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: Because what happened after the Cold War was we took the deeply integrated uh market that had existed really amongst advanced industrial democracies and we spread it to China and the former Soviet system.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, look, choke points are parts of the global economy where one country has a dominant position and there are few, if any, substitutes.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: To be very sort of disciplined about it, there are really three criteria you need for any good service market to be a choke point.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: The first is a single country or a coalition of close allies needs to possess a dominant market share of a specific, specific industry.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: Usually, for the choke points we see used for economic warfare most, like the US dollar, which is involved in 90% of all foreign exchange transactions or Chinese rare earth elements where China refines 90% of the global supply, that control usually is almost like a monopolist, right?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's 80, 90% market share.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: And the closer you do have to a monopoly, the more effective that choke point is.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: But just having a monopoly or a very dominant market share is not enough.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: You really need two other criteria.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: The second is the good or service in question needs to be very difficult to substitute.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because if it's easy to substitute, even if you've got a dominant market share, it's not that useful as an economic weapon.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you an example that I think will resonate with people.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: You go back to early 2020, uh, at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, the United States imported 95% of our medical masks at the start of 2020.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: And China, as the country that was sort of first afflicted by the pandemic, imposed export controls on medical masks because they wanted to hoard them for themselves.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Naturally, you know, they they needed to do that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we were, we were importing almost uh almost three quarters of our medical masks from China specifically.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so there was a panic in the United States.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: We got to the point where we we provided public health guidance that we had to only uh you know provision masks for doctors and nurses and that they wouldn't be helpful to everyday people.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that was done in the interests of you know making sure that the people who needed the most would have those masks.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, guess what?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Within a couple months, we had quadrupled our domestic production of medical masks.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And we no longer really were dependent on China at all.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that's because it was very easy to substitute.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: Contrast that with rare earths, right?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Where um, you know, independent industry uh analysts say it's gonna take at least a decade for us to break China's choke point over rare earths, even if it's just a couple of years, which I think is what Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, has said, that's still a long time for us to be completely susceptible to Chinese economic coercion.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to be measuring that substitutability in years rather than months.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: But even if you have those first two, you have a monopolistic market share and it's something that's really hard to substitute, you would need one more criteria for a good or service to qualify as a choke point.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I call asymmetric coercive potential.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: You need, if you're the country of the coalition that possesses it, to be able to cut off adversaries for it from it and impose substantially more harm on them than you're imposing on yourself.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Because if the harm is symmetric or close to symmetric, you're probably not going to use that choke point.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the sort of classic examples of this is you look at uh, you know, China's holdings of US treasuries, right?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Where there's a question, well, would China ever fire sale uh their treasuries in order to hurt the U.S.?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: The answer is they probably wouldn't do that because it'd be so damaging to themselves.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, another sort of case of that is if you look at U.S.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: tariffs on Canada, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: The Canadians sell 75% of their exports to the United States.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Most of those exports are oil and gas that basically can't be diverted because they're in fixed infrastructure like pipelines.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got dominant market share over Canadian uh, you know, uh Canada's exports, and they can't substitute the U.S.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: markets.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: You'd think we can impose tariffs on Canada and coerce them the way Trump has been threatening now for over a year, right?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: He imposed a 25% tariff on Canada, I think 10 days into his time in the White House.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at the average effective tariff on Canada from last year, even though Trump imposed this 25% tariff on Feb 1 of 2025, it's only 3%.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's because it's untenable for the United States to impose embargo-level tariffs on Canada without sending the United States into a significant economic crisis.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: So we've effectively exempted the vast majority of Canadian imports from American tariffs.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: So you need all three of those.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: The final one, like I said, asymmetric coercive potential.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to sort of counterexample to Canada, you look at Chinese rare earths, where I think in 20 they only had$3.5 billion worth of export revenues, whereas the U.S.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey has estimated that a 2.2 uh sorry, that a 30% disruption to the US supply of neodymium, which is a uh a very important rare earth element, would affect the US economy by 2.2% of a hit to our GDP.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: So that's about uh you know$500 plus billion dollars.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: So China would just have to forego a couple billion dollars worth of export revenues to have a monumental impact on the US economy.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's the kind of asymmetry you want to you want to have.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so you really need those three criteria.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: If you have a dominant market share, lack of substitutability, and the ability to weaponize this choke point with asymmetric effect, that's what gives you a potent economic weapon.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Jim.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: Now turning to you for the original, the originator of the word choke points, the uh really looking at some of the maritime choke points.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the one on everybody's mind is this on again, off-again blockade of a blockade in the Strait of the Hormoons.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about this?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure if I should call it a current blockade, recent blockade.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: It seems to be sort of in the in the middle of things right now, from a military strategist perspective, and really in comparison to some historical examples.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: And um, if you could just explain to the audience how has the advantage of military mobility, economic pressure, or deterrence changed over time?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: And aside from the Strait of Hornmuz, are there other potential choke points that could be leveraged in the way in which Hormuz was?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of questions, a military strategist perspective.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Score.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, there was a there was a lot there.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was talking for with uh somebody, I don't even remember who it was.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: They won the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal not too long ago about Hormuz, and they and they asked what and they asked basically what she just did.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, have we ever seen the sort of dual blockades?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I was sort of ransacking my memory.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the the best the best example is I came up with were the world wars.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about think about what happened there, think about what made Britain have the dominant navy, the United States was on the rise and so forth.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: They could, but and then the British Isles sit astride the sea lanes connecting Germany uh with with the wider Atlantic and its ability to do things.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, what did they do?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: They mounted what we call a distant blockade of the North Sea in order to in order to pinch the German economy in both cases.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: What did the Germans do?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they did they didn't do very well in undersea warfare.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: They had a very late start uh building their navy and especially their submarine navy, but what they had, they realized that they could swim underneath the Royal Navy's blockade, so they went out into the Atlantic and tried and tried to basically mount another blockade against uh shipping comparing the I connecting the United States and Canada to the European theater.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's if you could black at shipping, go watch the movie Greyhound.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that gives you a good that gives you a good sense of what that was all about.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, uh in fact, it's it got it the German attempt at a distant blockade in World War II got so much that we were actually seeing German U-boats.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we have we have two propellers from a German U-boat uh displayed on our campus from right off right off Rhode Island.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Ernest Hemingway, the the wonderful novelist, actually signed on as a naval auxiliary in the Caribbean Sea in order to fight U-boats.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's I mean that it really was a menace that was stretching out.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thankfully, for Ernest, he didn't catch one in his wooden fishing boat, but he did, he did, he did try to lock some of the uh so I think those are probably the hit the best historical precedents.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: What other waterways could it happen at?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we have a recent example uh where the U.S.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Navy and European navies were trying to fight off the Houthis who were blocking the Babel of Mandam Strait using uh what we call access denial stuff, shore-based missiles and drones and and whatnot.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's so yeah, there are certainly others.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think the what the one other thing that our listeners might want to think about is that there are sort of two, there are sort of two categories of of uh of narrow passages of maritime choke points.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: One, they're just sort of natural choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, the other ones are artificial choke points like the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a that actually makes a do that actually makes a difference.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Iran's trying to try it wants to charge fees or tolls or whatever to pass through Hormuz.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it actually that that actually makes some sense in Panama and then in Egypt.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: We don't expect we don't expect Panama and Egypt to run those as philanthropies, but as far as national and uh natural waterways like the Strait of or like the Malacca Strait or you know, pick your favorite strait, it's it it actually does make a difference.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: But uh thank you.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's very helpful.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I have a few questions in my mind, but I want to move on because you brought up a good point about tolls versus non-tolls, which leads to the international law piece.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: So, Monica, I'd love to turn to you.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: Could you talk a little bit about how international law currently regulates action, state action around choke points?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: And as an international lawyer or someone who studies international law, what has this recent incident around the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and potentially exploitation of other economic or geographical choke points, how is that impacting the international legal system?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: Well, maybe I will start by talking about how international law regulates geographic choke points and specifically straits, since that's the example on the table.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_04: And then maybe we can zoom out and talk a bit more about the other kinds of choke points that Eddie mentioned.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_04: So, with respect to the Strait of Hormuz, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea essentially provides for a right of free passage through straits, international waterways and straits, of which the Strait of Hormuz is one.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: One thing to note, though, is that neither Iran nor the United States is party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_04: And as I said, it was adopted in 1982, which is just a few years after the revolutionary government took over in Iran.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_04: So Iran, no doubt, chose not to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in part as a signal to indicate that it wasn't actually on board with recognizing the right of free passage through the strait.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_04: And so this has been a latent tension in the Strait of Hormuz, in the, let's say, the geostrategic configurations on the Strait of Hormuz for quite some time.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_04: And it does not only through like the rules that it creates, for example, that you have this countries have a right of free passage, but also through the broader set of practices that are organized around international law, is that it helps to identify what might be a choke point and what the terms for using it might be.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_04: So if one has been following the international legal conversation on the Strait of Four Moose or on straits more generally, one would not be at all surprised to see that Iran is holding in its back pocket the claim of being entitled to restrict access through the state of Fort Moose because that's been its long-standing position.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_04: And it's sort of used legal norms and texts and discourses to communicate to the world that it had the potential to use this chokehold and or choke point and might and might well do so.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_04: So if you want to talk about choke points generally and the ways in which international law regulates it, I would say that international law helps to identify what a choke point is.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_04: It helps to define the terms for using a choke point, and it gives the different players, in this case, Iran and the United States, the tools for trying to negotiate what kind of choke point, if it will be a choke point, something like the Strait of Four moves will be going forward.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_04: Great.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: Eddie, turning back to the US and the economic leverage, um, you know, you brought up the example of China and rare earths, and Monica has brought up the example of us having this very dominant leverage.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: What does one, the US-China relationship tell us about economic choke points?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: And two, more broadly, and particularly drawing on your experience at the State Department, what determines when Washington chooses to utilize these economic choke points?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and what has the impact been on the international order?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: Because I would imagine that you one can't just use these choke points and have that be kind of in a vacuum.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: There must be potentially some corrosive qualities to using it, or you can't use it too frequently.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: So what what determines how those decisions get made?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: So look, China is no stranger to economic coercion.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and rare earths, you know, they they've sort of in the last year has uh become a more prominent topic in Washington.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: But you're going back to 2010 is actually in the Senkaku crisis that I'm sure Jim knows all about, uh, when China first restricted rare earths to Japan.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that they've been using that as a coercive lever for a long time.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think, though, if you read the scholarship on Chinese economic statecraft and Chinese economic warfare, really the norm up until recently was that they preferred to do this in a deniable fashion, that it was an informal economic warfare, right?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think the 2010 uh embargo on rare earths to Japan, there was no legal statute that came out of China that actually restricted those shipments.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: The shipments just stopped, right?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they would do it in a way where they had plausible deniability.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think what happened with China after the first Trump administration, when uh Bob Leitheiser launched a 301 investigation on China in the summer of 2017, eventually rolled out tariffs uh the next year.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: We did export controls against ZTE and Huawei, two very large Chinese companies.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: China realized that they needed a bigger armamentarium to respond to American economic coercion.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the informal economic statecraft wasn't going to cut it against a great power rival like the United States, that very much manifestly was weaponizing choke points against China, in this case through technology.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so what China started doing really around 2018 was effectively copying and pasting a lot of the legal architecture and bureaucratic machinery that we have for sanctions and export controls and porting it over to the Chinese system, even honestly down to the nomenclature, right?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: In the US system, uh the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce Department has the entity list, where, uh, which is used for export controls.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: In China, now they have the unreliable entity list, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they they've taken it down to almost the same names for some of these items.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it was really only maybe two or three years ago that they kind of had scale for these government processes and these newer statutory authorities.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And really the test case was last April, where Trump imposed up to 145% tariffs on Chinese imports with the theory that uh the US could always win a trade war against China because the United States imports so much more from China than China imports from the United States that we can escalate tariffs more than they can escalate against us.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: And what China said was well, sure, we can go tit for tat on tariffs, but we're gonna respond asymmetrically.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna use some of these new tools that we have and use a choke point, namely rare earth elements, which I mentioned earlier, China's 90% of the global uh supply of refined rare earths, and use that to try to coerce the United States.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: And what happened?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh China put these export controls in place in April of last year.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: And within weeks, Ford, you know, the big US automaker, had to idle its factory that produces the Explorer SUV, one of its flagship automobiles.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: Raytheon had to scour the globe looking for alternative supplies for rare earth elements to use in some of its most important missile systems.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: It had an immediate impact on American companies in national security at the center of our industrial economy.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: And what happened?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: The United States agreed to a truce with China and has since been effectively backpedaling on China policy, even now relieving some export controls on semiconductor exports to China.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: What we saw last year was, I think, in the first example in really modern uh you know the contemporary history, at least the last decade or two, of a US rival using a choke point to coerce the United States.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then this year, with the Strait of Hormuz, we saw the same playbook.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: A US rival, this case Iran, a middle power, using a choke point to coerce the United States.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's happened.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: The United States has now given more sanctions relief under on Iran, at least in terms of oil sanctions relief, than was even given in 2015 under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: What happened in the Obama administration was the United States coerced Iran, imposed economic pressure on Iran in order for Iran to give nuclear concessions.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: What happened in 2026 was Iran imposed economic pressure on the United States by weaponizing a choke point.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: And now the United States is giving economic relief to Iran.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's happened.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think what we're in right now is an economic arms race.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: We've now seen two examples of both China and Iran coercing successfully the United States.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: To your point about the reaction function, what happens when you weaponize a choke point?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think the flip side of that economic arms race that I mentioned is that when choke points are weaponized, you make other countries feel uh vulnerable.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: You make companies feel vulnerable, right?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: China, for over a decade now, has been trying to build Build parallel financial infrastructure to the dollar for fear that the United States could impose financial sanctions on China.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're doing that explicitly because they saw the United States impose financial sanctions on Iran and Russia weaponizing choke points the way that Monica mentioned in her opening comments.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: The United States now, in the last year, has been pouring billions of dollars to try to indigenize our rare earth industry.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: Because we don't want to be vulnerable to China's rare earth choke point.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: One of the easiest bets coming out of this Iran war is that there are going to be tens of billions of dollars of investment in new pipelines to try to circumvent the Strait of Horror moves and energy storage facilities close to big markets like China and India, so that this choke point is less potent five or 10 years from now.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: Ditto in terms of adoption of uh renewable energy technology like EVs, batteries, you know, solar panels.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that is the risk that comes with weaponizing choke points.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the reason why, at least in the United States, policymakers now for over a decade, including my colleague at Columbia, Jack Liu, have been warning against the overuse of sanctions.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, having served in government, there are not many good alternative coercive levers to economic pressure, right?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's either economic pressure or military force, really.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh most governments, despite the downsides that I think are very easy to see, have found the use of this sort of choke point-oriented coercion irresistible once they discover how to use it.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: Monica, turning back to international law, it's both, as you described, an accountability measure on the use or misuse of choke points.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: But as you mentioned, it's also arguably a choke point in itself, as you know, more powerful countries, the ones who are backing the international legal system, are able to use international law to their advantage.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: So you've written about how the shifting international legal system, the system of international law, in part by the US pulling back from that, is creating new opportunities and maybe new challenges.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so I'm curious to get your sense, just looking ahead.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: How do you see international law evolving to become a more globally accepted mechanism of checks on abuse of power around, you know, around the world, around these choke points?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so what are some of the challenges and opportunities of this moment?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I'm going to answer that question, but before I do, maybe I could just offer an elaboration on what I take to be Eddie's concept, because I think Eddie's concept doesn't admit the possibility that international law might change a certain power configuration.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, a choke point either exists or does not.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_04: It depends on capacity for coercive control and domination and monopolistic behavior.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that might all be true.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_04: The thing that international law might do that is different from that, and that I think your question doesn't quite get at, because your question also assumes, you know, it's well, it's the same, it's the same actors who have the coercive capacity to maintain monopolistic control over a choke point that will also use international law toward those ends, is sort of like what I took to be implicit in your question, Courtney.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: And I guess I want to say international law changes the ways in which people navigate and work around one might otherwise be a choke point.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_04: And in some cases, it creates its own choke point.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_04: So if one takes seriously the international legal regime on the use of force, which the United States actually has historically done, even though it has pushed the boundaries of it and oftentimes exceeded it, the UN Security Council is a choke point on the use of military force now for defensive purposes.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_04: It's a construct of international law, and it's historically one that the United States has felt in various ways some compulsion to use.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_04: And so international law is not just itself a way of channeling the interests of the powerful in creating certain choke points.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_04: It can, it can, again, change the terms on which certain social or geographic or economic features are used.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_04: And that's historically been the case with the Strait of Horror moves too.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_04: Iran has always had some desire to control that space.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_04: And for a variety of reasons, it has not felt the pressure to do so in the way that it has done in response to this most recent round of violence with the United States and Israel.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_04: And you might ask the question, why?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_04: Why is it acting now?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_04: And why has it not acted historically to try to impose, as Jim says, a toll on the Strait of Hormuz when that's long been one of the things in its arsenal that it has broadcasted and indicated that it has wanted to do?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I think one answer is that we are seeing, and this is not a new insight, I think it's something that the audience will be familiar with, that we're seeing dramatic changes in the way the world is ordered.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: And one of these very, very dramatic changes is that it's become clear to me, and I think to many others, that the US security and economic structures that had long dominated global security and global commerce and much of the world is no longer sustainable at the levels it once was.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_04: And to the extent that it is sustainable, many think it's no longer desirable.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_04: So there's all sorts of pressure to push back on that.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_04: And international law is, of course, also a feature of the various social dynamics that are playing out in the world.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_04: And so just as you're seeing these power dynamics shift and efforts to take advantage of, exploit potential choke points against the United States in ways that they have not historically done.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_04: So too is international law shifting with it.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_04: And it's up for graphs to see what how the constellation of sort of social and material power will be realigned going forward.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_04: I think one thing that is maybe one way of broadening a point that Eddie made about some of these changes that are happening, is that it is true that others are now trying to create new choke points against the United States.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_04: And the United States doesn't quite have the tolerance for it, I think, because we haven't come to terms with the implications of a retreat of US power in as many places of the world as are indicated by what's actually happening, including the Strait of Hormuz, but not exclusive to the Strait of Hormuz.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: And so what you're seeing is a combined sort of deterioration of the US capacity to maintain the openness of what might otherwise be choke points in the world and efforts to push back on that.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_04: And international law will shift with those movements.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_04: International law, it always has, it always will.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_04: So if you want a window into where things might be going, I think the Strait of Four moves and the conflict there is a very good site for seeing the future because what you're seeing there is whether international lawyers want to recognize it as not or not.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_04: And many will not quite want to recognize it because it's not consistent with like their formal constraints of how international law ought to change.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_04: But you're seeing there a fight over the future terms, which will be defined through a combination of law and power for using that waterway.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_04: And because that waterway, other waterways too, including the Northwest Passage in Canada, including um, and and therefore the relation, the passages near near Denmark and Greenland, um, and why those are now also at issue and the South China Sea.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_04: So what what's happening there is a is a you with is a negotiation that involves a mix of law and power to try to create a new global order, if you want to use these sort of massive terms, um, that can that can be sustained again through a combination of power and law.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not clear where we're going or what kind of law we're gonna have or what kind of order we're gonna have in the Strait of Hormuz or anywhere else, because it's not yet clear who is going to insist on what positions and what the terms of the negotiation are gonna be.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Jim.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: Turning to you, and then I'll turn to the QA box.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: In terms of evolution from the military strategy point of view, how do you think military and maritime strategists in particular need to evolve in their thinking about choke points in order to more effectively operate in the world that we are in?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I think in particular about something like the Street of Hormuz, where it had always been threatened that this was a choke point.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I think military planners in Washington knew that.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: And yet at the same time, there was this idea that perhaps the economic, they know when it comes to the asymmetric, the symmetry of it, that it would inflict too much pain on Iran, but they found a way around that, I think, in part using technology.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: So, how does maritime strategy need to evolve when it comes to some of the different Monica has it exactly right?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's it's all about uh legal, legal, I mean, the legal order uh combined with with naval and and by the way, sure, shore-based military power as well.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we've one thing the Iran war has taught us is and we knew that we knew this already, but we've really seen it, uh we've really seen it in action, is that you don't have to have a great navy.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, Russia-Ukraine, same way the Ukraine has defeated a great navy without avia, but um, so there's a lot of uh so there's a lot of that uh lot of that stuff to unpack.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: The dissertation in the first book was on Theodore Roosevelt and the Roosevelt corollary in the Caribbean Sea in the 18th or in the in the early 20th century.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: It it feels like a it feels like a same, it feels like a similar moment in history.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Britain was on the way out because Germany was building a great navy, the United States Navy was on uh on the way up and it defeated Spain in the Spanish American War.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, in a sense, I wonder if the Gulf of I can't call it the Gulf of America, by the way.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up next to the Gulf of Mexico of Mexico.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's where that's what it is to me, but also the Caribbean Sea.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if that's not a uh wonder if that's not that wasn't a maritime show point that the United States was trying was trying to put into action.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were we were we were uh we're talking about uh waterways today.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the Panama Canal was starting to become a become a thing.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Roosevelt and uh oh uh Henry Cabot Lodge, who lived right over there from uh here here in uh here in Rhode Island, and all of them were warped, they were obsessed with the potential for European navies to come into the Western Hemisphere and and basically take control of that take control of those waterways and thus keep us from actually using the canal when it's uh when it's uh when it when it came into being.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh that's huge.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that one's huge.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what the uh what what the U.S.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: Navy had to do had to do before them.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you we didn't have enough ships for an Atlantic and a Pacific fleet, so therefore, if you need to just to uh shift uh uh vessels from one ocean to another, they had to go all the way around the southern tip of uh South America.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the canal, I mean, that was we we thought it might be in Nicaragua for a while, but it was, I mean, I would I mean that's I mean that's literally a physical choke point.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one little anecdote before he turned over to QA, and I it was something that Eddie said when he was talking about economic leverage.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Back during COVID, I'm a heart patient.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I I take part medication and um when when covet when COVID set in, I found I uh I got online and I found out that the only source of that medication was China.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: So which was uh which was a bit uh which was a bit uh heart stopping, if you want to say.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, so uh as far as what how we need to think about this going ahead, again, I think it's uh it's all about the combination of law and power, law is not self-enforcing.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it has to be enforced just like it is on our city streets.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's it's back during the night, if but back in fact back in the 90s when I started doing this, I heard people say law, uh international law is self-enforcing.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: What an absurd thing to say, but uh but that was sort of the mentality that we're trying to get over.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_03: We are just about at time, so I want to say thank you to each of you for uh bringing you know your very different and yet overlapping expertise to this uh to this question of choke points and helping illuminate a topic that I think a lot of us are quite curious about right now.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Jim, Eddie, Monica.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: You've been fantastic.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for joining us today.
• 35:03
  unknown: Thank you.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a real pleasure.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: It really has.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_03: All right, bye-bye, everyone.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Global Insights.
• 35:17
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• 35:25
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• 35:34
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