The Incommodities of War: the Creep of Geopolitical Conflict into Maritime Trade Lanes

As geopolitical competition increasingly reaches the world’s shipping lanes, maritime chokepoints are becoming powerful tools of coercion, and hence increasingly vulnerable points in the global trading system.

The global politics of the past 36 years have been defined by globalization and free trade, despite hiccups. It was once assumed that they would produce peace. Now, it is becoming clear how well they lend themselves to waging war.

As interstate tensions and conflicts have proliferated in the past several years, access to international trade has grown significantly in strategic importance. Attacks and security incidents involving ships have more than doubled in the past year.

The explosion of prosperity since the end of the second World War and especially after the end of the Cold War can largely be attributed to lowered barriers to international trade, both economic and political. Not only did production and transportation techniques vastly improve during this period, but trade regimes became steadily freer, culminating in the broad abandonment of capital controls, the inclusion of China in organizations such as the WTO, and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. These political changes set the stage for the full flowering of globalized trade.

It is perhaps exactly because globalized trade has brought so much openness and prosperity – and with it, interdependence – that preventing access to it has become such an attractive option as a geopolitical tool. Trump’s fixation on imposing tariffs, which can be used to leverage the benefits of trade to extract political concessions, is a prime example of this logic. Another example is Ukraine’s recent strikes on distribution centers belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon. While such moves can certainly impede trade or have knock-on effects, they do not affect the fundamental character of international trade.

Attacks on maritime shipping: the emerging paradigm

The cornerstone of globalized trade is maritime shipping, which accounts for 80% of globalized trade by volume (UNCTAD 2025). The two main ongoing interstate wars, the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Iran war, both feature concerted efforts to impede maritime shipping by both sides. It will come as little surprise to most observers of international relations that Iran and Russia have attacked cargo vessels and tankers numerous times in recent months, but  this is equally true of the US and Ukraine. Ukraine has struck ships violating sanctions on Russia not only in the Black Sea, but in the Mediterranean as well. For its part, the US has used fighter jets and helicopters to disable ships attempting to evade the naval blockade it has imposed in the Gulf of Oman (Raza 2026a & 2026b).

Not only is military power now being used against commercial vessels, there is also little discrimination between the targets. In May, a Chinese oil tanker was attacked in the strait of Hormuz for the first time in the Iran war (Reuters 2026a), while another cargo ship crewed by Chinese nationals was struck by a Russian drone off the coast of Ukraine (Raza 2026b). In July, in the Black Sea, a gas tanker which had rescued civilian sailors injured in an earlier drone strike was itself struck by a drone (Raza 2026d). These cases demonstrate a worrying lack of concern for the potential collateral damage – human and political – of attacks on shipping.

Sanctions have also come to be more explicitly geopolitical, with the US seizing ships unilaterally in direct connection with war and negotiations. In the Caribbean, the US imposed a blockade on Venezuela, seizing seven tankers headed to the country between December 2025 and January 2026 (Raza 2026e). It was later revealed that at least one of these tankers had been returned to Venezuela, perhaps as a part of some kind of deal (Ali & Stewart 2026). This case is particularly interesting, as it demonstrates how sanctions-related seizures can be used to apply pressure and potentially extract concessions rather than enforcing international law. Whether the sanctions action was legitimate or not, it was ultimately used in service of a political agenda.

Over the course of the Iran war, the US has also seized 3 vessels in the Indian Ocean – one near Malaysia – in connection with sanctions on Iran (Raza 2026f). Iran has conducted its own seizures of ships in the Persian Gulf, including – curiously – a ship managed by a Chinese company carrying Iranian oil (Raza, 2026g).

What is particularly jarring about these cases is the fact that the US – which has traditionally positioned itself as the key defender of free trade – is now itself using maritime shipping as a geopolitical instrument. In the absence of a champion of free trade and with a lack of clear rules, there appears to be little stopping other powers from throwing their own weight around and interfering with maritime trade.

Maritime chokepoints: a geopolitical lever

What stands out from the data on geopolitical incidents affecting maritime trade in the past year is that chokepoints are especially vulnerable and are a preferred target for applying pressure. The most affected areas in the spike of attacks on maritime shipping are chokepoints and the seas leading to them. In the past year, the Houthis in Yemen have attacked ships in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea 22 times, Iran and the US have attacked ships in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman 69 times, and Russia and Ukraine have struck ships in the Black Sea 99 times.

It is important to contextualize the data: there are over a hundred thousand cargo vessels currently operating worldwide (UNCTAD 2026), and the number of ships struck this year represents a vanishingly small number. Yet these strikes have outsize importance on perceptions of risk. The flow of maritime traffic through the strait of Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea, one of the most important trade lanes in the world, has slowed significantly in the wake of a Houthi declaration of a maritime blockade in July (Reuters 2026c). With the US opening a corridor for ship transit in the strait of Hormuz in May, the number of ships transiting has risen – but the amount of oil being exported through the strait remains less than half of what it was before the start of the war, and Iranian strikes have continued (Eavis & Ismay, 2026).

Coming risks and distant solutions

One set of strategically and economically critical maritime chokepoints remains largely absent in the data – those located in the seas of East and Southeast Asia. A report from CSIS claims that $6.4 trillion of trade passed through the straits surrounding the South China Sea, with the strait of Malacca and the strait of Taiwan accounting for more than $2.4 each, accounting for about 21% of global maritime trade (Hart et al., 2026).

Despite the lack of concerning developments in the region so far, it should not be assumed that it is devoid of the political and territorial tensions found in other parts of the world. Taiwan remains a huge geopolitical question mark, and tension between the PRC and a number of its maritime neighbors such as the Philippines has been growing. Unilateral enforcement of sanctions regimes and blockades – like that employed by the Trump Administration against Venezuela – presents just one option for applying pressure while maintaining plausible deniability. Against the backdrop of the aforementioned increasing tensions, this presents a real risk for international shipping routes in the region. The outbreak of open conflict involving these maritime chokepoints is also not out of the question, and poses a seriously worrying scenario.

A feasible political solution to this issue is difficult to envision: blocking maritime traffic to punish geopolitical enemies and strengthen a negotiating position will remain an attractive option in the future. It also seems that international forums, agencies, and laws lack the edge to protect the free flow of trade from belligerents. However, it seems that the exclusion of certain maritime regions (namely chokepoints) from conflict could be just as desirable for third parties as weaponizing them is for belligerents. The best way to defend maritime shipping will probably be for the states benefiting from free trade to seek such an arrangement and enforce it together. Unfortunately, this may also require a number of wake-up calls.

Bibliography

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