Getting Strait

Straits are all the news these days.  It seems every nation wants one or more.  Possession being nine tenths of the law sometimes overrules agreed upon conventions like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.  That can be a problem as even a cursory glance at today’s news confirms.

Straits are generally defined as narrow openings between two large landmasses that allow ships to navigate between separate bodies of water.  Most are formed by natural forces like plate tectonics.  A few are manmade like the Panama and Suez Canal. 

How many straits are there?  Technically over 200 but that list can be whittled down substantially.  Since each of the major ones may become a chokehold disrupting global commerce, let’s consider some of the biggies.  In addition to the two aforementioned canals, the Strait of Hormuz may currently lead the list with Bab al-Mandeb hot on its heels. Then there are two in Turkey: the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits (both of which can lock part of the Russian fleet away from the Mediterranean). The Strait of Gibraltar links the Mediterranean to the Atlantic thereby underlining its importance. The Danish Straits rarely make the evening news but, separating Denmark from Sweden by some two nautical miles, they could prove problematic for another part of the Russian fleet since that passage links the Baltic Sea to the outside world.  Let’s add two more of interest to international shipping and China: The Strait of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait.

Geopolitics potentially endows each of these ten locations with extreme strategic importance.  Currently we are seeing their significance spread beyond a single point on the map.  Should this continue, we will face dire straits indeed if policy continues to be made by individual sultans and kings.