[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Maritime chokepoints are narrow passages, natural or engineered, through which a large share of global shipping must pass: the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, the Panama Canal, and Bab-el-Mandeb. They matter because they concentrate risk — Suez alone carries roughly 12% of global trade, and Hormuz roughly a fifth of world oil trade — so a single blockage, drought, attack, or closure at one point cascades across the whole network with little slack to absorb it. They are also where geography converts into leverage: whoever controls a chokepoint can tax or deny passage once the security guarantees that keep them open weaken. This is the mechanism behind the rerouting and extortion dynamics in Global Shipping and the near-term risk map in Economic and Geopolitical Risk Scenarios for the Next 3 Months. Seeded from Global Shipping.