By: Ken Robinson
The most consequential geography in the current Middle East crisis is not a desert town or a militia stronghold. It is a set of narrow waterways through which the world economy breathes.
The Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz are not simply shipping routes.
They are pressure valves in the global system. If they remain open, markets adjust and alliances hold. If they are threatened, freight rates rise, insurance prices jump, energy markets wobble, and political leaders begin to feel pressure at home almost immediately.
Suez Canal
That is why the central strategic question is so often framed the wrong way. Washington periodically falls into a stale debate over whether it should put more troops on the ground in the Middle East.
Bab El Mandeb
That debate begins too late and at the wrong point on the map. The first American objective should be to preserve command of the sea lanes that matter most. Land power can punish, raid, or stabilize in limited cases. But when the issue is the uninterrupted movement of oil, liquefied natural gas, container traffic, food, and military resupply, naval power is the decisive instrument.
Strait of Hormuz
The numbers explain why. UNCTAD says the Suez Canal handled about 12 percent to 15 percent of global trade in 2023. In its Review of Maritime Transport 2024, the agency notes that about 10 percent of world maritime trade by volume and 22 percent of containerized trade normally cross Suez.
On the energy side, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that flows through the Bab el-Mandeb and Suez system accounted for about 12 percent of global seaborne-traded oil and about 8 percent of global liquefied natural gas trade in the first half of 2023. And the same agency says that in 2024 roughly 20 million barrels per day moved through Hormuz, equal to about 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption.
Those figures are why these passages are best understood not as isolated waterways but as a single strategic architecture:
Suez is the northern gate connecting Europe and Asia.
Bab el-Mandeb is the southern hinge joining the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Hormuz is the energy valve at the mouth of the Gulf.
When all three are functioning, the maritime system has resilience. When one is compromised, pressure shifts across the others. When two are threatened at once, the shock is global.
The market has already shown how quickly it reacts. In early 2024, UNCTAD warned that simultaneous disruptions in the Red Sea and Panama Canal were driving longer routes, higher fuel use, rising insurance costs, and broader supply-chain stress. By mid-2024, according to UNCTAD, tonnage transiting Suez had been cut by about 70 percent as shipping diverted around the Cape of Good Hope.
That followed the earlier lesson of the Ever Given blockage in 2021, when a single stranded container ship demonstrated that the global trading system can be disrupted not only by war but by fragility itself.
For Iran and its partners, this vulnerability is not incidental. It is strategy. The Defense Intelligence Agency has long assessed that Tehran’s maritime approach relies on anti-access and area-denial tactics, not changed since I fought there in the 80’s:
fast attack craft
fast inshore attack craft
naval mines
coastal and ship-launched anti-ship cruise missiles
submarines, unmanned systems, and, increasingly, layered missile threats
That is why the real choice is not strategic choke points or boots on the ground.
And Covert Operation PRIME CHANCE
Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy in a blue-water engagement. It only needs to create enough uncertainty in confined waters to raise the cost of transit, trigger market panic, and test Washington’s willingness to absorb risk.
The Houthis have adapted a version of that same logic in the Red Sea.
CENTCOM statements and Maritime Administration advisories describe a campaign of missile, drone, and maritime attacks on commercial shipping and coalition naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The aim is not classic sea control. It is selective disruption.
The Houthis seek to prove that even a non-state actor, backed by Iran and operating from poor terrain, can impose costs on the international system by threatening one narrow passage. That is a strategic message, not merely a battlefield tactic.
American history offers a more useful guide than the recurring calls for boots on the ground. During the Tanker War in the late 1980s, my Task Force, along with Joint Task Force Middle East, the U.S. Navy protected reflagged Kuwaiti tankers in Operation Earnest Will.
The lesson was not that maritime security is clean or risk-free. USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine, and the confrontation escalated into direct naval combat. That may happen again.
But the strategic point held: the United States used sea power to keep shipping moving and to deny Iran a veto over Gulf commerce without invading and occupying another Middle Eastern state.
That history matters now because the temptation in Washington is always to move from maritime coercion to territorial thinking. Once a crisis intensifies, every discussion risks sliding toward bases, brigades, raids inland, and arguments about resolve that are really arguments about visibility.
Yet the real test of resolve in this theater is not whether the United States can seize ground. It is whether it can maintain freedom of navigation, protect merchant traffic, reassure allies, and suppress attacks at acceptable cost over time.
This is where a maritime strategy has clear advantages over a large ground commitment.
Naval Escort -in Red Sea & Gulf of Aden
Naval power is mobile. It can concentrate and disperse. It can escort, surveil, strike, intercept, and signal. It can scale pressure up or down without creating an occupation problem. It is also coalition-friendly.
European and Asian partners that may resist another American land war are far more likely to support convoy protection, intelligence sharing, air and missile defense, sanctions enforcement, mine countermeasures, and multinational patrols. In other words, sea control is not just a military option. It is the alliance option.
It is also the economically rational option.
A prolonged disruption in Hormuz would hit global oil and LNG flows quickly. The EIA notes that about 20 percent of global LNG trade also transited Hormuz in 2024, mostly from Qatar.
That means any serious threat there would not just raise oil prices. It would shake gas markets, electricity costs, industrial production, and Asian and European energy planning at the same time. The purpose of naval dominance in this setting is therefore larger than battlefield success. It is to prevent the conversion of a regional military crisis into a systemic economic crisis.
There is also a strategic-competitive dimension. China, India, Japan, South Korea, and European economies all depend heavily on the uninterrupted use of these waterways.
The United States gains more from acting as the guarantor of commons access than from becoming the occupier of contested land.
One role strengthens its alliances and reinforces its legitimacy. The other risks draining military resources while giving adversaries time to frame America as a resident power trapped onshore.
Alfred Thayer Mahan understood the basic logic more than a century ago: command of critical sea lines of communication shapes the balance of power because it determines movement, commerce, endurance, and strategic reach.
The geography has changed less than the rhetoric. In the Middle East, the enduring reality is that narrow waters matter more than broad speeches.
Suez, Bab el-Mandeb, and Hormuz are where pressure is applied, where credibility is tested, and where prudent statecraft should begin.
The right policy follows from that reality.
Washington should keep its focus on layered naval and air defense, convoy protection where necessary, mine warfare readiness, persistent intelligence collection, sanctions enforcement, and targeted strikes against systems that directly threaten maritime traffic.
It should avoid any easy rhetorical slide from protecting commerce to remaking societies. For god sake can we finally learn this lesson!
The mission is not to occupy the Middle East. It is to keep the arteries of the world economy open.
That is why the real choice is not strategic choke points or boots on the ground.
The choke points are the reason boots on the ground are usually the wrong answer. When the contest is over whether energy, trade, and deterrence continue to move through narrow seas, the decisive instrument is the fleet, not the division.