Malaysia booked equidistance as a parallel circuit. The IISS has now traced the wiring: one Taiwan break puts forty-one per cent of GDP through a single conductor.
America’s strategic ambiguity about Taiwan makes it very difficult to determine what would happen if China attempted to invade Taiwan and block the Malacca Strait. However, America’s attack on Iran and its expenditure of interceptors in the Middle East makes a Chinese attempt on Taiwan more likely than before. It will be interesting to see how countries re-align if the Hormuz Strait re-opens and it will be interesting to see how countries re-align if conflict between China and Taiwan increases. The fog of war is real and the proxy battles between the US and China are forcing some difficult decisions for everyone.
You put your finger on the thing I find hardest to call. Strategic ambiguity over Taiwan only works while nobody can price it — and the Iran campaign just handed everyone a data point on what the US can actually sustain. You're right that the realignment is the real story.
Watching who moves when Hormuz reopens will tell us more than the reopening itself.
Interesting analogy. I think any attempt to disrupt the Malacca strait leads to WWIII and the “taking of sides” would be irrelevant. It’s like playing the game of tic-tac-toe.
Same assumption gets made about Hormuz and Suez — but we've both watched disruptions hit those exact chokepoints, and the world kept turning. That's what makes them worth a second look right now. Tankers just reroute or convoy, Suez cargo goes the long way round the Cape — pricey, yeah, but hardly the end of days. The system soaks it up and reprices.
Malacca's the real outlier, the one that's genuinely hard to substitute, which is likely why no one's willing to touch it. So I'd nudge the tic-tac-toe point a bit: these straits matter not because disrupting them guarantees catastrophe, but because the cost is real and compounds.
Malacca involves a world power, China, with another world power, the US. The Hormuz has so far just pitted the US and Israel against Iran directly. I don’t think the analogy is the same.
Yeah, you've got me there. I was treating them as the same kind of risk at different sizes, and they're not. Like you say — Hormuz has only ever been US and Israel against Iran, nobody with a peer backer.
Malacca is two world powers on the same chokepoint, which is a different animal entirely. Cost compounds in both, but only one of them has someone in the room who can turn it into a real war.
America’s strategic ambiguity about Taiwan makes it very difficult to determine what would happen if China attempted to invade Taiwan and block the Malacca Strait. However, America’s attack on Iran and its expenditure of interceptors in the Middle East makes a Chinese attempt on Taiwan more likely than before. It will be interesting to see how countries re-align if the Hormuz Strait re-opens and it will be interesting to see how countries re-align if conflict between China and Taiwan increases. The fog of war is real and the proxy battles between the US and China are forcing some difficult decisions for everyone.
You put your finger on the thing I find hardest to call. Strategic ambiguity over Taiwan only works while nobody can price it — and the Iran campaign just handed everyone a data point on what the US can actually sustain. You're right that the realignment is the real story.
Watching who moves when Hormuz reopens will tell us more than the reopening itself.
Interesting analogy. I think any attempt to disrupt the Malacca strait leads to WWIII and the “taking of sides” would be irrelevant. It’s like playing the game of tic-tac-toe.
Same assumption gets made about Hormuz and Suez — but we've both watched disruptions hit those exact chokepoints, and the world kept turning. That's what makes them worth a second look right now. Tankers just reroute or convoy, Suez cargo goes the long way round the Cape — pricey, yeah, but hardly the end of days. The system soaks it up and reprices.
Malacca's the real outlier, the one that's genuinely hard to substitute, which is likely why no one's willing to touch it. So I'd nudge the tic-tac-toe point a bit: these straits matter not because disrupting them guarantees catastrophe, but because the cost is real and compounds.
That's the part worth thinking twice about.
Malacca involves a world power, China, with another world power, the US. The Hormuz has so far just pitted the US and Israel against Iran directly. I don’t think the analogy is the same.
I had the same thought.
Yeah, you've got me there. I was treating them as the same kind of risk at different sizes, and they're not. Like you say — Hormuz has only ever been US and Israel against Iran, nobody with a peer backer.
Malacca is two world powers on the same chokepoint, which is a different animal entirely. Cost compounds in both, but only one of them has someone in the room who can turn it into a real war.