Good one. You elucidated it well and I get your point on the broader Geography from the earlier conversation.
Here is the irony, atleast for me. From the Roman times and into the 19th century, it was always the concept of Indian Ocean trade that drove the thinking. Isn't this whole Chokepoints a more recent outcome?
The Portugese. The Dutch and the British looked at the whole expanse, starting with Persian Gulf and Red Sea to the South China Sea as one continuum.
Probably it is time to learn some lessons from history, which we never seem to
That's an interesting way of putting it. One thing that struck me while writing the piece was something similar: earlier maritime powers often seemed to think in terms of connected systems rather than isolated nodes.
Hormuz, Aden, and Malacca were certainly important in their own right, but they were usually understood as parts of a wider commercial and strategic continuum stretching across the Indian Ocean and into East Asia. In many ways, the article is an attempt to recover some of that perspective.
I suspect the issue today isn't that chokepoints are unimportant. It's that they often become the entire analytical frame. We focus on the bottlenecks and, in the process, pay less attention to the corridors that connect them and make them strategically meaningful in the first place.
Your point about learning from history is well taken. Sometimes the older maritime view was broader than the one we use today.
Good one. You elucidated it well and I get your point on the broader Geography from the earlier conversation.
Here is the irony, atleast for me. From the Roman times and into the 19th century, it was always the concept of Indian Ocean trade that drove the thinking. Isn't this whole Chokepoints a more recent outcome?
The Portugese. The Dutch and the British looked at the whole expanse, starting with Persian Gulf and Red Sea to the South China Sea as one continuum.
Probably it is time to learn some lessons from history, which we never seem to
That's an interesting way of putting it. One thing that struck me while writing the piece was something similar: earlier maritime powers often seemed to think in terms of connected systems rather than isolated nodes.
Hormuz, Aden, and Malacca were certainly important in their own right, but they were usually understood as parts of a wider commercial and strategic continuum stretching across the Indian Ocean and into East Asia. In many ways, the article is an attempt to recover some of that perspective.
I suspect the issue today isn't that chokepoints are unimportant. It's that they often become the entire analytical frame. We focus on the bottlenecks and, in the process, pay less attention to the corridors that connect them and make them strategically meaningful in the first place.
Your point about learning from history is well taken. Sometimes the older maritime view was broader than the one we use today.