핵심요약

• 글로벌 무역 상품의 약 90퍼센트가 해상으로 운송됩니다.
• 호르무즈 해협과 같은 해상 병목 지점에서의 분쟁은 막대한 경제적 영향을 초래합니다.
• 역사적으로 주요 수로의 통제는 강대국의 국제적 결정에 결정적인 역할을 해왔습니다.
• 지정학적 갈등이 해상 통로를 분쟁 지역으로 만들 위험이 있습니다.

도입

본 기사는 주요 해상 병목 지점의 통제권이 글로벌 무역과 경제에 미치는 지정학적 위험을 분석합니다. 이는 단순한 군사적 충돌을 넘어, 역사적으로 형성된 지리적 통제권이 현대 경제 시스템에 어떻게 반영되는지를 보여줍니다. 투자자들은 이러한 해상 경로의 안정성이 글로벌 공급망과 원자재 시장의 변동성에 직접적인 영향을 미친다는 점을 인식해야 합니다.

본문 1: 지정학적 리스크와 경제적 파급 효과

해상 병목 지점에서의 분쟁은 물리적인 운송의 중단을 의미하며, 이는 즉각적으로 글로벌 공급망에 경제적 충격을 가합니다. 특히 호르무즈 해협과 같은 전략적 통로가 차단될 경우, 원유 및 천연가스 등 에너지 자원의 운송 비용이 급증하고 물류 비용이 폭등하게 됩니다. 이는 최종적으로 인플레이션 압력으로 작용하여 전 세계적인 물가 상승을 유발할 수 있습니다. 90퍼센트의 상품이 해상에 의존하기 때문에, 이러한 병목 지점의 불안정성은 각국 경제의 안정성에 심각한 위협이 됩니다. 따라서 해상 통로의 안정성은 단순한 무역 문제를 넘어 국가 간의 경제 안보 문제로 직결됩니다.

본문 2: 역사적 맥락과 통제권의 의미

이러한 해상 통제권의 중요성은 단순히 현재의 군사적 충돌에 국한되지 않고, 역사적 맥락에서 이해되어야 합니다. 기사는 오스만 제국이 다르다넬스와 보스포루스 해협을 통제하며 지리적 통제력이 어떻게 제국의 권력에 영향을 미쳤는지 언급합니다. 이는 지리적 위치가 어떻게 국제적 협상과 권력 관계를 형성하는지를 보여줍니다. 현대의 해상 병목 지점 통제는 과거 제국들이 구축했던 지정학적 이점을 현대적인 경제적 이익으로 전환하는 메커니즘과 유사합니다. 즉, 특정 지점을 통제하는 것은 단순한 군사적 우위를 넘어, 국제 무역 흐름을 좌우하고 금융적 이익을 확보하는 핵심 수단이 됩니다.

본문 3: 장기적 전망과 전략적 대응

장기적으로 볼 때, 해상 통로의 불안정성은 에너지 안보와 무역 정책의 근본적인 재편을 요구합니다. 국제 사회는 이러한 병목 지점의 안정성을 확보하기 위해 다자간 협력 체제를 강화하거나, 대안적인 운송 경로를 개발하는 전략을 모색해야 합니다. 특정 국가들의 행동이 글로벌 해상 질서를 재편할 가능성이 높으므로, 투자자들은 에너지 및 해운 산업에 대한 지정학적 위험 프리미엄을 지속적으로 평가해야 합니다. 이러한 위험에 대비하기 위해서는 공급망 다변화와 전략적 자원의 확보가 필수적입니다.

결론

결론적으로, 해상 병목 지점의 통제는 현재의 지정학적 갈등과 직결되어 있으며, 이는 글로벌 경제 시스템의 안정성에 중대한 위협이 됩니다. 과거의 역사적 통제권 논리가 현대의 경제적 이익으로 재현되고 있다는 점이 핵심입니다. 향후 글로벌 해상 질서의 변화에 따라 에너지 및 해운 부문의 투자 환경이 크게 달라질 가능성이 높으므로, 지정학적 위험을 반영한 신중한 분석이 요구됩니다.

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원문 링크: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMigAFBVV95cUxQR3ZoN0o5Qzc3c1BNTUFBWlBnV3BzSjZ2V0N0X29seHcwQi1pcU1pSmFqdmhMbDlZMlJpYjdFMldqblQ3Tmh0T2tGX29qd3J1dmFhTE9kTWt0cWVqQklKRXlubVg4QU1VTXZQWUVsMjlmMTJyYkdxWWFycU83OFF2Sg?oc=5

The Straits Are Not OK - Foreign Policy

After Hormuz, global waterways will return to being sites of bloody contention.

At time of writing, U.S. President Donald Trump’s haphazard attacks on Iran have killed 18 U.S. service members, an unknown number of Iranian civilians and military personnel, and cost tens of billions of dollars. Most importantly for everyone else on Earth, it has closed the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

Approximately 90 percent of traded goods are shipped by sea. Disruptions caused by a war over vitally important naval choke points are not new, nor are their calamitous economic effects. Trump’s war has catalyzed a reversion to a period before Great Britain and the United States enforced the neutrality of major global waterways in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a deliberately manufactured situation that modern Americans inherited without remembering or understanding that it was artificial, and like everything artificial, needed to be maintained.

Trump’s grotesque actions do not represent the abdication of empire, as some Trump supporters from the far left and right hope , but its degeneration. Unless this failure is reversed, the world’s waterways will again become sites of brutal contention, as they have been historically.

Consider two examples: the Dardanelles, between the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea; and the Oresund Sound into and out of the Baltic. One exemplifies the way control over geography can make even a weak power vital to international decision-making. The other provides an example of the financial rewards of control of a shipping choke point—which becomes unsettling when applied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its power over Hormuz.

From 1453 and the final conquest of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the Ottoman Empire controlled the entire Turkish Straits, the passage from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea including the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. Since the Baltic exit to the open ocean was dominated by Denmark, Russia had for centuries bent toward an exit to the Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits.

As the Ottoman Empire crumbled, control of this important waterway was a recurrent aim of warfare in the eastern Mediterranean: between Russia and everyone else. After the Napoleonic wars, control over the Turkish Straits swung back and forth, eventually culminating in the Crimean War, during which a European alliance propped up the Ottomans to deny Russia control of the Bosphorus.

The Oresund connects the Baltic to the North Sea, which from the late Middle Ages onward was a vital nexus of shipping for a broad group of Northern European communities from Muscovy to England. (This contact is how Shakespeare knew enough about Russians for characters to disguise themselves as Muscovites in Love’s Labour’s Lost , for instance.) The Baltic trade was in vital but unsexy commodities like timber and wood products, hemp and flax, iron and copper, grain, beer, salt, and fish, as well as more visible luxury products like furs and amber—and after the adoption of gunpowder in Europe, firearms. From 1429, the sound was controlled by the Kalmar Union and then Denmark, and so were the lucrative sound tolls, where ships paid 1 percent to 2 percent of the cargo’s value for passage. (The closeness of this date to the fall of Constantinople is not a coincidence: Throughout Eurasia, the early modern period was characterized by the development of state power, including the ability to make war and extract revenue.)

This money went not to the embryonic Danish government—at this time, the Rigsrad, or council—but to the king of Denmark as a personal asset. In 1625, control of this independent revenue, amounting to one-eighth of Danish state income, allowed Christian IV to intervene in the Thirty Years’ War without consulting his own council, a disastrous decision for Denmark.

That raises an uncomfortable parallel in Iran: Is this money going to the Iranian government as such, or directly to the IRGC, a parallel armed force whose purpose is to maintain the theocracy? This purpose has enabled a substantial expansion of its remit: For instance, it is the IRGC, and not the regular Iranian armed forces, that controls the ballistic missiles. It is also a vast economic cartel.

Even before 2026 , the IRGC was already becoming stronger at the expense of other entities within the Iranian power structure, such as the clerisy. During the U.S. attacks this year, it has rapidly consolidated power . Independent revenue would reinforce revenue from its economic operations within Iranian society and give it more funding to finance war as well as support proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Shiite militias in Iraq, without input from other Iranian decision-makers. This would bring Iran closer to what I believe is one probable decay state for the Islamic Revolution: instead of a cleric-dominated Islamic republic, an IRGC-led junta.

The Turkish Straits, the Oresund, and other waterways were forced open to shipping and commerce during the 19th and early 20th centuries by the British Empire and the United States. In 1841, the London Straits Convention barred all warships from the Bosphorus, benefiting British naval power at Russia’s expense. Although dissatisfaction with the sound tolls had been brewing in Denmark itself throughout the early 19th century, the United States forced the issue when it refused to pay tolls in 1856; in response, Denmark convened a summit to establish the sound’s neutrality. The modern United States has inherited this imperial structure, which remains beneath the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which protects “innocent passage” within narrow waterways and coasts.

Until this year, the United States securing international trade is how the world has functioned. Trump has thrown this away for zero gain—not even for pacifism’s sake. (In 2026 so far, he has bombed Iran, Somalia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela.)

A world order enforced by the United States was morally unpalatable for many people on the American left. But when isolationists imagined a world without U.S. hegemony, they envisioned a world order characterized by mutual restraint without considering who might enforce this situation. As we are now seeing, the alternative to some kind of enforcement of a consistent world order is not an acephalic, mutually respectful world, but recurrent, destructive wars.

Within this more bellicose world, every single power bordering an important shipping channel is likely to remember it has a potential throat hold on the world economy, and eventually they will act accordingly. The Iranian-allied Houthis in Yemen are already attempting to contest the Bab el-Mandeb passage from the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea. If I were one of Russia’s enemies, I would be seriously contemplating the old significance of the Oresund and the Turkish Straits. If Finland and Estonia block the Gulf of Finland, Russia could not export oil through this routeor resupply Kaliningrad.

In the Iran conflict in 2026, we are confronted with the same conclusion that T.R. Fehrenbach, infantry officer and author, reached regarding the Korean War: “Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did … [in] the mud.” What decides history is the geography of earth and water, and the human beings on it.

This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here .

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage . Read more here .

Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers During the Era of the Thirty Years War , forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

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