Power Has Moved to Chokepoints. That Is Where the Next Conflicts Will Be Fought
by Jaffa Levy
·
Power has moved to chokepoints.
Not slogans. Not speeches. Not even territory alone. In 2025, leverage increasingly flows through a small number of bottlenecks that others cannot easily bypass: energy routes, critical minerals, chip supply chains, payment rails, cloud infrastructure, undersea cables, and custody and jurisdiction. This is where the next conflicts will be fought, because this is where outcomes can still be forced.
We talk about geopolitics as if it were a contest of ideas. It is not. It is a contest of systems. And systems do not yield to persuasion. They yield when you control a valve they cannot route around.
This is why the world feels harsher. The age of moral theatre is giving way to an age of plumbing. States are not arguing about what should happen. They are positioning themselves to decide what can happen.
What is a chokepoint, in plain English?
A chokepoint is a bottleneck that is expensive, slow, or risky to bypass. If one actor can restrict access, delay flow, or raise the cost of passage, they can shape behaviour without firing a shot. Chokepoints are where interdependence becomes coercion.
Energy chokepoints: the market is global, the constraints are physical
Europe learnt the lesson the hard way: energy security is not a moral posture. It is infrastructure. Pipelines, LNG terminals, shipping lanes, storage, and the ability to pay for supply in tight markets.
The International Energy Agency has been explicit that tighter market fundamentals and reduced piped gas supply to Europe contributed to higher prices and volatility in 2025, with European storage needs tightening markets further. That is not ideology. That is physics and logistics.
And the “LNG solution” carries its own chokepoints. LNG depends on specialised engineering, shipbuilding, liquefaction and maintenance, and it sits inside Western controlled finance and compliance networks. When you hear politicians say “we will diversify”, they are often describing a shift from one dependency to another.
Why energy chokepoints are so powerful
Energy is the input that makes everything else possible. If you can raise a rival’s energy price, you can shrink their industrial margins, reduce fiscal room, and force political tradeoffs. That is why energy security is no longer a “sector”. It is a strategic foundation.
Minerals and magnets: China’s leverage is upstream and hard to replicate
In 2025, one of the clearest chokepoints has been the rare earths complex: not just mining, but processing, equipment, and the permanent magnet supply chain that feeds modern industry.
China expanded export controls on rare earth elements and processing equipment, adding licensing requirements and extending compliance expectations, including for foreign firms using Chinese materials and equipment. This is the logic of upstream control. If you cannot process, you cannot manufacture at scale. And if you cannot manufacture, you do not have strategic autonomy.
Then, as bargaining shifted, Reuters reported China issuing a first batch of streamlined export licences intended to accelerate shipments to certain customers. That is what chokepoint power looks like in practice: restrict, create pain, then selectively relax. The message is not “we ban”. The message is “we decide”.
Why this is different from a normal trade dispute
When leverage sits in upstream processing, alternatives take years to build. You cannot conjure a magnet supply chain in a quarter. That is why control over licensing regimes can shape decisions far beyond the specific commodity.
Chips as a policy lever: the U.S. can still squeeze, but the squeeze has costs
Semiconductors remain the most famous chokepoint because advanced chips sit at the centre of AI, military systems, and industrial competitiveness. The United States has used export controls as a strategic instrument, tightening and loosening measures and licensing regimes with clear geopolitical intent.
But chokepoint power cuts both ways. Reuters reported today that senior U.S. lawmakers are pressing the Commerce Department for transparency over any licensing approvals related to Nvidia’s H200 sales to China after a policy shift. This is the U.S. discovering the domestic limit of its own lever: if restrictions impose economic or political costs at home, they become unstable. A lever you cannot hold is not a lever.
Why “controls” are not a one way weapon
Export controls can slow a rival, but they also shift incentives: substitution, domestic buildout, and new supply chains. If the controlling state cannot sustain the policy domestically, the lever turns into a bargaining chip rather than a structural constraint.
Shipping lanes: the world still runs through a few narrow corridors
The Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb are not just lines on a map. They are a global cost function. When the corridor becomes risky, ships route around Africa. Transit times rise. Insurance rises. Fuel rises. Inventory costs rise. The price of distance returns.
Reuters reported Maersk completing a Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb passage for the first time in nearly two years, a cautious test rather than a full return. That is a snapshot of chokepoint logic: even when attacks drop, insurers and carriers do not instantly price the risk back to normal. The corridor becomes a geopolitical premium.
And even if the Red Sea normalises, chokepoints do not disappear. They migrate. The global logistics system is increasingly stressed by climate, conflict, and capacity limits. That is why maritime chokepoints have become strategic objects again rather than background geography.
Why chokepoints raise inflation without “supply shocks”
Rerouting and risk premiums act like a hidden tax on trade. It is not a shortage of goods. It is a rise in the cost of moving goods. That cost bleeds into everything from food to industrial inputs.
Undersea cables and cloud: the internet has geography, and it is vulnerable
The public still imagines the internet as weightless. It is not. It runs through cables, landing stations, and a surprisingly small number of physical corridors.
In September 2025, undersea cable faults in the Red Sea degraded connectivity and created latency issues for cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, affecting parts of the Middle East and Asia. Analysts have noted that such incidents expose the fragility of global connectivity precisely where modern commerce depends on it most: finance, logistics, coordination, and state operations.
The UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy published a 2025 report focused on subsea telecommunications cable security, preparedness, and crisis response. The point is no longer hypothetical. Cables are infrastructure. Infrastructure is leverage. Leverage attracts pressure.
Why cable cuts matter more than “internet outage” headlines
Cloud services are now operational infrastructure for banks, hospitals, transport systems, and government. When connectivity degrades, systems do not just slow. They lose resilience. That is why cable corridors and landing stations are becoming strategic assets.
Finance and custody: Euroclear shows how legal plumbing becomes strategic risk
If energy is the input of industry, custody is the input of finance. Whoever controls custody and settlement infrastructure controls what can move and when, and under what legal conditions.
Euroclear sits at the centre of one of the most politically charged custody disputes in Europe: immobilised Russian assets. In December 2025, Reuters reported Fitch placing Euroclear Bank on “rating watch negative” over legal and liquidity risks linked to EU plans to use cash flows from frozen Russian central bank assets for a Ukraine loan structure. That is a technical credit story. It is also a sovereignty story: the credibility of European custody as neutral infrastructure is now in play.
Serious analysts have warned that the legal and balance sheet consequences of weaponising custody can migrate into systemic stress, particularly where a single jurisdiction bears concentrated exposure. When custody becomes policy, confidence becomes conditional. That is how chokepoints create second order damage.
Why financial chokepoints are dangerous to overuse
They work because they rely on trust. If custody and settlement are perceived as politically contingent, clients hedge, diversify, and build alternatives. The lever still functions, but its long term credibility erodes. That is power spent, not power invested.
The model: values are not obsolete, but leverage lives elsewhere
This is the core shift. The West still speaks the language of values because it is how Western systems justify themselves. But in practice, outcomes are increasingly shaped by chokepoints controlled by whoever can execute: build, maintain, secure, and ration access.
China’s signalling of industrial sovereignty and cadence matters because it suggests the ability to build and hold choke assets. The United States remains powerful because it still commands key levers, particularly in advanced technology and finance. Europe is powerful when it acts as a coherent regulatory and custodial bloc, and fragile when execution failures force it to substitute law for capacity.
The next conflicts will therefore look less like ideological crusades and more like disputes over access, licensing, routing, and settlement. A world of valves, not sermons.
That is why the future will not be decided by who tells the best story. It will be decided by who controls the bottlenecks the rest of the world still needs in order to function.
This article is part of a four-part series on power, execution, and sovereignty
Power Has Moved to Chokepoints. That Is Where the Next Conflicts Will Be Fought.
Energy, finance, chips, shipping, platforms, and custody now determine who can force outcomes.
