Maritime, Chokepoints, Space, and Gray-Zone Conflict

LESSON METADATA

SECTION 0 — Why This Lesson Exists

The central puzzle of this lesson is how states and non-state actors contest control of the sea and of space without crossing the threshold into declared armed conflict, and why the geography of maritime chokepoints makes that contest both possible and dangerous. Maritime power has historically been the decisive instrument of global order: Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 argument that sea control determines national greatness remains the baseline against which contemporary strategies are measured, and Julian Corbett’s 1911 refinement—that command of the sea is a means to an end rather than an end in itself—still structures naval doctrine. Yet the contemporary maritime environment is no longer one in which a single navy can guarantee command of the sea. It is characterized instead by layered denial: anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems that raise the cost of entry for superior fleets, gray-zone coercion that exploits legal and political ambiguity about what counts as an act of war, and the militarization of space-based infrastructure on which maritime operations increasingly depend. The student who masters this lesson will be able to explain why a superpower’s carrier strike group can be held at risk by a weaker state’s missile and mine arsenal, why a coast guard vessel can accomplish what a warship cannot, and why the destruction of a single satellite can disable a fleet’s ability to find, fix, and target.

This lesson sits at the intersection of three preceding modules and synthesizes their logics in a domain where physical geography and legal ambiguity interact. Lesson 20 established the logic of coercion: how actors use threats to compel or deter without necessarily fighting, and how the credibility of threats depends on capability and resolve. Lesson 22 examined conventional warfare and the operational art of massed force, including the problem of escalation dominance. Lesson 24 extended the analysis to cyber, showing how attacks below the threshold of armed conflict can achieve strategic effects while exploiting attribution problems. Lesson 25 brings these threads together in the maritime and space domains, where narrow straits, shallow littorals, and orbital mechanics create a distinctive form of conflict in which the physical environment is itself a weapon. The forward links to Lessons 44, 48, and 57 indicate that the concepts introduced here will be applied in greater depth to the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, to Indo-Pacific sea denial, and to space security. The student should therefore treat this lesson as a conceptual foundation that will be tested against specific cases later in the curriculum, not as a self-contained case study.

The African perspective is not an add-on to this analysis; it is the vantage point from which the lesson’s central puzzle becomes most visible and most consequential. For African coastal states, maritime security is not primarily about great-power competition but about sovereignty over exclusive economic zones, the protection of fisheries from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, the suppression of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, and the vulnerability of Red Sea shipping lanes to disruption. The 2023–2024 Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea demonstrated how a non-state actor operating from the African littoral could impose costs on global trade disproportionate to its military capacity, while African states bore the consequences in the form of disrupted port revenues, heightened insurance costs, and the militarization of their coastal waters by external powers. African scholarship—ranging from Grovogui’s critique of international legal hierarchies and the racialized foundations of sovereignty, to Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics and the governance of death, to Bayart’s work on the criminalization of the state and the extraversion of African politics—suggests that maritime insecurity in Africa is inseparable from the political economy of coastal governance and the externalization of security by foreign powers. The African vantage reveals what the great-power frame occludes: that chokepoints are not merely strategic assets to be controlled but lived spaces whose populations experience the consequences of distant competition, and that the legal categories of the law of the sea often encode rather than resolve power asymmetries.

The lesson’s five key ideas build a cumulative argument about how maritime and space domains are contested in the twenty-first century. First, the sea power traditions of Mahan and Corbett establish the theoretical baseline: command of the sea as a precondition for global power, and the distinction between command and control that shapes how navies are employed. Second, chokepoint geography—Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, Suez, Panama—translates that theory into concrete leverage, showing how narrow passages convert maritime traffic into strategic vulnerability and how transit volumes create asymmetric dependence. Third, A2/AD strategies by China, Iran, and Russia demonstrate how weaker actors contest US maritime primacy not by matching American fleet size but by raising the cost of access through missiles, mines, submarines, and integrated air defense. Fourth, gray-zone coercion—coast guard vessels, maritime militia, cyber operations, economic pressure—shows how states achieve objectives below the threshold of armed conflict by exploiting ambiguity about attribution and about what counts as a use of force. Fifth, space as a military domain reveals the orbital infrastructure on which all maritime operations now depend—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and communications—and the vulnerability of that infrastructure to anti-satellite weapons. Together, these ideas explain why maritime conflict today is less about fleet engagements than about denial, ambiguity, and infrastructure.

After mastering this lesson, the student will be able to reconstruct the Mahanian and Corbettian logics and identify their scope conditions; map the strategic significance of the five major chokepoints and explain how transit volumes create leverage; analyze A2/AD as a mechanism of cost-imposition rather than fleet parity; distinguish gray-zone coercion from armed conflict using legal and operational criteria; and evaluate the role of space-based ISR, PNT, and communications in maritime operations. The student will also be able to reconstruct five perspectives—African, Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN—on any maritime or space security issue, identifying what each contributes and what it occludes, and to adjudicate between competing explanations on the basis of evidence. The assessment tasks require the student to apply these skills to the Iranian asymmetric strategy in the Strait of Hormuz and to Chinese activity in the South China Sea, and to interpret data on oil transit volumes, satellite launches, and ASAT tests. The Bloom ceiling of evaluate and create means that the student is expected not merely to describe but to judge and to design analytical frameworks.

A methodological caution runs through the lesson and should frame the student’s approach. Maritime and space security are domains in which classification, commercial sensitivity, and strategic ambiguity make evidence scarce and contested. Quantitative claims—transit volumes, satellite counts, incident tallies—should be treated as indicative rather than definitive, and the student should distinguish carefully between description (what happened), explanation (why it happened), prediction (what will happen), and prescription (what should be done). The strongest analyses in this field are those that specify mechanisms, state scope conditions, and acknowledge counterarguments rather than asserting conclusions. The lesson’s structure—key ideas with causal claims, mechanisms, scope conditions, observable implications, and perspective notes—is designed to train that habit of mind, and the independent memo requires the student to demonstrate it explicitly.

SECTION 1 — Pre-Class Priming

1.1 Retrieval warm-up

1. From Lesson 20: Define coercion and distinguish compellence from deterrence. What two conditions must hold for a coercive threat to be credible?
2. From Lesson 20: What is “gray-zone” conflict as introduced in the coercion module, and why does ambiguity about the threshold of armed conflict create strategic opportunity?
3. From Lesson 22: What is the “stability-instability paradox,” and how does it shape the relationship between nuclear deterrence and conventional conflict?
4. From Lesson 22: Explain “escalation dominance” and identify one historical case in which a state lost escalation dominance despite material superiority.
5. From Lesson 24: How does cyber coercion differ from kinetic coercion with respect to attribution, reversibility, and the threshold of armed conflict?
6. From Lesson 24: What is the “attribution problem,” and how does it constrain the range of responses available to a state that has suffered a cyber attack?

1.2 Orientation questions

1. Why might a state with a smaller navy be able to deny a larger navy access to a maritime region, and what does this imply about the relationship between fleet size and strategic effectiveness?
2. How do maritime chokepoints convert geography into coercive leverage, and which actors are most vulnerable to disruption at each of the five major chokepoints?
3. What distinguishes gray-zone coercion from armed conflict under international law, and why does that distinction matter for alliance commitments and rules of engagement?
4. Why is space considered a military domain, and what are the strategic consequences if satellite-based ISR, PNT, or communications infrastructure is disrupted or destroyed?

1.3 Vocabulary pre-teach

• Sea control / command of the sea: The ability to use the sea for one’s own purposes while denying its use to the adversary; the Mahanian baseline of maritime strategy, historically associated with fleet engagements and blockades.
• Sea denial: The ability to prevent an adversary from using the sea without necessarily being able to use it oneself; the strategy of weaker actors who cannot contest command but can raise the cost of access.
• A2/AD (anti-access/area-denial): A layered strategy combining long-range missiles, mines, submarines, and integrated air defense to prevent an adversary from entering or operating within a maritime theater.
• Chokepoint: A narrow maritime passage through which a large share of global shipping must transit, creating geographic concentration that can be exploited for coercion or denial.
• Gray-zone coercion: Actions that achieve strategic objectives below the threshold of armed conflict, exploiting ambiguity about attribution, legality, and the definition of a use of force.
• Maritime militia: Civilian or paramilitary vessels operating under state direction to assert maritime claims, harass foreign vessels, or conduct surveillance while maintaining plausible deniability.
• UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea): The 1982 treaty framework governing maritime zones, navigation rights, and resource jurisdiction; the legal baseline for most maritime disputes.
• EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone): The maritime zone extending up to 200 nautical miles from a state’s coast, in which the state has sovereign rights over resources but not full sovereignty.
• ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance): The collection and processing of information about adversary forces and the environment, increasingly dependent on space-based assets.
• PNT (Positioning, Navigation, Timing): Satellite-based services, such as GPS, that enable precise navigation and synchronization of military operations; a critical and vulnerable infrastructure.
• ASAT (Anti-Satellite weapon): A weapon designed to destroy or disable satellites, creating debris and threatening the orbital infrastructure on which modern militaries depend.
• Freedom of navigation (FONOP): Operations conducted to challenge excessive maritime claims and assert rights under UNCLOS, typically by naval vessels transiting disputed waters.

SECTION 2 — LESSON CORE

2.1 Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

1. Analyze the causal mechanisms through which sea power translates into strategic advantage, distinguishing Mahan’s command-of-the-sea logic—concentration of battle fleets, decisive engagement, and the opening or closing of oceanic systems—from Corbett’s control-of-communications logic—selective, limited, and often indirect control of sea lanes for specific operational purposes—and specifying the scope conditions, including industrial capacity, geographic position, alliance structure, and technological environment, under which each applies rather than the other.

2. Evaluate the strategic significance of maritime chokepoints by linking geographic constriction to transit volumes, vulnerability, and the political economy of energy security, using EIA World Oil Transit Chokepoints data as an evidentiary baseline and identifying which chokepoints are substitutable through alternative routes and which are not.

3. Compare A2/AD strategies across Chinese, Iranian, and Russian cases, identifying the common mechanism—denial of access and freedom of action to a superior maritime power—and the divergent scope conditions: Chinese near-seas defense and blue-water transition, Iranian regional deterrence in the Gulf, and Russian Arctic and Black Sea bastion defense.

4. Synthesize gray-zone coercion as a distinct category of conflict that exploits thresholds of attribution, escalation, and legal status, drawing on coast guard, maritime militia, cyber, and economic instruments, and distinguishing it from both conventional warfare and peacetime competition.

5. Apply the four levels of analysis—individual, state, systemic, and transnational—to a maritime case, reconstructing African, Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN perspectives, and adjudicating among them on the basis of evidence rather than assertion. Each objective is assessed through the worked example, problem pair, and independent memo that follow.

2.2 KEY IDEA 1 — Sea power traditions: Mahan, Corbett, and the strategic logic of maritime dominance

Bolded Causal Claim: Maritime dominance is not a natural endowment of coastline or fleet size but a produced strategic condition: states that convert geographic position, industrial capacity, and institutional coherence into sustained control of sea communications gain disproportionate influence over trade, coercion, and alliance politics, while states that neglect any of these inputs see their maritime advantage decay even when their navies appear strong on paper.

Mechanism: The mechanism runs through three linked stages, and it is worth tracing each because the common error is to stop at the first. First, geographic position and physical conformation create differential access to sea lanes and chokepoints. Mahan’s six determinants—geographic position, physical conformation, extent of territory, number of population, character of the people, and character of the government—are best read as a checklist of inputs rather than a ranking, and the last two, which concern national character and governmental capacity, are the ones most often neglected by analysts who prefer hardware metrics. Second, industrial and fiscal capacity converts these inputs into hulls, bases, and logistics; without this, geography is inert, which is why several states with excellent maritime geography have failed to become sea powers. Third, and most decisive, institutional coherence—naval doctrine, officer education, civil-military relations, and alliance management—determines whether the fleet is used to command the sea or merely to display it. Mahan’s command-of-the-sea logic, developed in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) in the context of late-nineteenth-century US naval expansion and the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European powers, treats the decisive battle fleet as the instrument: concentrate superior force, destroy the enemy fleet, and thereby open the oceans to one’s own commerce and close them to the adversary’s. Corbett’s control-of-communications logic, developed in Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911) in the context of British imperial defense and coalition warfare, treats the sea as a medium to be used rather than a territory to be owned; command is often partial, temporary, and exercised for specific operational purposes such as protecting an expeditionary force or interdicting a particular trade route. The two are not rivals so much as answers to different questions: Mahan asks how to win the war at sea, while Corbett asks how to use the sea to win the war. The mechanism of dominance, on either account, is the denial of use to the adversary combined with the preservation of use for oneself, sustained over time by logistics, bases, and the legal and commercial infrastructure that makes sea-borne trade predictable. A further element, often omitted, is the maritime-industrial complex itself: shipyards, ports, merchant marine, and the financial systems that underwrite them. Sea power is not a navy; it is a maritime system in which the navy is one component.

Scope Conditions: Mahan’s logic applies most cleanly where (a) the state possesses or can seize a decisive material advantage in capital ships, (b) the theater permits concentration and a single climactic engagement, and (c) the political objective requires opening or closing entire oceanic systems. It weakens where fleets are dispersed by alliance obligations, where technology—submarines, mines, aircraft, and now precision missiles—fragments the battle space, or where the adversary adopts a sea-denial rather than sea-control posture. Corbett’s logic applies more broadly, especially for medium powers, coalition warfare, and expeditionary operations, but risks underestimating the political value of visible dominance and the deterrent effect of a fleet-in-being. Both traditions assume a state-centric, Westphalian actor with a professional navy and a coherent national strategy; neither was designed for gray-zone competition in which coast guards and maritime militias carry the operational load, or for a world in which commercial shipping is globally distributed and legally regulated by international convention. Till’s contemporary restatement in Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century (2018) emphasizes that seapower today is a system of systems—naval, commercial, informational, and legal—and that the Mahan-Corbett debate is best treated as a spectrum rather than a binary. The scope conditions have also shifted with nuclear weapons: a decisive fleet engagement between nuclear-armed states is now implausible, which pushes even great powers toward Corbettian limited control and deterrence rather than Mahanian annihilation.

Observable Implications: If Mahan’s logic dominates in a given state’s strategy, one expects fleet concentration, carrier strike group deployments, investments in capital ships, and a preference for decisive engagement; if Corbett’s, one expects convoy systems, distributed maritime operations, emphasis on logistics and sustainment, and the use of the sea as a highway rather than a battlefield. Empirically, the US Navy’s post-Cold War posture has oscillated between both: the 1990s and 2000s emphasized carrier-centric power projection that was Mahanian in form, while recent distributed maritime operations concepts and expeditionary advanced base operations reflect Corbettian adaptation to A2/AD environments. A further implication: states that score high on Mahan’s determinants but low on institutional coherence—large populations, extensive coastlines, weak governance—should exhibit “hollow” maritime power, impressive on paper and fragile in use. This is observable in several post-colonial navies whose procurement outpaced training, maintenance, and doctrine. Conversely, states with modest determinants but high coherence, such as the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century or Japan in the early twentieth, can punch above their geographic weight. The observable test is not fleet size but sustained operational availability and the ability to project force at distance without external support.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary). African maritime thought does not begin with Mahan or Corbett; it begins with the experience of the sea as a vector of extraction and domination. From the transatlantic slave trade through colonial partition and the post-independence scramble for offshore resources, the ocean was not a commons to be commanded but a corridor of dispossession. Post-independence African states inherited coastlines without the industrial or institutional capacity to police them, and the Mahanian ideal of a battle fleet was neither affordable nor strategically apt. African scholarship reframes sea power accordingly. Rodney’s analysis of how colonialism underdeveloped African maritime capacity, and Nkrumah’s insistence that political independence without economic control of sea-borne trade is incomplete, shift the question from commanding the sea to controlling the terms of one’s own maritime participation. Bayart’s work on the politics of extraversion and Mamdani’s analysis of the colonial state’s institutional legacies further illuminate why African maritime governance often operates through external dependency—foreign training, donated vessels, and intelligence sharing—rather than autonomous capacity. The contemporary African maritime agenda, visible in the African Union’s 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy and in regional frameworks such as ECOWAS, the Indian Ocean Commission, and the Gulf of Guinea Commission, centers on blue economy development, illegal fishing, piracy, maritime domain awareness, and the protection of offshore energy infrastructure rather than fleet battles. The African vantage point thus reveals what Mahan and Corbett occlude: that for most of the world’s states, the problem is not commanding the sea but surviving its asymmetries. African navies and coast guards operate under severe resource constraints; their strategic logic is closer to Corbett’s limited control than to Mahan’s decisive engagement, but even Corbett presumes a state with choices, whereas many African maritime agencies are structurally dependent on external partners. This dependency is not merely a capacity gap; it is a sovereignty question, because the terms of external assistance shape whose priorities—counter-piracy, counter-narcotics, or great-power competition—define African maritime security.

Chinese. Chinese maritime strategy has moved from a Mahanian phase of fleet building and carrier acquisition toward a hybrid that uses Mahanian symbols—carriers, blue-water deployments, and a growing surface fleet—to serve Corbettian and A2/AD purposes: near-seas control, denial of US access, and protection of sea lines of communication. Holmes and Yoshihara’s analysis in Red Star over the Pacific (2017) emphasizes that Beijing’s strategic culture blends Western-derived concepts with indigenous traditions, and that the “near seas”—the Yellow, East, and South China Seas—remain the priority even as blue-water ambitions grow. The Chinese perspective contributes the insight that maritime dominance is historically contingent and that a rising power can contest an incumbent’s command without replicating its fleet structure, substituting missiles, submarines, and sensors for capital ships. It also reveals the political dimension of sea power: the construction of artificial islands and the use of coast guard and militia are not merely tactical choices but claims about sovereignty and order.

Russian. Russian maritime strategy, shaped by geographic enclosure, ice, and the legacy of continental defense, has historically emphasized bastion defense and sea denial rather than global command. The Arctic and Black Sea are treated as strategic sanctuaries; the Northern Fleet’s ballistic-missile submarines require protected bastions from which to guarantee second-strike capability. Russian thought thus inverts Mahan: the goal is not to command the ocean but to deny an adversary the ability to threaten the homeland from it. This perspective highlights the defensive and deterrent dimensions that Mahanian triumphalism understates, and it reminds us that sea power can be exercised negatively—through denial—as well as positively—through control.

Western. The Western, and especially Anglo-American, perspective treats freedom of navigation and open sea lanes as foundational to global order and economic prosperity. Mahan’s influence on US naval thought is direct and enduring; Corbett’s is more visible in British and Commonwealth doctrine. The Western contribution is the institutionalization of maritime dominance through alliances, forward bases, and carrier strike groups, and the legal framing of the high seas as a global commons. Its occlusion is the tendency to universalize a historically specific, post-1945, US-led maritime order as natural or as the legal baseline, and to treat challenges to that order as threats to order itself rather than as competing claims about legitimate maritime governance.

UN. The UN perspective is legal-institutional: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) codifies maritime zones, freedom of navigation, and the common heritage of mankind. It provides the framework within which all other perspectives operate, but it lacks enforcement capacity and depends on state consent. The UN contribution is the attempt to convert maritime power into legal entitlement and to provide dispute-resolution mechanisms; its occlusion is the gap between law and power, visible when major states decline to ratify or comply, and the fact that legal frameworks can be invoked selectively by powerful states while weaker states lack the capacity to enforce their entitlements.

SECTION 2.3 KEY IDEA 2 — Chokepoints and maritime geography: Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, Suez, Panama

Bolded Causal Claim: Maritime chokepoints are not merely narrow waterways; they are structural bottlenecks in the global economy, and their geography converts localized disruption into systemic leverage over energy prices, supply chains, and diplomatic bargaining. A state or non-state actor that can credibly threaten closure, harassment, or selective inspection at a chokepoint can impose costs far exceeding its conventional naval power, because global shipping and energy markets are organized around the assumption of continuous, low-friction transit through a small number of passages.

Mechanism: Chokepoints concentrate flows that are otherwise dispersed across oceans. Shipping routes are not random; they follow great-circle paths, canal shortcuts, and established lanes that minimize fuel, time, and crew costs. When a passage narrows, traffic density rises, maneuvering room shrinks, and the cost of delay compounds. The mechanism operates through several channels. First, volume concentration: a large share of global petroleum, liquefied natural gas, and container traffic moves through a handful of straits and canals, so disruption at one node affects many supply chains simultaneously. Second, inelastic short-run alternatives: rerouting around Africa or South America can add days or weeks, increase fuel consumption, disrupt port schedules, and strain crew rotations; pipelines and overland routes have limited spare capacity and cannot absorb sudden maritime shortfalls. Third, market amplification: energy and freight markets price expected continuity, so threats, inspections, or partial disruptions can raise spot prices, war-risk premiums, and insurance costs even without a formal closure. Fourth, operational friction: mines, small-boat attacks, drone strikes, or regulatory harassment can force convoys, reduce throughput, and create queues that propagate through just-in-time logistics. Fifth, legal and infrastructural leverage: straits used for international navigation are governed by transit-passage rules, while canals are sovereign infrastructure subject to fees, maintenance, and political control. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s World Oil Transit Chokepoints (2024) treats these passages as critical nodes in global petroleum logistics; their significance lies not only in volume but in the absence of ready substitutes at acceptable cost. Hormuz connects Gulf producers to the Arabian Sea and concentrates oil and gas exports behind a narrow maritime corridor. Bab el-Mandeb links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and therefore to the Suez route between Asia and Europe. Malacca connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and is central to East Asian energy and container flows. Suez is an artificial shortcut whose blockage or closure immediately lengthens Europe-Asia trade. Panama performs a similar function between the Atlantic and Pacific. Each chokepoint has distinct physical, legal, and political characteristics, but all share the same structural property: they make global commerce dependent on a small amount of geography.

Scope Conditions: Chokepoint leverage is strongest when traffic volume is high relative to physical capacity and scheduling tolerance; when alternatives are slow, expensive, or politically unavailable; when the commodity is energy or time-sensitive manufactures; when a disruptor can sustain low-cost harassment without triggering full-scale war; when naval protection is absent, stretched, or politically constrained; when the coastal state has legal or physical control over adjacent waters or canal infrastructure; and when insurance and financial markets amplify perceived risk. It weakens when strategic petroleum reserves buffer supply shocks; when pipelines, alternative ports, or canal expansions diversify routes; when multinational naval escorts restore throughput; when demand shocks reduce traffic; when legal frameworks and diplomacy de-escalate; and when technological change reduces dependence on a single passage. Chokepoints can be bypassed over decades, but not during a crisis. Some are natural straits whose legal status is contested; others are artificial canals whose vulnerability includes accidents, climate stress, and infrastructure failure as well as coercion.

Observable Implications: If chokepoint geography is strategically salient, one should observe naval deployments and multinational task forces near straits; spikes in war-risk insurance premiums after incidents; rerouting, delays, and port congestion; commodity price volatility correlated with threats rather than only with closures; investment in alternative routes, pipelines, ports, and canal expansions; legal disputes over transit passage, exclusive economic zone rights, and coastal-state security zones; assertions of fee, inspection, or regulatory control by littoral states; and the treatment of piracy, drone attacks, or harassment as strategic rather than merely criminal events. Chokepoint incidents should also internationalize quickly, because global markets transmit local disruption into price and risk signals far from the passage itself.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary). For African states, chokepoints are not abstract nodes in a Western logistics map; they are spaces where African trade, food imports, fishing livelihoods, and port revenues are exposed to disruption. The Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, the Gulf of Guinea, and the approaches to the Cape all matter because African economies are deeply integrated into maritime trade but often lack the capacity to secure their own waters. African scholarship on maritime security frequently begins from this capacity gap: many coastal states do not have enough vessels, surveillance systems, or legal institutions to police exclusive economic zones, so external navies operate in African waters under counter-piracy or maritime-security mandates. That creates a sovereignty dilemma in which protection against piracy, illegal fishing, or trafficking may come at the cost of ceding operational control to outside powers. The African perspective also emphasizes that chokepoint disruption is not only a great-power issue. Red Sea disruptions raise costs for African importers and exporters; Gulf of Guinea piracy has historically imposed costs on regional trade and coastal communities. From an African vantage, the central question is not simply which power controls a strait, but whether maritime governance protects coastal communities, artisanal fishers, port workers, and national revenues. Broader African international-relations scholarship—Grovogui on the coloniality of international order, Mbembe on necropolitics and the production of African space, Bayart on the historical sociology of the state, and Mamdani on the bifurcated state—suggests that chokepoints are embedded in an unequal global economy in which African states are often price-takers in markets whose volatility is generated elsewhere. Thinkers and analysts such as Aning and Danso on African maritime security highlight the need for regional cooperation, maritime domain awareness, and legal-institutional development rather than blue-water fleet competition. The African perspective therefore stresses frameworks such as the Yaoundé Code of Conduct, coast-guard capacity, information sharing, and EEZ governance. Its contribution is to show that chokepoint politics is also a question of livelihoods and sovereignty; its occlusion in great-power debates is the reduction of African coastal security to piracy statistics or to basing opportunities for external powers.

Chinese. China’s “Malacca dilemma” exemplifies chokepoint anxiety: a large share of its energy imports and trade passes through straits it does not control. Chinese strategy therefore combines naval modernization, port and infrastructure investments along the Belt and Road, pipeline diversification, and near-seas defense. Chokepoints are seen as vulnerabilities to be mitigated and, potentially, as leverage in regional crises. This perspective emphasizes economic security and the right to development, and it often frames external naval presence in Asian straits as threatening. Its contribution is to show that chokepoint dependence can drive both military and infrastructure policy; its occlusion is the concern of smaller littoral states whose waters are traversed by great-power competition.

Russian. Russia’s maritime geography is shaped by ice, enclosed seas, and limited warm-water access. Chokepoints such as the Turkish Straits, Danish Straits, and Arctic passages matter for energy exports and naval mobility. Russian strategy uses energy exports as leverage and seeks to control or influence chokepoints and adjacent seas, including the Black Sea, Baltic, and Arctic. This perspective highlights how chokepoints can be weaponized through energy, sanctions, and naval presence; its occlusion is the cost imposed on importers and the legal norms of transit.

Western. Western maritime strategy treats chokepoints as nodes in a global commons requiring freedom of navigation. The United States and allies deploy carrier strike groups and multinational task forces to keep straits open, viewing closure as a threat to global commerce and alliance credibility. This perspective contributes operational capacity and legal advocacy for transit passage; its occlusion is the way “freedom of navigation” can be experienced by coastal states as external military presence, and the possibility that Western energy-security interests do not align with local development.

UN. The UN perspective is legal-institutional: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines transit passage through straits used for international navigation, exclusive economic zone rights, and the common heritage of the seabed. It provides the vocabulary for resolving chokepoint disputes and supports maritime-security resolutions. Its contribution is normative order; its occlusion is enforcement weakness and selective compliance, especially when major powers or canal authorities assert security exceptions.

SECTION 2.4 KEY IDEA 3 — A2/AD and sea denial: Chinese, Iranian, and Russian strategies to contest US maritime primacy

Bolded Causal Claim: Anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategies do not require a weaker maritime power to defeat the U.S. Navy in open-ocean battle; they require only that it raise the cost, risk, and uncertainty of U.S. entry and operations in a defined theater sufficiently to deter or delay intervention during a crisis.

Mechanism: A2/AD is a compound strategy. Anti-access seeks to prevent an adversary from entering a theater; area denial seeks to degrade its operations once inside. The mechanism is not sea control in the Mahanian sense but sea denial: the weaker power does not need to command the ocean globally, only to deny the stronger power the ability to use a specific maritime space for a limited time. It works through cost-exchange asymmetry and geographic advantage. Land-based systems are often cheaper and more survivable than ships; missiles can be dispersed, hidden, and fired in salvos; sensors create targeting chains; and the defender operates near homeland bases with interior lines. The main mechanisms include long-range precision strike against ships, bases, and logistics nodes; integrated air defense that denies air superiority; submarines and mines that threaten sea lines of communication and carrier groups; coastal radar, satellites, and drones that provide over-the-horizon targeting; electronic and cyber warfare that disrupts communications, navigation, and command; and ambiguous “gray-zone” layers such as coast guard, militia, and fishing vessels that create friction below the threshold of armed conflict. Geography matters: the first island chain, the Persian Gulf, the Black Sea, and the Arctic allow land-based fires to cover maritime approaches and compress the attacker’s maneuver space. Holmes and Yoshihara’s work on Chinese maritime strategy emphasizes that sea denial is a classic asymmetric response to superior sea control, while Till’s treatment of sea power distinguishes command of the sea from denial of its use. The strategic logic is therefore not to win a decisive fleet battle but to make intervention too costly, too slow, or too uncertain for the political objectives at stake.

Scope Conditions: A2/AD is most effective when the defender has secure land bases and interior lines; when the attacker depends on a small number of forward bases and long logistics chains; when missile and sensor networks are survivable, redundant, and well integrated; when the crisis is short and the political stakes are high; when the defender can tolerate escalation; and when geography constrains the attacker’s approach. It is less effective when the attacker can operate from range, disperse forces, use stealth or autonomy, or rely on allied access; when cyber or kinetic strikes can degrade command and control; when economic blockade or attrition can outlast the denial bubble; when the defender’s systems are vulnerable to preemption; or when a coalition imposes costs that exceed the defender’s capacity. A2/AD is also not a static fortress. It is a contest between detection and concealment, offense and defense, and its effectiveness depends on the survivability of the kill chain. There is an additional instability: if the defender fears its A2/AD systems will be destroyed in a first strike, it may face “use it or lose it” pressure, increasing crisis instability.

Observable Implications: If A2/AD is shaping maritime competition, one should observe development and testing of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and hypersonic weapons; militarization of islands, reefs, and coastal positions; submarine and mine-warfare exercises; electronic-warfare incidents and navigation interference; doctrinal adaptations by the United States and allies, such as distributed maritime operations, expeditionary advanced base operations, and long-range fires; allied base hardening and access agreements; changes in commercial routing and insurance pricing; and crisis simulations or war games showing delayed or denied intervention. One should also observe arms racing between denial systems and missile defense, as well as debates over whether A2/AD creates deterrence or merely shifts the locus of risk.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary). The A2/AD frame is largely a great-power concept, but African states encounter its logic in asymmetric and often non-military forms. African maritime insecurity is frequently characterized by “sea denial” exercised not by advanced missile networks but by pirates, insurgents, illegal fishers, traffickers, and weak governance. From an African perspective, the relevant question is who can deny use of coastal waters to whom: artisanal fishers may be denied access by industrial trawlers or security zones; coastal communities may be denied safety by piracy; states may be denied revenue by illicit trafficking. African scholarship on maritime security—Aning and Danso, among others—and broader critical international-relations work by Grovogui, Mbembe, Bayart, and Mamdani suggest that importing A2/AD vocabulary without attention to governance can misdiagnose African maritime problems as military gaps rather than political-economic ones. At the same time, African littorals are affected by great-power A2/AD dynamics: Red Sea and Gulf of Aden disruptions, foreign naval bases, and competition for port access can militarize African coasts. The African perspective reveals that sea denial is not only a strategy of rising powers against the United States; it is also a condition of weak maritime governance, where non-state actors deny states the ability to enforce law at sea. It also cautions that external powers’ A2/AD competition can externalize risk onto African shipping lanes and ports. Thus African maritime strategy prioritizes coast-guard capacity, information sharing, legal frameworks, and regional mechanisms over participation in high-end denial contests. Its contribution is to restore the human-security dimension; its occlusion in great-power debates is the tendency to treat maritime space as a battlefield between fleets rather than as a space of livelihoods, food security, and state capacity.

Chinese. China’s A2/AD strategy is framed as defensive and regional: to prevent U.S. intervention in a Taiwan or South China Sea crisis by making the costs prohibitive. It combines missiles, submarines, mines, air defenses, and island-based infrastructure. This perspective contributes the logic of cost-imposition and homeland defense; it occludes how regional neighbors experience these capabilities as offensive and how “defensive” denial can enable coercion short of war.

Russian. Russia uses A2/AD to protect strategic bastions and compensate for naval inferiority, especially in the Black Sea, Baltic, and Arctic. Coastal missiles, submarines, and air-defense systems create denial zones around Crimea, Kaliningrad, and the Northern Fleet. This perspective emphasizes geographic defense and escalation control; it occludes the destabilizing effects on NATO’s eastern flank and on commercial shipping in enclosed seas.

Western. Western strategy sees A2/AD as a challenge to freedom of navigation, alliance credibility, and the ability to defend partners. Responses include distributed operations, long-range fires, missile defense, and allied capacity building. This perspective contributes operational innovation and deterrence; it occludes how Western forward presence itself may be perceived as threatening and how high-end competition can crowd out cooperative maritime security.

UN. The UN perspective focuses on legal constraints: the law of armed conflict at sea, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and maritime-security resolutions. A2/AD raises questions about escalation, civilian shipping, and the distinction between military and civilian infrastructure. Its contribution is normative and humanitarian; its occlusion is limited enforcement and the tendency of major powers to treat legal frameworks as instruments rather than constraints.

2.5 KEY IDEA 4 — Gray-zone coercion: below the threshold of armed conflict (coast guard, militia, cyber, economic)

Bolded Causal Claim: Gray-zone coercion achieves strategic gains by operating in the ambiguous space between peace and war, exploiting the adversary’s reluctance to escalate, so that incremental faits accomplis accumulate without triggering collective defense or legal accountability.

Mechanism: The mechanism rests on three interacting elements that together convert ambiguity into territory, influence, or economic advantage. First, ambiguity of attribution and intent: actions are conducted by actors whose state affiliation is deniable or plausibly civilian—coast guard vessels, maritime militia, fishing fleets, cyber proxies, and state-owned enterprises—so that the victim cannot easily establish the legal predicate for a forceful response. The coercer deliberately blurs the line between state and non-state, military and civilian, public and private, which complicates both legal categorization and political decision-making. Second, threshold manipulation: each individual act is calibrated to remain below the level that would justify armed response under international law or alliance commitments, such as the armed-attack threshold that triggers Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty or collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The coercer studies the adversary’s red lines and operates just beneath them, forcing the target to either accept the incremental loss or risk being seen as the escalator. Third, cumulative fait accompli: repeated small gains—feature construction on disputed reefs, harassment of fishing vessels, economic coercion through trade restrictions or tourism bans, cyber intrusions that impose costs without kinetic exchange—shift the status quo incrementally. Each step is small enough to be tolerated; the aggregate is large enough to be decisive. Reversal becomes costlier than acceptance, and the new baseline is treated as the starting point for the next round. Supporting instruments include economic leverage (debt, market access, sanctions), information operations that shape domestic and international narratives, and cyber operations that degrade infrastructure without crossing into armed attack. The mechanism is not deception alone; it is the structural exploitation of the gap between legal categories (peace versus war) and operational reality, combined with the adversary’s own risk aversion and institutional constraints.

Scope Conditions: Gray-zone coercion is most effective when (a) the target’s alliance commitments require a clear armed attack to trigger collective defense, creating a threshold the coercer can approach but not cross; (b) the target’s domestic politics favor de-escalation and reward leaders who avoid war; (c) the coercer possesses escalation dominance in the local theater, meaning it can raise costs faster than the target can respond; (d) international institutions lack enforcement capacity, so legal protests do not translate into material consequences; and (e) the issue is salient to the coercer but not to third parties, limiting coalition formation. It fails when the target has pre-committed and credible red lines, when attribution becomes unambiguous and public, when the coercer overreaches and triggers a unified response, or when the target has high risk tolerance and is willing to absorb costs. It is also less effective against states with strong local capacity and against issues framed as existential by the target’s public. The scope conditions imply that gray-zone coercion is a strategy of the relatively strong against the relatively constrained, not a universal tool.

Observable Implications: Indicators include increased coast guard and maritime militia activity in disputed waters; construction or fortification of features; economic coercion episodes such as trade embargoes, tourism bans, or regulatory harassment; cyber incidents below the threshold of armed attack; and diplomatic protests without military response. Metrics include the number of maritime incidents, area of feature construction, changes in bilateral trade volumes, and the frequency of coast guard encounters. Predictions: gray-zone activity intensifies where A2/AD protects the coercer and where the target lacks local capacity; it diminishes where the target has established credible red lines and rapid attribution capabilities. A key diagnostic is the gap between the coercer’s public framing (routine law enforcement, rights protection) and the target’s framing (coercion, aggression), which itself becomes a site of contestation.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary). African states experience gray-zone coercion less as a strategic puzzle of great powers and more as a continuum of maritime insecurity that directly threatens livelihoods and sovereignty. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by distant-water fleets, piracy, and unauthorized resource extraction in exclusive economic zones constitute gray-zone activity that is often normalized by its perpetrators as commercial or enforcement conduct. The African perspective emphasizes that the “gray zone” is frequently a luxury of powers that can afford ambiguity; for coastal African states, the same activities constitute existential economic harm and erosion of sovereign rights. Responses include regional maritime security architectures such as the Yaoundé Code of Conduct and the ECOWAS integrated maritime strategy, alongside external partnerships with the European Union and the United States. This perspective contributes attention to non-state and criminal actors, to the economic dimension of maritime coercion, and to the reality that many African states lack the capacity to attribute or respond, making them structurally vulnerable. It occludes great-power strategic competition framing but reveals how gray-zone logic operates at lower levels of capability and how legal ambiguity can be exploited by commercial as well as state actors.

Chinese. China frames its maritime law-enforcement activities as legitimate rights protection within waters it claims, rejecting the “gray zone” label as a Western construct designed to delegitimize lawful conduct. The coast guard and maritime militia are presented as civilian instruments of sovereignty administration and public order, not as military assets. This perspective contributes a challenge to Western legal categorization and asserts that enforcement of claimed rights is not coercion. It occludes the coercive effect on neighboring states, the militarization of civilian agencies, and the cumulative fait accompli that results from sustained presence in disputed waters.

Russian. Russia employs gray-zone tactics in the Black Sea, the Arctic, and the Baltic, including the use of “little green men,” maritime militia, economic pressure, and information operations. It frames these as defensive responses to NATO expansion and as protection of Russian interests or populations. This perspective contributes a demonstration of hybrid methods and a critique of Western double standards. It occludes state responsibility, the erosion of trust, and the destabilizing effect of plausible deniability on crisis management.

Western. Western analysts, notably Mazarr (2015) and Hoffman (2007), define the gray zone as deliberate competition below armed conflict, emphasizing the need for integrated deterrence, resilience, attribution capabilities, and whole-of-government responses. This perspective contributes conceptual clarity, policy frameworks, and a focus on the coercer’s intent. It occludes the tendency to treat all non-Western maritime activity as gray-zone coercion, the possibility that Western states also operate in the gray zone, and the risk that the framework itself can be used to justify escalation.

UN. The UN perspective stresses legal thresholds: the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the Charter, the law of armed conflict, and UNCLOS. Gray-zone activities challenge the binary legal framework by operating in the space between peace and war. This perspective contributes a normative anchor and a vocabulary for distinguishing lawful from unlawful conduct. It occludes the inability to adjudicate ambiguous cases in real time and the lack of enforcement mechanisms when states exploit legal gaps.

2.6 KEY IDEA 5 — Space as a military domain: ISR, PNT, communications, and anti-satellite weapons

Bolded Causal Claim: Space has become a warfighting domain because modern military operations depend on satellites for intelligence, navigation, and communications, and because anti-satellite weapons can deny these services, creating both first-mover incentives and deterrence dilemmas.

Mechanism: The mechanism is dependency coupled with vulnerability. Modern precision warfare, network-centric operations, and global power projection rely on space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) for targeting and situational awareness; on positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), principally through GPS and other global navigation satellite systems, for precision munitions, logistics, and command and control; and on satellite communications (SATCOM) for beyond-line-of-sight connectivity. Denying or degrading these services can paralyze conventional forces without any kinetic exchange on Earth, making space an attractive axis of attack. Anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities—direct-ascent kinetic interceptors, co-orbital systems, directed-energy weapons, and cyber attacks on ground stations or satellite links—create a “use it or lose it” dynamic: because satellites are fragile, orbits are predictable, and constellations take years to rebuild, a state that fears losing its space assets in a crisis may be tempted to strike first. Conversely, mutual vulnerability may produce deterrence if both sides recognize that space warfare would degrade everyone’s capabilities and generate debris that endangers all users. The domain is further complicated by dual-use assets (civilian and military satellites often share platforms and frequencies), congestion (tens of thousands of objects in orbit), and the difficulty of attribution for non-kinetic attacks. Space warfare thus couples tightly to terrestrial conflict: space is not a separate theater but an enabler whose disruption cascades through air, land, and maritime operations. The mechanism also includes the commercialization of space, which multiplies the number of actors and assets and blurs the military-civilian boundary further.

Scope Conditions: Space militarization escalates when (a) a state’s military doctrine is heavily space-dependent, so that loss of space services would be operationally catastrophic; (b) ASAT capabilities are deployed and tested, demonstrating both intent and capacity; (c) crisis instability exists in terrestrial theaters, raising the premium on rapid, decisive action; and (d) no binding arms-control regime covers conventional space weapons, leaving the domain governed by unilateral restraint. It is constrained by mutual vulnerability, the risk of debris generation (the Kessler syndrome, in which cascading collisions render orbits unusable), the economic cost and long lead times of space assets, and the shared interest of all states in preserving access to space. The domain favors states with independent launch capacity, space situational awareness, and the industrial base to reconstitute constellations. It also favors states that can integrate commercial space services into military operations, as the United States has done extensively.

Observable Implications: Indicators include satellite launches by state and by sector (military, civil, commercial); ASAT tests, such as China’s 2007 direct-ascent test, the United States’ 2008 Operation Burnt Frost, India’s 2019 Mission Shakti, and Russia’s 2021 test; the establishment of dedicated space forces (the US Space Force in 2019, and analogous organizations elsewhere); doctrinal statements treating space as a warfighting domain; and the proliferation of commercial satellite constellations. Metrics include the number of satellites in orbit, launch rates, debris counts, and the share of military versus commercial launches. Predictions: increased hardening and redundancy of space assets, greater allied space cooperation and burden-sharing, development of on-orbit servicing and maneuver capabilities, and possible norms restricting debris-generating ASAT tests. A key diagnostic is the gap between states’ public commitments to the peaceful use of outer space and their actual military space programs.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary). African states are increasingly space actors—Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Rwanda among them—but primarily as users and emerging launchers rather than as militarized space powers. The African perspective emphasizes equitable access to space benefits, including communications, remote sensing for agriculture, climate monitoring, and disaster management, and the risk that orbital congestion and debris pose to all users regardless of their contribution to the problem. It stresses African participation in governance, exemplified by the African Space Agency established in 2018 and hosted in Egypt, and the need for capacity building rather than militarization. This perspective contributes a development and equity lens, highlighting how space militarization threatens a shared global commons on which developing states depend. It occludes great-power military competition but reveals how the weaponization of space could deny developing states the benefits of space-based services and how African states can leverage multilateral forums to shape norms.

Chinese. China frames space as a domain for peaceful development and national rejuvenation, while simultaneously building ASAT capabilities and space-force structures to counter US space dominance. It emphasizes sovereignty over space activities conducted from its territory and opposes what it characterizes as US pursuit of space dominance and the weaponization of space by others. This perspective contributes advocacy for multipolar space governance and for constraints on US missile defense and space-based systems. It occludes China’s own ASAT tests, its military space programs, and the dual-use nature of its civilian space infrastructure.

Russian. Russia views space as strategic high ground and maintains ASAT capabilities, early-warning systems, and a space force, framing US missile defense and space militarization as threats to strategic stability. It has advocated for a treaty banning the placement of weapons in outer space (the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space Treaty, PPWT, proposed with China). This perspective contributes arms-control advocacy and a critique of US unilateralism. It occludes Russia’s own ASAT tests, including the November 2021 test that generated significant debris, and its reliance on space assets for military operations.

Western. The Western, particularly US, perspective treats space as a warfighting domain requiring space superiority, reflected in the establishment of the US Space Force in 2019 and in allied cooperation frameworks. It emphasizes deterrence, resilience, and the integration of commercial space into military operations. This perspective contributes operational innovation and a focus on protecting space-enabled forces. It occludes how US space dominance drives other states’ ASAT development, how commercial space complicates military control and attribution, and how the framing of space as a warfighting domain may itself accelerate militarization.

UN. The UN perspective centers on the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit and declares space the province of all mankind, and on the work of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). It also encompasses efforts to prevent an arms race in outer space (PAROS) and discussions of transparency and confidence-building measures. This perspective contributes a legal framework and a normative commitment to peaceful use. It occludes the treaty’s silence on conventional (non-WMD) space weapons, the lack of verification and enforcement mechanisms, and the difficulty of adapting Cold War-era frameworks to contemporary commercial and military space activity.

2.7 FIVE PERSPECTIVES IN DEPTH

2.7.1 African Perspective (PRIMARY)

The African vantage point on maritime, chokepoint, and space security begins from a fundamentally different ontological premise than the other four perspectives: the sea is not primarily a medium of power projection or a global commons to be policed, but a lived environment whose governance determines whether coastal communities survive. This premise, developed across African political thought from Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence through Mbembe’s necropolitics to contemporary African security scholarship, reframes every element of the lesson’s five key ideas.

Consider sea power traditions. Mahan’s (1890) argument that command of the sea determines national greatness, and Corbett’s (1911) refinement that sea control must be exercised for specific strategic purposes, were formulated within imperial contexts in which African coastlines were objects of European naval strategy rather than subjects of their own maritime policy. The African perspective does not simply reject these traditions; it reveals their occlusion. Rodney’s analysis of how European maritime expansion underdeveloped Africa, and Nkrumah’s concept of neo-colonialism, show that sea power as historically practiced was inseparable from the extraction of African resources and the denial of African sovereignty over adjacent waters. Cabral’s insistence that national liberation required the reclamation of both territory and culture extends to the maritime domain: the sea was not empty space to be commanded but a zone of African life and labor that colonial powers appropriated. Nyerere’s ethic of self-reliance (ujamaa) translates into a maritime register as the demand that African states develop the capacity to govern their own waters rather than depend on external naval protection. The contemporary African maritime security agenda—articulated in the African Union’s 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy and the Lomé Charter—thus treats sea power not as dominance but as the capacity of African states to govern their exclusive economic zones, protect fisheries, and prevent the offshore looting of hydrocarbons. What the African vantage contributes that Western, Chinese, or Russian perspectives cannot is the recognition that maritime insecurity in Africa is less often a problem of great-power contestation than of state incapacity, corruption, and the externalization of environmental costs onto African coastal populations.

Chokepoints illustrate this reframing with particular clarity. The Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, Suez, and Panama appear in Western and Chinese strategic discourse as nodes in global energy and trade networks whose disruption would cascade through the world economy. The African perspective adds that two of these chokepoints—Bab el-Mandeb and Suez—are adjacent to African territory, and that their disruption is not an abstract systemic risk but a direct threat to African economies and populations. The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 onward, which prompted rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, increased shipping costs and insurance premiums that were passed through to African importers and consumers, while also disrupting Ethiopian and Sudanese access to ports. The Cape route itself, historically the path around Africa, reminds us that African geography has always been central to global maritime circulation even when African agency was denied. Moreover, the African perspective highlights that chokepoint security is inseparable from the security of the coastal states that border them: Djibouti hosts multiple foreign military bases whose presence is justified by chokepoint protection but whose operations are governed by agreements that African governments have limited capacity to renegotiate. Mamdani’s distinction between citizen and subject, applied to maritime space, suggests that African coastal populations often experience chokepoint security as something done to them by external powers rather than by their own states.

The Gulf of Guinea provides the most developed African case. Piracy in the Gulf, which peaked in the early 2010s and has evolved into a complex of armed robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and oil theft, is not merely a law-enforcement problem but a symptom of the political economy of the postcolonial state. Bayart’s analysis of the “politics of the belly” and the criminalization of the state helps explain how maritime criminal networks are embedded in elite political economies, with stolen oil laundered through international markets. Danso’s work on African maritime security governance emphasizes that external naval interventions—such as the US-led Africa Partnership Station or European Union naval missions—can suppress symptoms without addressing the political roots, and may even displace criminal activity to less policed waters. Aning’s research on African security governance reinforces this point: maritime insecurity is produced by the interaction of weak state capacity, elite predation, and global commodity markets, not simply by the absence of naval patrols. The African perspective thus contributes a causal mechanism that Western security studies often misses. What it may occlude is the extent to which non-state maritime violence also serves the interests of external actors who benefit from cheap security provision and continued access to resources, and the difficulty of disentangling local criminality from transnational networks that include foreign shipping companies and commodity traders.

A2/AD and sea denial, when viewed from Africa, appear less as strategies of great-power contestation than as extensions of a longer history of external powers using African coastal waters for their own strategic purposes. The US Africa Command’s maritime security initiatives, the Chinese naval base in Djibouti, and Russian port access agreements in Sudan and elsewhere all represent forms of sea denial or access denial exercised by external powers on African territory. The African perspective reveals that A2/AD is not only something that China does to the United States in the Western Pacific; it is also something that all major powers do, in different registers, to African coastal states when they establish military facilities, conduct surveillance, or restrict African access to their own maritime resources. Grovogui’s critique of sovereignty in international relations is pertinent here: the formal sovereignty of African states over their territorial waters is repeatedly qualified by the practical dominance of external naval powers and by the conditionalities attached to security assistance. The African Union’s maritime strategy attempts to reclaim this sovereignty through regional cooperation, but its implementation is hampered by resource constraints and by the reluctance of member states to pool sovereignty. The “blue economy” discourse, promoted by the African Union and various international partners, offers a developmental framing for maritime governance, but the African perspective warns that without genuine African control, the blue economy risks becoming another vector for external extraction.

Gray-zone coercion is perhaps where the African perspective is most distinctive and most underappreciated in the broader literature. Western and Chinese discussions of gray-zone conflict typically focus on coast guard ramming, maritime militia, and cyber operations in the South China Sea or the Baltic. The African experience of gray-zone coercion is different in form but not in logic: foreign fishing fleets operating under flags of convenience, private military companies providing maritime security, and the use of economic leverage to secure port access and resource concessions. These activities occur below the threshold of armed conflict and are difficult to attribute, yet they systematically erode African coastal state sovereignty. Tamale’s work on African feminism and Oyěwùmí’s analysis of colonial epistemologies remind us that the “gray zone” is not a new phenomenon but a continuation of the ambiguous sovereignty that characterized colonial and neo-colonial relationships, in which African states were formally independent but practically subordinated. Fanon’s analysis of the violence of colonialism, extended to the maritime domain, suggests that the gray zone is where the postcolonial state’s weakness is most exploited: not through open conquest but through the accumulation of small, deniable encroachments that cumulatively undermine sovereignty. The African perspective thus contributes the insight that gray-zone coercion is not an innovation of twenty-first-century great-power competition but a persistent feature of the international order as experienced by weaker states.

Space as a military domain, viewed from Africa, raises questions of epistemic and developmental justice. African states are not major space powers; no African state has conducted an ASAT test, and African satellite programs are modest and primarily civilian. Yet African populations are deeply affected by space militarization: GPS and satellite communications underpin African financial systems, agriculture, and disaster response; satellite imagery is used in African conflicts by external powers; and the orbital slots and spectrum frequencies allocated to African states are often underutilized or contested. The African Union’s space policy and the African Space Agency, headquartered in Egypt, represent efforts to claim a voice in space governance, but they operate within frameworks—the Outer Space Treaty, the International Telecommunication Union—designed by and for the major space powers. The African perspective reveals that the militarization of space is not only a strategic competition among the United States, China, and Russia; it is also a process that deepens the technological dependence of African states and excludes African priorities—such as earth observation for climate adaptation and agricultural monitoring—from the global space agenda. What this perspective may occlude is the agency that some African states are beginning to exercise through national space programs and through participation in multilateral forums, as well as the possibility that commercial space actors may offer African states alternatives to great-power dependence.

In sum, the African perspective on maritime, chokepoint, and space security contributes three things that the other four perspectives cannot: first, a historical memory of maritime power as extraction and domination, which disciplines celebratory accounts of sea power; second, an insistence that maritime security must be measured by its effects on coastal communities and state capacity, not only by great-power balances; and third, a recognition that the “gray zone” and space militarization are not new phenomena but continuations of older patterns of asymmetric subordination. Its occlusions include a tendency to understate the genuine security dilemmas faced by major powers, a risk of romanticizing African solidarity in the face of diverse national interests, and limited analytical attention to the technical military dimensions of A2/AD and ASAT systems that require specialized expertise. Nevertheless, as the longest and most developed of the five perspectives in this lesson, the African vantage is not a regional add-on but a constitutive lens: it shows that the global maritime order is not a neutral commons but a historically produced structure of inequality, and that any theory of maritime security that does not account for this is incomplete.

2.7.2 Chinese Perspective

The Chinese perspective on maritime, chokepoint, and space security is organized around the concept of “near-seas defense” (jinhai fangyu) and the strategic imperative of breaking through what Chinese strategists describe as the “first island chain” constraint. This framework, articulated in successive defense white papers and in the writings of Chinese naval strategists, treats the Western Pacific as a zone in which China must be able to operate without interference, and the broader maritime domain as an arena in which China is transitioning from a continental to a maritime power.

Sea power traditions are received selectively. Mahan’s emphasis on fleet concentration and decisive battle influenced early Chinese naval thinking, but contemporary Chinese strategy has moved toward Corbett’s more nuanced conception of sea control as a means to specific ends, particularly the protection of sea lines of communication and the denial of adversary access. Holmes and Yoshihara’s analysis of Chinese maritime strategy highlights this evolution: China’s A2/AD complex—encompassing anti-ship ballistic missiles, submarines, mines, and integrated air defense—is designed not to achieve command of the global ocean but to make the cost of US intervention in the Western Pacific prohibitive. The Chinese perspective thus contributes a distinctive causal mechanism: sea denial as a defensive strategy of a rising power confronting an established maritime hegemon. What it occludes is the extent to which this “defensive” posture is perceived as threatening by regional neighbors who do not share China’s assessment of its own security needs.

Chokepoints are central to Chinese strategic anxiety. China imports roughly two-thirds of its oil, much of it transiting the Strait of Malacca, which Chinese strategists have long described as a strategic vulnerability—the “Malacca dilemma.” The Belt and Road Initiative’s maritime component, including port investments in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, represents an attempt to diversify routes and reduce dependence on chokepoints controlled by or vulnerable to US naval power. The African perspective’s observation that Chinese port investments can constrain African sovereignty is, from the Chinese viewpoint, a byproduct of commercial strategy rather than a deliberate design; yet the Chinese perspective does not fully engage with the sovereignty concerns that these investments raise, nor with the possibility that commercial infrastructure can be converted to military use.

Gray-zone coercion is a signature Chinese strategy in the South China Sea. The use of coast guard vessels, maritime militia, and fishing fleets to assert claims without triggering armed conflict represents a deliberate exploitation of the threshold between peace and war. The Chinese perspective frames these activities as law enforcement and rights protection within China’s claimed maritime jurisdiction, not as coercion. This framing contributes the insight that the “gray zone” is partly a product of legal ambiguity—particularly the unresolved status of maritime claims under UNCLOS—and that states will exploit this ambiguity to advance their interests. What it occludes is the coercive effect on smaller states, the erosion of the normative framework that China itself invokes when its own interests are at stake, and the way in which gray-zone tactics can escalate unpredictably.

Space is increasingly central to Chinese strategy. The BeiDou navigation system, China’s ASAT test in 2007, and lunar and Mars exploration programs reflect a determination to achieve space independence and, ultimately, space leadership. The Chinese perspective treats space as a domain in which China must not be dependent on US systems, and in which it can challenge US information dominance. This contributes a multipolar vision of space governance that challenges US unilateralism. It occludes the debris and escalation risks of ASAT testing, the difficulty of reconciling competitive space programs with cooperative governance, and the possibility that China’s space ambitions may generate the same security dilemmas that US space dominance has created for others.

In sum, the Chinese perspective contributes a coherent strategic logic—near-seas defense, A2/AD, and space independence—that explains much of contemporary maritime competition. Its occlusions include the security dilemmas it creates for neighbors, the legal ambiguity it exploits, and the gap between its defensive rhetoric and its expansive maritime claims.

2.7.3 Russian Perspective

The Russian perspective on maritime, chokepoint, and space security is shaped by geography: Russia is a continental power with limited warm-water access, and its maritime strategy reflects a persistent anxiety about encirclement and a determination to secure the approaches to its territory. This geographic imperative, articulated in Russian naval doctrine and in the writings of Russian strategists, organizes Russian thinking across all five key ideas.

Sea power traditions are received through a continental lens. Russian strategists have historically been skeptical of Mahan’s emphasis on global maritime dominance, preferring a more limited conception of sea power focused on coastal defense and the protection of adjacent seas. The Soviet navy’s blue-water ambitions, developed under Gorshkov, represented a partial departure, but post-Soviet Russian naval strategy has returned to a focus on “near seas” and the protection of maritime approaches. Till’s analysis of contemporary maritime strategy notes that Russia’s naval capabilities have declined relative to the Soviet era, but that Russia compensates through asymmetric means: submarines, mines, and coastal defense systems. The Russian perspective thus contributes a model of maritime power as denial rather than command—a strategy of making adjacent waters too dangerous for adversary operations rather than seeking global sea control.

Chokepoints matter to Russia primarily through the lens of the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits. Control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, governed by the Montreux Convention, is a persistent Russian concern, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was partly motivated by the desire to secure the naval base at Sevastopol and to control the maritime approaches to southern Russia. The Arctic, with the Northern Sea Route, represents a new chokepoint of sorts: as ice recedes, Russia seeks to control this route and to assert sovereignty over the continental shelf. The African perspective’s observation about external powers using African waters applies here in reverse: Russia seeks to prevent external powers from using waters adjacent to its territory, and its Arctic claims are an assertion of sovereignty over a space that other states regard as a global commons.

A2/AD is a Russian specialty. The deployment of anti-ship missiles, air defense systems, and electronic warfare capabilities in Kaliningrad and Crimea creates “bubbles” of contested space that complicate NATO operations. Russian strategists describe this as defensive, but NATO perceives it as a threat to alliance freedom of movement. The Russian perspective contributes the insight that A2/AD is not only a Chinese strategy but a general approach available to any state with sufficient technological capacity and geographic advantage. What it occludes is the destabilizing effect of these deployments on regional security, the risk of inadvertent escalation, and the way in which Russian A2/AD can be used to coerce neighbors rather than merely to defend Russian territory.

Gray-zone coercion is central to Russian strategy, though the maritime dimension is less developed than the land and cyber dimensions. The use of “little green men” in Crimea, information warfare, and economic leverage has maritime analogues: the detention of Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait in 2018, the use of fishing and research vessels for intelligence collection, and the deployment of private military companies in maritime contexts. The Russian perspective frames these activities as responses to Western encroachment and as assertions of legitimate interests. This contributes a narrative of defensive reaction that challenges Western accounts of Russian aggression. What it occludes is the coercive and destabilizing character of these activities, their contribution to a broader pattern of undermining the rules-based order, and the difficulty of distinguishing defensive from offensive intent when the same capabilities can serve both purposes.

Space is a domain of historical Russian strength and contemporary ambition. The Soviet space program’s legacy, GLONASS as an alternative to GPS, and Russian ASAT capabilities reflect a determination to maintain space independence. The Russian perspective treats space as a military domain in which Russia must not be subordinate to the United States, and in which it can challenge US information dominance. Russian proposals for space arms control, including treaties to prevent the placement of weapons in space, are framed as genuine arms control initiatives but are also seen by Western analysts as attempts to constrain US advantages while preserving Russian capabilities. This contributes a legal and normative challenge to US space dominance. What it occludes is the gap between Russian arms control rhetoric and its own weapons development, the difficulty of verifying space arms control agreements, and the possibility that Russian space policy is driven more by the desire to maintain parity than by a genuine commitment to demilitarization.

In sum, the Russian perspective contributes a geographic and historical logic that explains Russian maritime and space behavior as defensive reactions to encirclement and Western expansion. Its occlusions include the aggressive character of its actions, the destabilizing effects of its A2/AD deployments, and the gap between its arms control rhetoric and its weapons programs.

2.7.4 Western Perspective

The Western perspective on maritime, chokepoint, and space security is organized around the concept of the “global commons” and the normative commitment to freedom of navigation. This framework, rooted in the Mahanian tradition and developed through NATO maritime strategy and US naval doctrine, treats the oceans as a shared space whose openness is essential to global prosperity and security, and assigns to the United States and its allies the role of guarantor of that openness.

Sea power traditions are the foundation. Mahan’s (1890) argument that command of the sea is the key to national greatness remains influential in US naval thought, though Corbett’s (1911) more limited conception of sea control has gained ground in contemporary doctrine. The Western perspective treats sea power as a public good: US carrier strike groups, freedom of navigation operations, and maritime security partnerships are framed as protecting the global trading system from which all benefit. Till’s analysis of maritime strategy in the twenty-first century notes the tension between this public-goods framing and the reality of US strategic interests. The Western perspective contributes a powerful normative claim: that maritime security is best served by a rules-based order in which no single state can deny access to others. What it occludes is the historical and contemporary reality that this “rules-based order” was constructed by and for Western powers, and that its application has been selective.

Chokepoints are central to Western strategic planning. The US Navy’s maritime strategy identifies the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, Suez, and Panama as critical nodes whose disruption would have global consequences. Western naval presence in these areas—Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, Combined Maritime Forces in the Gulf of Aden—is justified by the need to protect global commerce. The Western perspective contributes detailed operational and intelligence capabilities for monitoring and securing chokepoints. What it occludes is the extent to which this presence is perceived by regional states as an assertion of Western dominance rather than a neutral public good, the way in which chokepoint security can serve as a pretext for maintaining military access to strategically located territory, and the possibility that Western chokepoint security strategies may prioritize the flow of oil and goods over the security of coastal populations.

A2/AD is the primary challenge to Western maritime primacy. Chinese and Russian A2/AD systems are framed in Western doctrine as threats to the freedom of action that underpins the global order. The Western response has included investments in long-range precision strike, undersea warfare, and distributed maritime operations designed to penetrate A2/AD bubbles. Holmes and Yoshihara’s work on Chinese maritime strategy is widely read in Western defense circles as a guide to understanding and countering this challenge. The Western perspective contributes a sophisticated operational and technological response. What it occludes is the possibility that A2/AD is, from the perspective of the states deploying it, a defensive response to Western forward presence, and that the Western framing of A2/AD as inherently aggressive may foreclose diplomatic solutions and accelerate arms racing.

Gray-zone coercion is a growing focus of Western strategy. The recognition that China and Russia operate below the threshold of armed conflict has prompted Western efforts to develop “integrated deterrence” and to strengthen the resilience of allies and partners. The Western perspective contributes a legal and normative framework for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate gray-zone activities, and operational concepts for responding. What it occludes is the extent to which Western states themselves engage in gray-zone activities—sanctions, cyber operations, information warfare—and the difficulty of maintaining a consistent standard when the definition of “gray zone” is itself contested. The Western perspective also struggles to address the possibility that some activities it labels as gray-zone coercion may be perceived by the states undertaking them as legitimate assertions of sovereignty or self-defense.

Space is a domain of US dominance and growing competition. The US Space Force, the commercial space revolution, and GPS as a global utility reflect a Western, and particularly American, vision of space as an enabler of military and economic power. The Western perspective treats space security as the protection of US and allied space assets and the maintenance of space dominance. This contributes unmatched capabilities in ISR, PNT, and communications. What it occludes is the extent to which US space dominance is perceived as threatening by other states, the debris risks of US ASAT development, the tension between commercial space exploitation and the Outer Space Treaty’s principle of space as the province of all mankind, and the possibility that the militarization of space may undermine the very global commons that the Western perspective claims to protect.

In sum, the Western perspective contributes a powerful normative and operational framework for maritime and space security, centered on freedom of navigation and the global commons. Its occlusions include the selective application of rules, the imperial legacy of sea power, the difficulty of reconciling US strategic interests with the public-goods framing of maritime security, and the risk that Western strategies may accelerate rather than manage competition.

2.7.5 UN Perspective

The UN perspective on maritime, chokepoint, and space security is institutional and legal, centered on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Outer Space Treaty, and a series of Security Council resolutions addressing piracy, maritime security, and space governance. This perspective treats the oceans and space as global commons governed by international law, and assigns to the UN system the role of framework-provider and, in limited cases, enforcer.

UNCLOS is the cornerstone. Adopted in 1982 and in force since 1994, it establishes the legal framework for maritime zones, navigation rights, and resource exploitation. The UN perspective treats UNCLOS as the “constitution of the oceans,” providing a comprehensive regime that balances coastal state rights with the freedom of navigation. The 2016 arbitral ruling in the South China Sea case, issued under UNCLOS Annex VII, exemplifies the UN perspective’s contribution: a legal determination that China’s nine-dash line claims have no basis in international law. The UN perspective contributes a legal framework that can adjudicate disputes and establish norms. What it occludes is the lack of enforcement mechanisms: the ruling has not been implemented, and UNCLOS lacks a compulsory enforcement regime. The fact that the United States has not ratified UNCLOS further weakens its authority, creating a legitimacy deficit that undermines the UN perspective’s claim to universality.

Maritime security resolutions extend the UN framework to specific threats. Security Council resolutions on piracy off the coast of Somalia, beginning with Resolution 1816 in 2008, authorized international naval operations and established a legal basis for action in Somali territorial waters. The UN perspective contributes a multilateral framework for addressing maritime security threats that transcend national jurisdiction. What it occludes is the dependence on member state contributions for enforcement, the risk that naval operations displace rather than resolve criminal activity, the limited attention to the root causes of maritime insecurity, and the possibility that UN-authorized operations may serve the strategic interests of contributing states rather than the affected populations.

Space governance is addressed through the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the Moon Agreement, and the work of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The UN perspective treats space as the province of all mankind and seeks to prevent an arms race in outer space. The PAROS agenda and discussions of transparency and confidence-building measures reflect this commitment. The UN perspective contributes a normative framework and a forum for dialogue. What it occludes is the treaty’s silence on conventional space weapons, the lack of verification mechanisms, the difficulty of adapting Cold War-era frameworks to contemporary commercial and military space activity, and the reality that major space powers are developing ASAT capabilities and militarizing space while participating in UN forums.

The UN perspective on gray-zone conflict is the least developed. The UN system has no clear framework for addressing activities that fall below the threshold of armed conflict but that coerce and destabilize. The UN perspective contributes the general principle that disputes should be resolved peacefully and that international law should govern state behavior. What it occludes is the gap between this principle and the reality of gray-zone competition, the inability of the UN system to address activities that are deliberately designed to evade legal categorization, and the risk that the absence of a gray-zone framework may encourage states to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

In sum, the UN perspective contributes an indispensable legal and institutional framework for maritime and space governance. Its occlusions include the lack of enforcement, the dependence on great-power consent, the difficulty of adapting legal frameworks to new forms of competition, and the gap between legal norms and state practice. The UN perspective is most effective when it can mobilize great-power consensus; it is least effective when great powers are in direct competition, as they are in the maritime and space domains today.

SECTION 2.7.6 Comparison Matrix

SECTION 2.8 WORKED EXAMPLE (I do)

Worked Example: Iran’s Asymmetric Maritime Strategy in the Strait of Hormuz

Levels of analysis. The Strait of Hormuz case operates across all four levels. At the individual level, the strategic calculus of Iran’s Supreme Leader and IRGC naval commanders shapes decisions to seize tankers or deploy mines; individual tanker captains and insurance underwriters at Lloyd’s of London respond to perceived risk. At the state level, Iran’s doctrine of asymmetric maritime warfare, the US Fifth Fleet’s forward presence, and the interests of Gulf Cooperation Council states define the strategic environment. At the systemic level, the US-Iran rivalry, sanctions regimes, and the global oil market’s sensitivity to supply disruptions create the structural conditions. At the transnational level, global energy supply chains, international maritime insurance markets, and UNCLOS-based legal frameworks connect the strait to economies far beyond the Gulf.

Mechanism. Iran’s strategy rests on a cost-imposition logic: by deploying low-cost, high-leverage capabilities—fast attack craft, naval mines, anti-ship missiles, and tanker seizures—against a conventionally superior US Navy, Iran raises the price of US and allied maritime operations in the Gulf without triggering a full-scale war. The mechanism works through three channels. First, geographic compression: the strait’s narrowness (approximately 21 miles at its narrowest point, with shipping lanes only two miles wide in each direction) negates US advantages in open-ocean maneuver and carrier aviation, compressing the battlespace into a littoral environment where small, fast, numerous Iranian craft can threaten larger vessels. Second, escalation ambiguity: tanker seizures and mine attacks occupy a gray zone below the threshold of armed conflict, forcing adversaries to choose between disproportionate military response and passive acceptance, thereby eroding deterrence credibility. Third, economic leverage: even the threat of disruption moves global oil prices and insurance premiums, imposing costs on the global economy that far exceed Iran’s military expenditure. The EIA estimates that roughly 20-21 million barrels per day of oil transited the Strait of Hormuz in recent years, representing approximately 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption. This concentration means that Iran does not need to close the strait to impose costs; it needs only to create sufficient uncertainty to raise risk premiums.

Specific incidents illustrate the mechanism’s operation. In May and June 2019, attacks on the tankers Kokuka Courageous and Front Altair—attributed by the US to Iranian mines—demonstrated Iran’s ability to strike commercial shipping while maintaining plausible deniability. In July 2019, Iran seized the British-flagged Stena Impero in retaliation for the UK’s detention of the Iranian tanker Grace 1 in Gibraltar, showing how tanker seizures serve as instruments of coercive diplomacy. In April 2023, Iran seized the Advantage Sweet, a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker chartered by Chevron, and in May 2023 seized the Niovi; in April 2024, Iran seized the MSC Aries, a Portuguese-flagged container ship. These seizures are not random piracy but calibrated signals: they impose costs on specific adversaries, demonstrate Iran’s reach, and test the US and allied commitment to freedom of navigation without crossing the threshold that would justify major military retaliation. Till’s analysis of seapower emphasizes that maritime strategy must account for the interaction between military capability and political purpose; Iran’s strategy exemplifies this by subordinating naval operations to political signaling and sanctions relief objectives.

The mechanism is not unlimited. It depends on Iran’s ability to maintain plausible deniability for gray-zone actions, on the US and its allies’ reluctance to escalate, and on the global economy’s continued dependence on Gulf oil. If any of these conditions shifts—if attribution becomes certain, if the US adopts more aggressive rules of engagement, or if global energy diversification reduces Hormuz dependence—the mechanism weakens. The US response, including Operation Sentinel (2019), multinational escort operations, and the forward deployment of carrier strike groups, aims to raise the cost of Iranian aggression while avoiding the escalation that Iran’s strategy is designed to provoke. This creates a deterrence dilemma: too little response emboldens Iran; too much risks the war both sides wish to avoid.

Perspective reconstruction. The African perspective, which must be understood as primary in this analysis, reveals dimensions that the other four miss. From the vantage point of African coastal states and the AU’s maritime security agenda, the Hormuz crisis is not merely a US-Iran confrontation but a node in a global maritime insecurity system that disproportionately harms non-combatant economies. African states importing Gulf oil face price spikes and supply uncertainty when Hormuz tensions escalate, just as Gulf of Guinea piracy raised shipping costs for West African trade. The African perspective highlights the asymmetry of maritime governance: while the US and Iran contest control of the strait, African coastal states have limited voice in the security architecture that determines their energy access. The AU’s 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy and the Lomé Charter reflect an insistence that maritime governance must be inclusive, not merely a great-power prerogative. The Red Sea shipping disruptions of 2023-2024 demonstrate how chokepoint insecurity compounds across African maritime space, affecting ports from Djibouti to Durban, framing Hormuz as a symptom of a global maritime order that systematically disadvantages non-great-power states.

The Chinese perspective interprets Iran’s strategy through the lens of anti-hegemonic resistance and near-seas defense. Beijing views US naval primacy in the Gulf as analogous to US presence in the Western Pacific; Iran’s asymmetric tactics provide a template for how a conventionally inferior power can contest maritime dominance. China’s own A2/AD investments—anti-ship ballistic missiles, submarines, mines—mirror Iran’s approach, and Chinese strategists have studied Iranian fast-boat swarms and mine warfare. At the same time, China is Iran’s largest oil customer and has a direct interest in Hormuz stability, creating tension between strategic sympathy for Iranian resistance and economic interest in uninterrupted supply. Holmes and Yoshihara’s analysis notes that Beijing’s approach combines Mahanian sea-control ambitions with Corbettian sea-denial tactics; Iran’s Hormuz strategy offers a real-world demonstration of the latter.

The Russian perspective sees Hormuz through the prism of great-power competition and anti-US alignment. Moscow has supported Iran diplomatically and militarily, viewing US pressure on Tehran as part of a broader strategy to dominate Eurasian energy corridors. Russia’s own maritime strategy—Arctic militarization, Black Sea Fleet operations, and the 2018 Kerch Strait incident—shares Iran’s emphasis on using geographic chokepoints to offset conventional inferiority. Russian analysts frame Hormuz as evidence that US maritime hegemony is contestable, reinforcing Moscow’s narrative that the unipolar moment has ended. However, Russia also has interests in stable oil prices and in maintaining its position as a major energy exporter, creating ambivalence about sustained Hormuz disruption.

The Western perspective, dominant in US and allied strategic discourse, frames Iran’s strategy as a threat to freedom of navigation and the rules-based maritime order. The US Fifth Fleet’s presence in Bahrain, Operation Sentinel, and escort operations for commercial tankers reflect a commitment to keeping the strait open. Western analysis emphasizes deterrence: maintaining sufficient naval presence to raise the cost of Iranian aggression while avoiding escalation. The perspective draws on Mahan’s insight that sea power requires both fleet strength and the political will to use it. Its occlusion lies in treating US maritime primacy as synonymous with global public goods, underweighting how that primacy appears from Tehran or from African capitals.

The UN perspective approaches Hormuz through UNCLOS and the framework of maritime security. The strait is an international strait under UNCLOS Part III, guaranteeing transit passage; Iran’s tanker seizures and mine attacks violate these norms. UN Security Council resolutions on maritime security provide a legal basis for collective action, but the UN system lacks enforcement mechanisms when a permanent member or its ally is the violator. The UN perspective contributes the essential insight that Hormuz governance requires multilateral frameworks, not merely bilateral US-Iran deterrence, but its effectiveness is constrained by great-power rivalry.

Explicit adjudication. The state-level perspective best explains Iran’s asymmetric maritime strategy: Iran’s doctrine is a deliberate, state-directed response to US military superiority and sanctions pressure, shaped by the IRGC’s institutional interests and the Supreme Leader’s strategic calculus. However, this perspective alone misses the systemic drivers—US-Iran rivalry, the sanctions architecture, and the global oil market’s structural dependence on Hormuz—that make the strategy viable and consequential. It also misses the transnational effects: the insurance market’s response, the cascade to African energy importers, and the erosion of UNCLOS norms. The African perspective, while not the primary explanatory lens for Iranian decision-making, provides the most complete account of the strategy’s global costs and reveals what the Western and Chinese perspectives occlude: that Hormuz insecurity is not merely a great-power contest but a burden on non-combatant states. The Western perspective correctly identifies the threat to freedom of navigation but underweights the degree to which US primacy itself generates the resistance that Iran’s strategy exploits. The Chinese perspective offers the most analytically productive analogy—A2/AD as a generalizable strategy—but risks normalizing coercive maritime behavior by framing it as defensive. The UN perspective identifies the legal violations but cannot enforce compliance. In sum, no single perspective fully captures the case; the state-level perspective explains Iranian agency, the systemic perspective explains the strategic environment, and the African perspective explains the distributional consequences that the other four underweight.

2.9 PROBLEM PAIR (We do)

1. Mechanism mapping. Identify the causal chain through which land reclamation, sensor and missile emplacement, and coast-guard/militia operations change the South China Sea from a contested maritime space into a continuously controlled one. Specify which levels of analysis—individual, state, systemic, transnational—best explain each link.

2. Threshold analysis. Determine whether water-cannoning, ramming, and blockade-like interference against resupply missions constitute “armed conflict” under the UN Charter and UNCLOS, or whether they are better classified as gray-zone coercion. What legal and operational consequences follow from each classification?

3. Perspective reconstruction. For each of the five perspectives (African, Chinese, Russian, Western, UN), state one contribution and one occlusion in explaining the 2016 arbitral ruling and China’s subsequent behavior.

4. Evidence and falsification. What observable evidence would support the claim that China’s strategy is primarily defensive deterrence? What evidence would support the claim that it is revisionist territorial consolidation? Identify at least one falsifier for each.

5. Comparative case. Compare the South China Sea case with Iran’s Hormuz strategy from the worked example. Which mechanisms are shared (asymmetric coercion below the armed-conflict threshold, exploitation of escalation reluctance), and which differ (geography, legal claims, actor types, global economic stakes)?

6. Adjudication. Given that the 2016 ruling rejected China’s historic-rights claim yet militarization and gray-zone activity continued, adjudicate between legal-institutional and power-political explanations. State the scope conditions under which each would be more persuasive.

Model answer. The South China Sea case is best explained by a mechanism in which material transformation, legal ambiguity, and calibrated coercion interact across multiple levels of analysis. At the state level, China’s reclamation and militarization of features convert temporary presence into persistent infrastructure, extending surveillance, air-defense, and missile coverage across a maritime space that was previously difficult to dominate continuously. At the transnational level, this infrastructure alters the operating environment for commercial shipping, fishing fleets, and naval vessels without necessarily closing sea lanes, thereby creating leverage through risk and uncertainty rather than through outright denial. At the systemic level, the strategy contests US maritime primacy by raising the cost of intervention and by complicating alliance reassurance, especially for states such as the Philippines and Vietnam that depend on external security guarantees. At the individual level, coast-guard and militia commanders operate under rules of engagement designed to harass, block, and signal resolve while remaining below the threshold that would trigger a military response or treaty obligations. The result is a fait accompli dynamic: each incident is small enough to be treated as a law-enforcement matter, but the cumulative effect is a shift in effective control.

The 2016 arbitral ruling illustrates the limits of legal adjudication when enforcement is weak. The tribunal rejected the historic-rights basis of China’s claim and clarified maritime entitlements, but it could not compel compliance. China rejected the ruling’s jurisdiction and legitimacy, and subsequent activity—militarized features, coast-guard interference, and administrative assertions—continued. From a Western perspective, this is a failure of the rules-based order: legal clarity was achieved, but without a coalition willing to enforce it, the ruling became a normative reference rather than a behavioral constraint. From a Chinese perspective, the ruling is an externally imposed interpretation that disregards historical practice and sovereign equality; Beijing frames its actions as defensive near-seas management and domestic law enforcement. From a Russian perspective, the case confirms skepticism toward Western legal universalism and highlights the value of multipolarity in resisting externally adjudicated outcomes. From a UN perspective, the ruling demonstrates the capacity of UNCLOS dispute settlement to clarify law, while also exposing the enforcement gap between legal determination and state compliance. From an African perspective, the case resonates with post-colonial concerns about externally drawn maritime boundaries and the unequal capacity to enforce legal claims; African coastal states may support UNCLOS as a framework while remaining wary of great-power selectivity in compliance, and they may see in the South China Sea a warning about how powerful states can convert legal ambiguity into de facto control.

The strongest adjudication is that legal institutionalism explains the production of legal clarity but not the distribution of power, whereas power-political and gray-zone explanations better account for post-ruling behavior. Legal rulings matter most when backed by enforcement coalitions, domestic costs of noncompliance, or reputational incentives; where a state perceives a vital interest and faces no credible enforcement, the ruling becomes a background condition rather than a causal force. Falsifiers for the power-political explanation would include Chinese demilitarization of features, acceptance of delimited exclusive economic zones, or a sustained reduction in coast-guard incidents after legal or diplomatic pressure. Falsifiers for the legal-institutional explanation would include continued escalation despite multilateral enforcement, or a collapse of regional states’ willingness to invoke UNCLOS. Compared with Iran’s Hormuz strategy, the shared mechanism is calibrated coercion below the armed-conflict threshold, exploiting an adversary’s reluctance to escalate and using asymmetric tools to impose costs. The differences are significant: Iran operates in a narrow chokepoint with immediate global oil-market leverage, relies heavily on speedboats, mines, and proxy forces, and faces a more direct military balance; China operates across a broad maritime space with legal claims, reclaimed territory, and a coast-guard/militia architecture, seeking incremental territorial and administrative consolidation rather than temporary disruption. Thus the South China Sea case is not merely a larger version of Hormuz; it is a distinct form of gray-zone coercion in which legal ambiguity, infrastructure, and persistent presence combine to reshape control without crossing the threshold of war.

2.10 INDEPENDENT MEMO (You do)

(a) Case description. In 2023–2024, Chinese coast-guard and maritime-militia vessels repeatedly interfered with Philippine resupply missions to Second Thomas Shoal, using water cannons, blocking maneuvers, and close-quarters harassment, while Beijing asserted administrative and law-enforcement authority over disputed features. Manila invoked the 2016 arbitral award and sought support from its US treaty ally; China framed its actions as routine enforcement within its jurisdiction. Regional states faced a choice between accepting incremental changes in effective control and risking escalation. Assess whether this pattern is best explained as defensive maritime management, revisionist territorial consolidation, or a hybrid strategy, and determine what evidence would most decisively distinguish among these explanations.

Mechanism:
Perspective reconstruction:
Historical analogue:
Falsifiers:

Self-check: Did you distinguish description (what happened), explanation (why), prediction (what next), and prescription (what should be done)?

2.11 HINGE QUESTION

Question: Which option best explains why the 2016 arbitral ruling did not reverse China’s militarization and gray-zone activity in the South China Sea?

A. The ruling lacked effective enforcement mechanisms, and China rejected its jurisdiction and legitimacy, allowing power-political and gray-zone dynamics to dominate legal obligation.
B. The ruling was legally invalid because UNCLOS does not address territorial sovereignty at all.
C. China demilitarized its features after 2016 but resumed militarization solely because of US freedom-of-navigation operations.
D. The UN Security Council enforced the ruling, but China used its veto to nullify it.

Correct answer: A.

Distractor diagnoses:

• B conflates the tribunal’s avoidance of territorial sovereignty with legal invalidity; the ruling addressed maritime entitlements and historic-rights claims, not sovereignty over land territory, and its legal force does not depend on resolving sovereignty.
• C is factually inconsistent with the continued and expanded militarization of features after 2016; US operations may have shaped Chinese rhetoric and risk calculations, but they do not explain the persistence of reclamation and infrastructure.
• D misattributes institutional authority; the UN Security Council did not enforce the ruling, and China’s veto power is irrelevant to a tribunal constituted under UNCLOS Annex VII.

SECTION 2A — DATA LAB

Table 1. Approximate oil transit through major maritime chokepoints (EIA, 2024 reporting of 2023 flows)

Note: volumes are approximate and vary by year, product mix, and EIA methodology; the table is for structural comparison, not exact forecasting.

Table 2. Approximate active satellite population by state (UCS Satellite Database, recent counts)

Note: counts change quickly because of mega-constellations; “active” excludes defunct objects and many classified payloads.

Table 3. Selected maritime and space security indicators

Note: incident counts are undercounts where reporting is voluntary, AIS is spoofed, or attacks are misclassified as accidents or piracy.

Numbered analysis questions

1. Trend: Chokepoint volumes are highly concentrated, yet incident counts are episodic and geographically clustered. What does this mismatch imply about the difference between structural vulnerability and realized disruption?
2. Level of analysis: Are Red Sea attacks best explained by state sponsorship and regional war (state/systemic), by Houthi organizational strategy (sub-state), by global shipping market incentives (transnational), or by individual crew and vessel decisions (individual)?
3. Perspective reconstruction: How would the African, Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN perspectives each read Table 1 and Table 3 differently—especially on whether maritime security is primarily a problem of sovereignty, commerce, great-power competition, or collective governance?
4. Interpretation: Table 2 suggests that satellite infrastructure is becoming both more distributed and more militarized. Does this imply that space is stabilizing through redundancy, or destabilizing through new counterspace incentives?
5. Limitation: Which of the following are most likely missing from these tables: classified military satellite counts, underreported Gulf of Guinea incidents, non-kinetic interference such as jamming and spoofing, and the political classification of attacks as “terrorism,” “piracy,” or “war”?

SECTION 3 — DUAL-CODED VISUAL ANCHOR

Visual 1: Hand-drawn map of maritime chokepoints and volume concentration

Draw a simple world map in pencil or marker, using an oval for the globe and a few curved continental outlines rather than detailed coastlines. Mark the following points with small circles and labels: Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Bab el-Mandeb, Panama, Turkish Straits, Danish Straits. Draw thick arrows through each chokepoint and write approximate volumes beside them: Hormuz 20.9, Malacca 16.0, Suez 8.8, Bab el-Mandeb 8.8, Panama 2.0, Turkish 3.4, Danish 3.2. Add a legend: “million barrels per day, approximate 2023 flows.” Draw a dashed alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope to show bypass capacity. In one corner, draw a small box labeled “Gulf of Guinea” with a piracy icon and a note “incidents clustered, not just chokepoints.” Annotate the map with perspective overlays: African perspective in green: “coastal security, piracy, Red Sea disruption”; Chinese perspective in red: “Malacca dilemma, near-seas defense”; Russian perspective in blue: “Arctic and Black Sea access”; Western perspective in black: “freedom of navigation, carrier mobility”; UN perspective in purple: “UNCLOS, collective maritime security.”

Visual 2: Hand-drawn A2/AD and sea-denial diagram

Draw a horizontal sea surface line across the page. On the left, draw a coastline labeled “Contested littoral” with three nested curved arcs extending seaward, labeled “A2/AD layer 1: sensors,” “A2/AD layer 2: missiles,” and “A2/AD layer 3: submarines / mines.” Place small icons for radar, mobile missile launchers, and submarines. On the right, draw a large ship icon labeled “Carrier strike group” approaching from open ocean, with a dashed line showing its operational range. Draw arrows from the littoral toward the carrier labeled “sea denial,” and a smaller arrow from the carrier toward the coast labeled “power projection.” Add a vertical scale on the right labeled “Distance from coast” with markers for territorial sea, EEZ, and high seas. Annotate perspectives: African: “coastal vulnerability and external intervention”; Chinese: “near-seas defense, anti-access”; Russian: “bastion defense, Arctic/Black Sea”; Western: “FON, carrier access”; UN: “law of the sea, EEZ rights.”

Visual 3: Hand-drawn space domain stack

Draw three horizontal bands from bottom to top: “LEO,” “MEO,” and “GEO.” In LEO, draw many small dots labeled “imaging, comms, mega-constellations”; in MEO, draw medium dots labeled “PNT / navigation”; in GEO, draw a few large dots labeled “strategic communications, early warning.” Draw a ground station at the bottom with lines connecting to each band. Draw an ASAT vector as a dashed arrow from the ground or from a co-orbital object toward a satellite, labeled “kinetic / non-kinetic counterspace.” Draw debris clouds around one destroyed satellite. Add a side panel labeled “Military uses: ISR, PNT, communications, missile warning.” Annotate perspectives: African: “space-enabled maritime domain awareness, but dependency on external providers”; Chinese: “space as sovereignty and security infrastructure”; Russian: “space as strategic stability and counterspace”; Western: “space as enabler of precision warfare”; UN: “outer space as global commons, debris governance.”

SECTION 4 — CORNELL NOTES

Summary: Maritime strategy links geography, technology, and law: chokepoints concentrate global commerce, A2/AD and gray-zone tools contest access without necessarily crossing into war, and space systems have become the nervous system of modern sea power. The five perspectives agree that the sea and space are strategically vital but disagree on whether security should be organized around sovereignty, commerce, deterrence, or collective governance. Data on flows, incidents, satellites, and ASAT tests reveal structure and trend, but they cannot by themselves settle questions of intent, legality, or proportionality.

SECTION 5 — FEYNMAN COMPRESSION

1. Explain without jargon: The ocean and space are like highways and nervous systems for modern states. A few narrow sea passages carry huge amounts of oil, so blocking or threatening them can hurt economies without a full war. Countries that feel weaker at sea can use missiles, mines, small boats, coast guards, or cyber tools to make entry expensive or politically awkward. Satellites help ships, planes, and missiles know where they are and what they see, so attacking or jamming satellites can weaken an opponent. The main debate is whether these tools deter war or make crises harder to control.

2. Mark gaps: I am less certain about the exact year-to-year EIA volumes, the precise number of active satellites, and how many maritime incidents go unreported. I also need to distinguish a legal chokepoint disruption from a physical one, and a destructive ASAT test from everyday satellite interference. Another gap is whether gray-zone actions are best seen as coercion or as routine sovereignty enforcement.

3. Reread verification: Rechecking the core sources confirms the conceptual distinction: Mahan and Corbett differ on command versus control of communications; EIA data show concentration but not intent; Holmes and Yoshihara emphasize layered Chinese maritime strategy rather than a single “wall”; and UNCLOS provides a legal vocabulary that does not fully capture coast-guard or militia ambiguity. The data tables support trend and structure, not causal proof.

4. Analogy with explicit limits: Think of a city with one bridge carrying most commuter traffic. A local power cannot defeat the whole city, but it can threaten the bridge, charge tolls, or create traffic jams. That captures chokepoint leverage and gray-zone pressure. The limit is that bridges are fixed and local, whereas sea lanes, alliances, rerouting, and international law make maritime coercion more complex and more reversible. Space is less like a bridge and more like the city’s traffic lights and GPS: damaging it can cascade, but attribution and escalation are uncertain.

5. Rewrite: Maritime, chokepoint, space, and gray-zone conflicts are best understood as contests over access rather than only contests over territory. Geography concentrates maritime risk; A2/AD and gray-zone tools exploit that concentration while staying below clear war thresholds; space systems extend and complicate both. African, Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN perspectives each identify real features of this problem—coastal vulnerability, near-seas defense, bastion security, freedom of navigation, and collective governance—but none alone captures the full mechanism. Evidence on flows, incidents, satellites, and ASAT tests is indispensable, yet it must be paired with legal, historical, and strategic interpretation before it can support strong claims.

SECTION 6 — SPACED-REPETITION FLASHCARDS

SECTION 7 — METACOGNITIVE CALIBRATION

7.1 Confidence Audit (score each 0–100)

7.2 Three-Question Debrief

1. Which concept did you define correctly but fail to connect to a causal mechanism?
2. Which perspective did you treat as an obstacle or bias rather than as a coherent argument with its own evidence?
3. What single piece of evidence would most strongly change your conclusion about Hormuz, the South China Sea, or space security?

7.3 Error-Log Table

SECTION 8 — CHEATSHEET

SECTION 9 — REVIEW SCHEDULE

SECTION 10 — COMPLETION CHECKLIST

• I can define sea power in Mahan’s and Corbett’s terms.
• I can distinguish sea control from sea denial.
• I can name and locate the five major chokepoints.
• I can explain why chokepoint volume is exposure, not destiny.
• I can describe A2/AD as a contest of systems, not a wall.
• I can identify scope conditions for Chinese, Iranian, and Russian sea denial.
• I can define gray-zone coercion and explain attribution ambiguity.
• I can analyze coast guard and militia roles in maritime coercion.
• I can explain ISR, PNT, communications, and ASAT interdependence.
• I can interpret ASAT test data without overstating intent.
• I can reconstruct the African perspective as primary, not an add-on.
• I can steel-man Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN perspectives.
• I can apply individual, state, systemic, and transnational levels of analysis.
• I can distinguish description, explanation, prediction, and prescription.
• I can write falsifiers for a maritime or space claim.
• I can complete the Data Lab without confusing correlation with mechanism.

FURTHER READING (Optional)

Sea power theory

• Mahan, A. T. (1890). The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783.
• Corbett, J. S. (1911). Some Principles of Maritime Strategy.
• Till, G. (2018). Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century (4th ed.).

A2/AD, sea denial, and the South China Sea

• Holmes, J. R., and Yoshihara, T. (2017). Red Star over the Pacific (2nd ed.).
• U.S. Department of Defense. (2024). Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.
• Center for Strategic and International Studies, Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. (2024). South China Sea feature and incident tracking.

Chokepoints and maritime security

• U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2024). World Oil Transit Chokepoints.
• International Maritime Bureau. (2024). Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships (annual report).

Maritime law and governance

• United Nations. (1982). United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Space security

• Secure World Foundation. (2024). Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment.

End of Lesson 25. Say Next when you are ready.