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Chirol
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Chirol

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May 9th, 2006

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The Five Top Global Choke Points

Not long ago, Younghusband blogged Gwadar Port. Today Foreign Policy has a short article up on the five top global choke points. Can you guess them?

1. Strait of Hormuz
2. Abqaiq Oil Processing Facility
3. Strait of Malacca
4. Suez Canal
5. Druzhba Pipeline

Read the short article on each one, what’s at stake and what the threats are.

Comments to this entry

Tagore
May 9, 2006
4:30 pm
Umm... the Abqaiq Oil Processing Facility is more important than the Panama Canal? I don't think so...
Jing
May 10, 2006
12:37 am
Am I the only one who doesn't like Foreign Policy. I remember many years ago, one of my IR teachers hammered into each and every one of us that Foreign Policy was for schmucks. The straits of Malacca as a "choke point" has been repeated by a lot of people but am I the only one who has bothered looking at a map and noticed the numerous other navicable routes through the Indonesian and Malayan archipelagos. A block at Malacca only adds several days transport delay time which is peanuts compared to if something were to happen to Panama or Suez which would delay shipping by weeks.
Curzon
May 10, 2006
1:03 am
Jing: Very good point. And as for the magazine in question, hear hear -- I'll take the _Economist_ any day of the week over FP.
Alex
May 11, 2006
3:48 pm
The Lombok Strait is hardly unproblematic from navigational or security points of view, and I think Sunda's not deep enough for the big buggers.