Hormuz as the Visible Chokepoint

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the clearest illustrations of how geography can translate into geopolitical leverage. At its narrowest point, the strait is only around 33 kilometres wide. Yet it forms the maritime gateway through which a significant share of global oil and liquefied natural gas trade must pass. Its importance lies not in its physical size, but in the concentration of flows that depend on it.

Roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption transits through the Strait of Hormuz, alongside a substantial share of global LNG trade. This makes it one of the most strategically sensitive maritime passages in the world energy system. Even without actual disruption, the mere possibility of interference can generate immediate geopolitical and economic effects: shipping insurance premiums rise, naval deployments increase, and energy markets respond to perceived risk.

This is what makes Hormuz more than a geographical feature. It functions as a chokepoint in the full sense of the term: a narrow point in a system where concentrated flows create outsized leverage for those able to influence access. Yet, Hormuz is best understood as a warning sign rather than an exception. It shows how concentrated dependence can become political leverage when alternatives are limited and disruption is costly. This article argues that the same logic increasingly applies beyond maritime geography. In critical minerals, the chokepoints of power are often less visible. Think for instance of mines, refineries, processing plants, export controls and industrial standards. Understanding these hidden bottlenecks is essential to understanding the future of strategic autonomy and resource resilience.

From Oil Chokepoints to Mineral Chokepoints

A chokepoint is often imagined as a narrow passage on a map: a strait, canal, pipeline route or port through which essential goods must pass. Yet, the concept is more useful if understood more broadly. A chokepoint is any point in a system where flows are highly concentrated, alternatives are limited, and disruption produces effects far beyond the immediate site of interruption. In that sense, the Strait of Hormuz is only the most visible version of a wider pattern.

The political power of a chokepoint comes from three overlapping conditions: concentration, criticality and weak substitutability. First, control over a flow must be concentrated in relatively few hands or locations. Second, the flow must be critical to the functioning of a wider system, whether energy, finance, technology, food, or defence. Third, alternatives must be difficult, slow or expensive to build. Where these conditions overlap, dependence can become leverage. This logic is consistent with Farrell and Newman’s concept of “weaponized interdependence” and with Clayton, Maggiori and Schreger’s account of economic coercion.

This logic has become more important because globalisation has not simply dispersed power. It has also produced dense networks with powerful hubs. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe this as “weaponized interdependence”: states that exercise jurisdiction over central nodes in global networks can use that position to gather information or restrict access. Their concept of the “chokepoint effect” is especially relevant here: if a state controls a hub that others cannot easily bypass, it may be able to deny access, impose costs, or coerce policy change.

Edward Fishman’s recent book Chokepoints extends this argument into the practice of contemporary economic statecraft. Fishman argues that the United States and its allies have increasingly relied on control over financial, technological and trade infrastructure. This includes the dollar system, sanctions architecture, and advanced semiconductor technology. Increasingly, these elements are used as instruments of geopolitical power. In this reading, the most consequential chokepoints of the twenty-first century are not always physical. They may sit inside payment systems, export-control regimes, software stacks, shipping insurance markets, chip supply chains or energy-processing infrastructure.

This does not mean that geography has become irrelevant. Rather, geography has been joined by networks. The same basic logic that makes Hormuz powerful also applies to less visible chokepoints: a rare earth separation plant, a semiconductor lithography machine, a dollar-clearing transaction, an export licence, or a refinery with few substitutes. Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator for The Wall Street Journal, makes this point by contrasting tariffs with chokepoint controls. Tariffs raise costs broadly, while chokepoints exploit specific dependencies where the target has few immediate alternatives.

This idea of chokepoints, therefore, helps connect different forms of geopolitical pressure: Iran’s leverage over Hormuz, Russia’s leverage over pipeline gas, China’s role in rare earth processing, US influence over dollar-based finance, and the EU’s regulatory power over access to the single market are not identical cases. They share a family resemblance. Each involves the conversion of concentrated dependence into political power. The central question is not simply who owns a resource, but who controls the point through which that resource, technology, transaction or capability must pass.

This is why chokepoints provide a bridge from the geopolitics of oil to the geopolitics of critical minerals. Critical minerals matter not only because they are needed for batteries, grids, chips and defence systems, but because their supply chains contain multiple points of concentration. The mine may be one chokepoint, but the refinery, separation facility, processing technology, export permit, industrial standard, or industry knowledge may be another. To understand their geopolitical significance, it is therefore necessary to look beyond extraction and ask where control actually sits.

The Supply Chains of Critical Minerals

The energy transition does not eliminate resource geopolitics. Rather, it changes its material basis. As economies electrify, the strategic question shifts from access to oil and gas alone towards access to the minerals, metals and processing capacity. These are needed for batteries, grids, wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, semiconductors and defence technologies.

This shift creates a different kind of chokepoint. Oil chokepoints are often geographical: tankers move through Hormuz, Suez or Malacca. Mineral chokepoints are more frequently industrial. A mineral may be mined in one country, refined in another, turned into a component in a third, and embedded in a final technology elsewhere. The strategic vulnerability is therefore not only the mine, but the sequence of processing steps that makes the raw material usable.

The International Energy Agency has repeatedly warned that clean-energy technologies are significantly more mineral-intensive than fossil-fuel-based systems, and that supply chains for many key minerals remain highly concentrated. In its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025, the IEA notes that the average market share of the top three refining countries for key energy minerals rose from around 82% in 2020 to 86% in 2024. It also finds that about 90% of recent supply growth came from the top single supplier alone: Indonesia for nickel, and China for cobalt, graphite and rare earths.

This matters because refining concentration can be as strategically important as geological concentration. A country may not control the ore underground, but it can still control the stage at which ore becomes battery-grade lithium, refined cobalt, spherical graphite, separated rare earths or magnet material. The chokepoint of the energy transition is therefore not simply where resources are extracted, but where they are transformed.

Critical Minerals: the Material Base of Modern Power

Critical minerals are not necessarily “critical” because they are rare. They are critical because they combine economic importance with supply risk. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act distinguishes between critical raw materials (CRMs) and strategic raw materials (SRMs). CRMs are raw materials identified by the EU as having high economic importance and a high risk of supply disruption, while SRMs are a subset of CRMs considered particularly crucial for technologies supporting the green and digital transition, as well as the defence and aerospace sectors.

The most important materials can be grouped by function.

Battery minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and manganese are central to electric vehicles and grid storage.
Magnet minerals, especially rare earth elements such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, are needed for permanent magnets used in electric motors, wind turbines, drones, robotics and defence systems.
Electrification minerals such as copper, aluminium and silicon underpin grids, cables, solar technologies and broader energy infrastructure.
Semiconductor and defence-related materials such as gallium, germanium, tungsten, antimony, titanium and tantalum matter because they appear in chips, sensors, radar, infrared optics, ammunition, aerospace systems and other high-technology applications.
Resources such as phosphate, potash and uranium sit at the edge of the “critical minerals” debate but are central to food security and energy resilience.

This functional grouping is useful because it avoids treating critical minerals as a single category. Each material has a different geography, demand profile, substitution potential and strategic risk. Lithium raises questions about battery supply chains; rare earths about magnets; copper about scale and grids; gallium and germanium about semiconductors; uranium about nuclear fuel. They are not interchangeable, but modern industrial systems increasingly depend on all of them.

Hidden Chokepoints: Who Controls Critical Minerals?

To ask who “controls” critical minerals is to ask several questions at once. Control can mean geological control: who has the reserves underground. It can mean extraction control: who mines the material at scale. It can mean processing control: who refines or separates the material into usable form. It can mean industrial control: who turns refined material into batteries, magnets, chips, turbines or weapons systems. And it can mean political or regulatory control: who can restrict exports, impose sanctions, finance projects, control shipping routes or set technical standards.

This layered understanding is essential because extraction is often not the main bottleneck. Cobalt is heavily associated with the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the mining stage. Refining of cobalt and battery integration are, however, strongly linked to China. Rare earths are mined in several countries, but China’s strength lies especially in separation, refining and magnet production. Graphite is another example. The strategic issue is not just the extraction, but also the processing of battery-grade spherical graphite used in anodes. Nickel shows a different form of chokepoint politics. Indonesia has used its position as a major nickel producer to restrict raw ore exports. Instead, Indonesia encourages domestic processing. This enables Indonesia to turn resource control into an industrial strategy.

Critical minerals have also already been used in overt political and regulatory ways. China’s export restrictions on rare earths, tungsten, and molybdenum led to WTO disputes brought by the United States, the European Union and Japan in 2012. More recently, China introduced export controls on gallium and germanium-related items from August 2023, citing national security and interests. In December 2024, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced restrictions on exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials to the United States. China combined this with stricter checks on dual-use graphite items. These materials are not large-volume commodities like oil, but their strategic relevance lies in their role in semiconductors, defence electronics, solar technologies and high-performance materials.

This is why critical minerals are best understood as systems of leverage rather than simple deposits of natural wealth. The mine matters. The refinery, the processing plant, the chemical conversion stage, the component manufacturer, the export licence, the shipping route, the offtake contract and the technical standard also all matter. In many cases, power sits not where the resource begins, but where it becomes indispensable.

No Autonomy Without Resilience

The political significance of critical-mineral chokepoints is that they shape the ability of states to act under pressure. Strategic autonomy is often misunderstood as self-sufficiency. This is, however, neither realistic nor desirable for most economies. A more useful definition is the capacity to make and implement decisions in strategically important areas without being paralysed by external dependencies.

Resilience is the operational counterpart to that autonomy. NATO defines resilience as the capacity to prepare for, resist, respond to and quickly recover from shocks and disruptions. Applied to resource systems, this means that a state or region must be able to withstand interruption without losing the ability to power its grid, build essential technologies, maintain defence systems or sustain basic economic activity. Autonomy is therefore not only a diplomatic aspiration. It depends on material systems that can continue functioning under stress.

This is where chokepoints become politically important. Interdependence is not inherently dangerous. Trade, specialisation and global supply chains can create efficiency and mutual benefit. Vulnerability emerges when a dependency is concentrated, critical and difficult to substitute. In those conditions, the actor controlling the bottleneck gains leverage. The strategic task is therefore not to eliminate all dependence. Rather, it is to prevent dependence from becoming coercion.

Ensuring Resilience

Governments have begun to respond to this problem by treating critical minerals as a matter of economic security, industrial policy and strategic autonomy. The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act is one of the clearest examples. By 2030, the EU aims to meet:

at least 10% of its annual consumption of strategic raw materials through domestic extraction;
at least 40% through domestic processing; and
at least 25% through recycling.

The EU also seeks to strengthen supply-chain resilience by ensuring that no more than 65% of its annual consumption of any strategic raw material (at any relevant processing stage) is sourced from a single third country.

The United States has taken a similar turn. It has systematically introduced critical materials assessments, supply-chain reviews and industrial policy measures linked to clean energy and advanced manufacturing. The Department of Energy’s 2023 Critical Materials Assessment evaluates materials based on their importance to energy technologies and their supply risk. More broadly, the IEA’s Critical Minerals Policy Tracker shows that governments across the world are increasingly adopting policies on mineral security, diversification, domestic processing, recycling and strategic partnerships.

Private companies are also responding to chokepoint risk by moving upstream. Automakers and battery producers increasingly sign long-term offtake agreements, take equity stakes in mining companies, provide prepayments, or enter joint ventures to secure lithium, nickel, cobalt and other battery materials before they reach open markets. GM’s joint venture with Lithium Americas to develop the Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada, Volkswagen and PowerCo’s investment and long-term offtake agreement with Patriot Battery Metals in Canada, and Mercedes-Benz’s direct lithium supply agreement with Rock Tech Lithium all show how carmakers are trying to secure future mineral flows before they become exposed to open-market volatility. Apple’s use of 100% recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries and 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets shows a different corporate response. Apple chooses to reduce its exposure by recovering critical materials already inside the product cycle. Circularity therefore becomes more than an environmental strategy. By lowering dependence on newly mined inputs and vulnerable external chokepoints, this also functions as a supply-security strategy.

These responses mark a broader change in political economy. For decades, supply chains were often organised around cost, efficiency and just-in-time delivery. The emerging critical-minerals agenda adds another priority: resilience. States and companies are no longer asking only whether materials can be acquired cheaply, but whether they can be acquired reliably and without creating excessive exposure to a single supplier or processing hub.

Chokepoints as a System Design Problem

The challenge is that reducing one chokepoint can create another. A country may open new mines but still depend on foreign refining. It may diversify suppliers but remain dependent on one shipping route. It may reshore production but create new environmental, water or community pressures at home. This is why critical-mineral resilience should be treated as a system design problem rather than a simple extraction problem.

This starts with mapping chokepoints across the whole chain: exploration, mining, processing, refining, component manufacturing, finance, standards, transport, recycling and waste. OECD emphasises that export restrictions and concentrated dependencies on critical raw materials pose risks to supply-chain resilience and economic security. The OECD has also found that export restrictions on industrial raw materials increased more than fivefold between 2009 and 2023. This illustrates how policies themselves can become a chokepoint.

It is of importance to build capacity beyond mining. Processing and refining are strategic infrastructure. Without them, new extraction may simply feed existing chokepoints elsewhere. Recycling should also be understood in strategic terms. The IEA argues that scaling up critical-mineral recycling can: build reserves against supply disruptions, reduce reliance on new mines, and mitigate environmental and social impacts from mining and refining.

Ecological or social fragility should not replace geopolitical fragility. Recent reporting by The Guardian has raised concerns that some EU-backed critical-mineral projects, which require a lot of water, are located in already water-stressed regions. This highlights the danger of solving one resilience problem by worsening another. A credible resource-resilience strategy therefore cannot be only about access. It must also be about legitimacy, sustainability and long-term system stability.

Conclusion: from Hormuz to Hidden Chokepoints

The Strait of Hormuz shows how a narrow passage can create outsized geopolitical leverage. Critical minerals reveal the same logic in less visible form. Their chokepoints are not always found on maps. They sit in refineries, separation plants, export licences, processing technologies, component factories and industrial standards.

The lesson is not that actors, whether public or private organisations, should seek total independence. In an interdependent world, that is neither possible nor necessarily desirable. The goal is to build systems with options. This must include diversified suppliers, domestic and allied processing capacity, strategic partnerships, recycling infrastructure and the ability to absorb shocks. Strategic autonomy, in this sense, is not the absence of dependence. It is the ability to prevent dependence from becoming coercion.

From Hormuz to rare earth refineries, modern power increasingly lies at the points where flows narrow. Understanding those chokepoints is essential to understanding the geopolitics of resilience. Shall we?

This article is part of The Outside World, ftrprf’s very own research center.

As changemakers, we believe that what happens in the outside world is the most powerful force shaping organizational strategy – and also the most underestimated. To do well, organizations need to understand what’s happening in the outside world. To do significantly better, they need to be aware of what it means for their future, their relations, their strategy, and their impact. We serve as a bridge between society and tailored strategy by analysing societal dynamics, global trends, and shifting public expectations with a multidisciplinary team of international analysts, excellent tooling, sophisticated AI, and a systems approach. This article is part of our second trimester research focus, which centers on resilience.

For more information, please contact theoutsideworld@ftrprf.com.

Next articleThe Trees We May Never Sit Beneath

In his essay on old age, Cicero described an image of an elderly farmer planting trees for another era he would not live to see. When asked why he labored for a harvest he would never see, the farmer answered without hesitation: for the generations to come . The image has endured because it expresses something fundamental. A good society is not only one that cares for its living citizens, but one that keeps making promises to a future that is not even here yet. For much of modern history, many societies could assume the next generation would be larger. That is no longer true. By 2024, more than half of all countries had fertility rates below replacement level, and by the late 2070s the global population aged 65 and older is projected to surpass the number of children under 18 . Most of the discussion of ageing societies treats the challenge as one of primarily money: How to fund pensions when fewer workers support each retiree; who will pay for the care older populations need; how far can the retirement age rise before the welfare state stops making sense. These pressures are real and immediate. But to frame demographic resilience only as a question of funding is to treat ageing as a budget problem, rather than a deeper test of what society stands for. As societies age, more public resources and political commitments become tied to needs that already exist. Pensions need to be paid. Health systems need to absorb the realities of longer lives. And social care must be organised. These commitments recognise a lifetime of contribution that older generations have given to society. In that sense, they form part of an unspoken promise between generations: that each generation supports the one before it, trusting that those who follow will one day do the same. This creates a form of social safety that can enable societies to think and plan beyond the short-term, for timescales that go beyond one lifetime. That long-term promise becomes harder to maintain as societies age. As the share of older people rises relative to the working-age population, pensions, healthcare and long-term care place greater demands on public budgets. These needs are immediate and difficult to defer in a way that many long-term investments are not. For example, if a pension payment is late, it can affect whether an individual can pay rent, buy groceries or arrange the care they depend on. Long-term investments create a different kind of pressure. If a school building is not maintained or climate adaptation infrastructure investment is postponed, the effects may not be felt immediately. The decision can look manageable in the moment. But over time, and repeated decisions, these delays shape the conditions future generations inherit. The costs land on people who were not at the table when the decisions were made . In OECD economies, public spending on old-age benefits and healthcare alone amounts to roughly 15 percent of GDP on average, while pensions, healthcare and especially long-term care are projected to place increasing pressure on public budgets as populations age . At the same time, the IMF’s 2025 Fiscal Monitor finds that public investment has declined as a share of total spending over recent decades, and public education spending has either fallen or stagnated in most countries . Estimates suggest that shifting one percentage point of GDP from current spending to human-capital investment or research and development could raise GDP by more than three percent by 2050 in advanced economies . This is the pull of the present. Existing commitments are easier to defend because their consequences are visible now. Future oriented investments are easier to delay because the costs of delay appear later. The potential risk is not that societies stop caring about the future, but that under pressure they leave too little room for the renewal that future resilience depends on. The pull of the present can make demographic change feel like a fixed future. If populations are ageing, fertility is falling and working-age populations are shrinking, it can seem as if the only task left is to manage decline. But every projection rests on assumptions about how people will live, move, work, age, have children and die. When those assumptions shift, the future shifts with them. Population change is more predictable in the short and medium term than economic growth or technological change, which makes it important for policies that require a longer time horizon . At the same time, long-range projections remain uncertain, especially because future birth rates are difficult to anticipate. In its 2024 revision, the United Nations projected a global population peak of around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an earlier and lower peak than previous revisions had anticipated, driven in part by lower-than-expected fertility in some of the world’s largest countries . The uncertainty does not weaken the value of projections; it changes how they should be interpreted. Fertility rates are shaped by conditions such as housing costs, childcare, gender equality, and economic security . Mortality assumptions depend on changes in medicine, inequality, public health and behaviour. Migration assumptions can shift with conflict, labour demand, policy and crisis . A population forecast is not a certainty, but it can be used as a starting point to identify where systems need to adapt. A forecast may show where systems need to adapt, but politics determines whether and how that adaptation happens. Governments decide how limited resources are spent, which commitments are protected, and what gets postponed. In ageing societies, those choices are shaped by a basic imbalance: the people most affected by long-term consequences are not always the people with the strongest voice today. The political theorist Dennis Thompson calls this democracy’s “presentism”: a bias toward present citizens and present concerns . Democracies are designed around people who can vote, organise and hold leaders accountable. Future citizens cannot do any of those things, even when today’s decisions shape the conditions they will inherit. The OECD states that population ageing is decreasing the share of young voters, increasing pension obligations, and raising demand for healthcare and social care across OECD countries . At the same time, it finds that young people’s trust in public institutions and their sense of political influence and representation have stalled since the global financial crisis, even while young people remain motivated by challenges such as climate change, rising inequality, shrinking civic space and threats to democratic institutions . A 2025 study using the European Social Survey found that, over the past two decades, people under fifty have become a minority within the voter population, a threshold first crossed in 2007 . It also found that turnout among under-fifties has declined relative to older voters, and that political manifestos in faster-ageing countries have shifted toward topics more associated with older voters, especially retirement policy. This is where the intergenerational promise becomes political. A society may value future generations in principle, while still making decisions through systems that give greater weight to citizens and claims already present. The OECD frames this as an intergenerational justice issue: population ageing decreases the share of young voters while increasing pension obligations and demand for health and social care . If the future is weakly represented, resilience cannot depend on goodwill alone. It has to be built into how decisions are made. It requires institutions and processes to consider long-term consequences of a decision before they become difficult to reverse. Some governments have started experimenting with ideas and policies to address intergenerational justice and obligations. The Netherlands has introduced a Generation Test that is designed to assess how the benefits and burdens of a policy are distributed across age groups, including those not yet born . New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework applies a similar logic to the budget process. It brings current well-being, future capital and distributional impacts into the assessment of public spending. In 2019, the framework was used to assess budget bids from government agencies, contributing to a budget that prioritised child poverty, mental health among young people and the transition to a low-emissions economy alongside conventional fiscal measures . These are still early experiments. Neither has a long track record to assess its impact, but they indicate that institutions are starting to adapt and design for a changing world. Wales has gone further by putting long-term responsibility into law. The Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015 requires public bodies to demonstrate how their decisions will affect long-term well-being . It also created a Future Generations Commissioner with a mandate to advise public bodies, review how they take into account long-term impacts, and make recommendations. In OECD economies, public spending on old-age benefits and healthcare alone amounts to roughly 15 percent of GDP on average, while pensions, healthcare and especially long-term care are projected to place increasing pressure on public budgets as populations age . That single example does not prove that one law can make every decision future-proof. It shows that when long-term consequences are written into the rules of accountability, they become harder to ignore. Finland chose a different approach: not an external commissioner, but a foresight built into the parliament itself . Since 1993, Finland's Committee for the Future has brought together members from across parties to examine long-term risks and opportunities that exceed any single electoral cycle, and the government is required to engage with its findings. The logic is simple: the pull of the present operates not just in budgets but in the attention of politicians. A committee whose explicit purpose is the long term creates a standing obligation to look further ahead than the next election. These experiments differ in strength and design. What they share is more modest: each creates a moment in the policy process where the future has to be named, where deferring it becomes a choice that must be justified, rather than a habit that goes unnoticed. The same question appears beyond government. Stewardship means managing something today on behalf of those who come after, and it appears at every scale. Families make choices between immediate needs and the education, care and security that will shape the next generation. Organisations decide whether to protect today’s profits or keep investing in skills, maintenance, research and succession. Pension funds, foundations, endowments and sovereign wealth funds exist because some responsibilities stretch beyond a single budget cycle, leadership term or lifetime. At every scale, the future depends on someone having reason to hold it in view. Cicero’s farmer understood something institutions often forget: the future is not in the room, but it is still owed something. That is the test ageing societies now face. Not whether they will grow old, but whether they will keep choosing to act on behalf of lives that lie beyond their own horizon. The present is always easier to defend. Design is what tilts the balance back: systems that force long-horizon choices into view before their consequences become irreversible. Without that effort, the future does not lose in any single dramatic decision. It simply runs out of advocates. Demographic resilience is not only about funding longer lives. It is about building the structures that keep the future visible, in budgets, in parliaments, in boardrooms, and families, before the costs of ignoring it become too large to reverse. So let’s be the people who keep planting trees whose shade we may never sit beneath. Shall we?

2026-06-15

The Trees We May Never Sit Beneath

The Power of Chokepoints Understanding chokepoints is essential to understanding the geopolitics of resilience.