Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates global maritime leverage as a weapon. Southeast Asian states now consider tolls on the Malacca Strait, eroding freedom of navigation norms with potentially catastrophic economic consequences.
Global Maritime Leverage has become the defining factor of the 2026 economic landscape as nations observe the fallout from the Iran conflict. This Global Maritime Leverage allows states to control vital trade routes, proving that Global Maritime Leverage can be wielded as a weapon. Understanding this Global Maritime Leverage is essential for navigating the current global crisis.
The Iranian Model of Global Maritime Leverage
Iran has suffered enormous infrastructure damage since the start of the war in late February, yet the country remains resilient. As I noted in a prior article, the regime’s survival has been due in part to assistance from other autocrats, including major supporters China and Russia.
But Iran has also learned that, in an existential war, it can upend the global economy and inflict significant economic pain on U.S. partners globally by controlling the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.
What Iran has taught other countries, unintentionally at first, is that states astride a critical maritime choke point could wield extraordinary leverage over the global economy.
By mining entrances to the Strait of Hormuz, threatening tanker traffic, and periodically choking the flow of energy to world markets, Iran has demonstrated how quickly economic pain can radiate outward to countries in Asia that depend heavily on Gulf oil.
Shifted Alliances and Global Maritime Leverage
As I previously noted, U.S. Asian allies and partners, faced with acute energy shortages that Washington is trying to help alleviate—with limited resources to do so—are turning to emboldened U.S. adversaries, namely, Beijing for massive imports of renewable technology, and Iran and Russia for oil imports.
The spectacle of a single choke point holding the global economy hostage has not been lost on other governments. In Southeast Asia, there is an even more critical global maritime passage than the Strait of Hormuz: the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly a third of global trade and more than a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes.
The importance of the Strait of Malacca is nearly impossible to overstate. Connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, its narrowest point, near Singapore, is barely 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) wide. Ninety thousand vessels pass through it each year. Major Asian exporters like China, Vietnam, and others whose manufactured goods are critical to every part of the world economy depend on the Strait of Malacca, as do consumers and companies around the world.
Economic Cascades of Global Maritime Leverage
There is also almost no way to get around the strait. Ships seeking to bypass it would have to sail around the entire Indonesian archipelago, adding thousands of nautical miles and many days to their journey, or go around the southern tip of Australia—an option that is effectively impractical for most shippers because of the costs and the physical distance required. Any sustained disruption to traffic through the Strait of Malacca would send cascading shocks through the global economy more severe than those caused by Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz.
Beyond the Gulf states and Iran, there is no part of the world where the economic impacts of the Iran war have hit harder than in Southeast Asia, which is heavily dependent on oil and liquified natural gas from the Gulf. Fuel shortages and work-from-home stipulations for civil servants, among many other effects, have demonstrated the massive costs of the conflict on daily life across the region.
Monetizing the Strait: New Global Maritime Leverage
Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz has made freedom of navigation for vessels, a norm long upheld by the United States and the rest of the world, suddenly seem less certain. In a recent turn of events that sent shockwaves through Southeast Asia’s diplomatic community, Indonesian Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa floated in April the idea of placing tolls on ships transiting the Strait of Malacca. “If we split it three ways between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, that could be quite something, right?” he said at a symposium.
Although the finance minister has since walked back his comments after Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono publicly rejected the idea, the simple fact that it was mentioned suggested that Indonesia’s political leadership has begun considering the idea.
Other Indonesian political elites have privately suggested to me that, at high levels of the government, the idea of using the Strait of Malacca to raise money for Indonesia’s budget has been taken seriously. At an April forum convened in response to the Iran war’s effect on Malaysia’s domestic affairs, Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said that no country has the power to determine access to the Strait of Malacca unilaterally, and that “whatever is to be done… must involve the cooperation of all four countries” astride the waterway—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.
Security Risks and Global Maritime Leverage
Regardless of the likelihood of these states trying to monetize the strait, the fact that Southeast Asian states are even raising the idea of tolling the Strait of Malacca is already forcing ships to pay a higher premium for transiting the waterway.
Dita Liliansa, a professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney, told the New York Times, “[Southeast Asian states] could just say, ‘Look, we’re not going to impose a toll, but it would be really nice if you helped us financially.’” As the Times further noted, in the aftermath of the Indonesian finance minister’s comments, costs across Southeast Asia are already increasing to insure, ship, and move fossil fuels through the Strait of Malacca.
Furthermore, floating the idea of using the strait as a revenue source carries security risks for Southeast Asia. Many of the region’s littoral states have staked the validity of their maritime territorial claims, which are disputed with China, on maritime laws.
(The Philippines took China to the Hague and won an arbitration ruling there in 2016, based on maritime laws, which held that Beijing’s South China Sea claims were invalid.) This includes Indonesia’s own right to sovereignty over waters within its archipelago and the natural resources within them, as well as its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The End of Navigation Norms in Global Maritime Leverage
But the signals that these states, and other countries around the world, are getting from the global hegemon are encouraging the breakdown—and potentially its end—of global commitment to freedom of navigation in Southeast Asia. The Trump administration has done more than simply observe developments that challenge freedom of navigation. Indeed, the United States, which is not a party to UNCLOS, has actively encouraged the idea that such freedom no longer matters in today’s world. The U.S. Navy’s Freedom of Navigation report, for instance, did not emphasize the principle.
Even before his inauguration, President Donald Trump suggested that the United States should reclaim the Panama Canal and monetize it. The proposal was presented partly as bluster and partly as a negotiating tactic, but its broader effect was to normalize—at the highest level of U.S. statecraft—the idea that maritime choke points are economic assets to be exploited rather than global commons to be maintained.
As journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, Trump even suggested, earlier in the Iran war, that the United States and Iran could work together to control the Strait of Hormuz and charge ships transiting it. That would, however, be a complete disregard of the principle of freedom of navigation. “For most of its history, the United States has taken a different view. Freedom of navigation has been treated not as a privilege to be sold, but as a right to be defended,” Zakaria wrote. No longer, apparently. And as countries like Southeast Asian middle powers learn from the global hegemon, the stress on the world economy could be catastrophic.