Read the original first: War Is Forcing the World to Reckon With Geography’s Power (New York Times, 5 October 2026, about 8 minutes). What follows is a summary and a set of tools for arguing with it. It is not a substitute for reading the piece.
The argument in one paragraph
For about thirty years, globalisation and technology seemed to make distance irrelevant. Money moved instantly, goods arrived from anywhere, and the map felt like background. Cohen argues that 2026 has broken that assumption. Countries and armed groups that cannot match the military or economic power of the United States have still been able to squeeze the world economy, simply because of where they sit. Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations puts the point plainly: Stuff still needs to get from here to there.
Five chokepoints, two kinds of cause
The article mixes two very different processes. Sort them before you use any of them.
| Place | What happened in 2026 | Cause |
|---|---|---|
| Strait of Hormuz | Iran disrupted traffic through the only sea route into the Persian Gulf. Oil is moving again, but mostly in tankers escorted by the US Navy. Iran has also pressured shipowners to pay for passage. | Conflict |
| Bab al‑Mandab | The Iranian backed Houthi movement in Yemen took control of the narrow southern entrance to the Red Sea, the route to the Suez Canal. | Conflict |
| Rhine and Danube | Summer drought lowered river levels, raising freight costs and cutting industrial output. Hungary and Romania faced risks to electricity supply because their nuclear reactors are cooled with river water. | Climate |
| Panama Canal | Operators restricted traffic because of low water levels made worse by El Niño. The canal carries roughly 40 percent of US container traffic. | Climate |
| Arctic Ocean | Chinese shipping companies began the first regularly scheduled commercial crossing of the Arctic, made possible by warming waters, sharpening competition with the United States. | Climate, then power |
Conflict closes old routes. Climate change both closes old routes (rivers, Panama) and opens new ones (the Arctic). A strong answer separates the two, then shows where they overlap.
Why weaker powers reach for the map
The most useful idea in the article for this course is about power. During the decades of hyperglobalisation, the two largest powers built pressure on economic chokepoints rather than physical ones. The United States uses its dominance of the global financial system to freeze assets and block transactions. China uses its control of rare earth metals to pressure rivals.
Countries without those tools look for their own leverage. For Iran, the leverage is a strait. Edward Fishman, a former diplomat now at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that Iran lived under heavy sanctions through the 2000s and 2010s without coming close to closing Hormuz. That it has done so now is, in his view, a sign of how far the world has moved from the globalisation model, and he expects the weaponising of geographic features to continue.
Underneath this is an older question: who keeps the sea lanes open? Since 1945, free navigation has largely depended on the United States acting as enforcer. Cohen notes that American willingness to play that role has weakened while other powers, including China in the waters around Taiwan, test it.
Location as real estate
Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins, author of The Landscape of Power, argues that the last thirty years rested on two mistakes: that rivalry between great powers was over, and that innovation had erased the constraints of geography. He points to two places whose value is mostly their position.
A hinge between European and Asian powers, with Black Sea ports and some of the most fertile soil on Earth. Contested for generations for exactly those reasons.
Sits between Japan and Indonesia and anchors the chain of islands off the Chinese coast. Control of it changes who controls the sea lanes around it.
Not new. In the fifth century BC, Sparta used control of this strait to cut Athens off from its grain supply during the Peloponnesian War.
The twist: technology made the chokepoint
Do not read this as geography beating technology. The article makes a subtler point near the end. Hormuz only became the world’s most important energy chokepoint after the Second World War, when oil extraction and export infrastructure was built around the Gulf. Technology turned a useful shipping lane into a pressure point. The same logic runs forward: new pipelines that bypass the straits, new trade relationships and new technology could redraw the map again.
“Geography is back” is a journalist’s framing, not a finding. Geography never left; what changed is how visible it is. Present the article as an argument with evidence, attribute it to its author, and weigh it. That is evaluation. Repeating it is not.
The debate behind the article
This piece sits inside a long argument you can use in essays. In 2005, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat argued that technology and trade were levelling the global playing field and shrinking the importance of location. In 2012, Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography argued the opposite: that mountains, rivers, coasts and distances still shape what states can do. Cohen’s article is evidence for the Kaplan side, gathered in 2026. Your job is to decide whether one year of shocks is enough to settle the question.
Where it connects in this course
Energy security in its sharpest form: a fifth of the world’s oil depending on one strait, and price shocks spreading into interest rates, factories and harvests.
Drought on the Rhine and Danube, low water at Panama, an open Arctic. Climate change as a process that rewires trade, not only a hazard.
The Arctic route is extreme environment geography in action: access, resource competition and sovereignty in a place that was physically closed until recently.
Financial chokepoints for the strong, physical chokepoints for the weak. Who can apply pressure, and through what?
Ukraine and Taiwan valued for position. The same piece of land means different things to different actors.
Pipelines, new routes and new technology could reduce the power of today’s chokepoints. What futures are plausible?
For Monday
- Sort the five chokepoints in the table into those closed by human action and those closed by physical processes. Then explain why the Arctic does not fit neatly into either group.
- The United States and China use economic chokepoints; Iran uses a physical one. Explain why a weaker state would choose geography as its source of leverage.
- Iran was under heavy sanctions for two decades without closing Hormuz. Suggest three reasons why it would be willing to do so in 2026 but not before.
- The Panama Canal carries roughly 40 percent of US container traffic. Explain how a drought in Central America could raise prices in a supermarket in Florida. Show each link in the chain.
- Hormuz became critical only after oil infrastructure was built around the Gulf. Use this to argue that technology creates chokepoints as well as removing them.
- Evaluate the claim that “geography is back.” Use Friedman and Kaplan as the two positions, and at least two places from this page as evidence.
- Compare this article with the Iran and Hormuz story and the Yemen displacement story on this site. What does a global analysis piece show that a single country story does not, and what does it miss?
- Source check: this is labelled news analysis, not a news report. Explain the difference, and say what that means for how you cite it in an exam answer.
Sources
- New York TimesWar Is Forcing the World to Reckon With Geography’s Power — Patricia Cohen, 5 October 2026. News analysis. Source of the figures and expert views in this summary. A subscription may be needed; ask Mr. Shrake if you cannot access it.
- On this siteIran and the Strait of Hormuz — 8 September 2026. The country level detail behind the Hormuz row of the table.
- On this siteThe hottest month ever measured — 10 September 2026. The El Niño behind the low water at Panama.
Current as of 6 October 2026. Shipping through Hormuz and Bab al‑Mandab is changing week to week, so check a current report before you cite the state of either strait.