Gates of Power, Corridors of Pain: The Chokepoint Fallacy
From the Øresund to the Dardanelles, chokepoints have imposed prolonged conflict and heavy costs on those who seek to command them.
With Washington mired in a strategic cul-de-sac in Iran with no evident off-ramp, there has been frenzied speculation in the past few days of President Donald Trump and the Pentagon mulling weeks-long ground operations, including raids on Kharg Island and Iranian coastal positions abutting the Strait of Hormuz.
Kharg, lying some 650 kilometres northwest of the strait, handles the bulk of Iran’s oil exports. The logic behind its proposed seizure is to constrict Tehran’s fiscal lifeline.
Regardless of whether American troops are ultimately deployed on ground in Iran, the allure of capturing global chokepoints has exerted a powerful hold over strategists in different marches of history.
For centuries, a narrow strait, a fortified island or a constricted passage between two seas have acquired an almost talismanic allure when contemplated in the councils of power.
Trump’s designs upon Kharg Island belong to this enduring tradition: the belief that the seizure of a point may compel the submission of a system.
But History, that stern tutor of overreach, offers a colder verdict. While chokepoints have enriched nations, more often they have entangled ambition, provoked resistance and imposed costs far exceeding their promise for the powers that sought to control them.
Fiscal Geography
No state monetised a chokepoint more systematically in early modern history than Denmark at the Danish Straits. What began as geography became policy in 1429, when King Eric of Pomerania imposed a toll on all vessels passing through the Øresund - the narrow channel linking the North Sea to the Baltic.
The levy came to be known as the ‘Sound Dues,’ derived from “the Sound” - the English term for Øresund itself. Every ship was required to halt at Helsingør (Elsinore), declare its cargo, and pay a duty calibrated to its value. Far more than a toll, this was one of Europe’s earliest experiments in what historians have termed “fiscal geography” - the systematic conversion of location into revenue.
The results were transformative. By the 16th and 17th centuries, the dues accounted for a substantial share (at times nearly two-thirds) of the Danish crown’s income. They financed fortifications, sustained naval power and elevated a middling kingdom into a pivotal Baltic actor. Grain from Poland, timber from Scandinavia and naval stores from Russia all passed through the Danish Straits.
Yet success bred intense friction between rival European powers. The Dutch Republic, whose commercial lifeblood depended on Baltic access, resisted both diplomatically and militarily. Sweden, rising to great-power status in the 17th century, contested Danish dominance in a series of Northern Wars. The Treaty of Brömsebro (1645) and subsequent settlements chipped away at the universality of the dues, weakening their fiscal logic.
By the early 19th century, the system had become strategically intolerable to other rising powers. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain, fearing that Napoleon Bonaparte might gain control of the Danish fleet and with it influence over the Baltic approaches, launched the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, a pre-emptive strike aimed as much at a chokepoint regime as at a state.
The Copenhagen Convention of 1857 finally abolished the Sound Dues under international pressure. But this was achieved at great cost to other powers and Denmark itself.
Strategic Limits
If Denmark represented the fiscal exploitation of chokepoints, Malta illustrated its strategic limits. Perched between Sicily and North Africa, the island has long served as a pivot in the central Mediterranean. During the Great Siege of 1565, the Knights Hospitaller had repelled an Ottoman armada, demonstrating how a fortified node could blunt imperial expansion.
Yet Malta’s later history under British rule offers a completely different lesson. As a base during the Napoleonic Wars and a linchpin of imperial communications thereafter, Malta was indispensable but never quite sufficient to guarantee British control of Mediterranean Sea lanes. It functioned as part of a chain of the British Empire along with Gibraltar to the west and Suez to the east. During the Second World War, this dependency became stark as Axis forces subjected the island to relentless siege, nearly starving it into submission. Between 1940 and 1942, Malta endured one of the heaviest sustained bombing campaigns of the war, with German and Italian aircraft seeking to neutralise it as a British base.
Its survival depended on a series of hazardous convoy operations mounted by the Royal Navy - most notably Operation Pedestal (August 1942), alongside earlier efforts such as Operations Harpoon and Vigorous. Losses were severe as carriers were damaged, cruisers were sunk and merchant ships destroyed in significant numbers.
Malta, a chokepoint base, completely consumed British power, demanding a continuous expenditure of ships, matériel and lives to remain operational.
Geometry of Defence
Long before modern naval theory pioneered by the likes of A.T. Mahan, the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium had well understood what narrow waters could do. The Bosporus and the Dardanelles were engineered as instruments of denial by successive Byzantine emperors.
Constantinople’s layered defensive system - most famously its landward Theodosian Walls, complemented by numerous towers, signalling networks and the chain across the Golden Horn, transformed its geography into a lethal defensive weapon against its numerous adversaries.
Naval manuals attributed to Byzantine emperors like Leo VI ‘The Wise’ emphasised manoeuvrability, coordination with shore-based defences and the calibrated use of incendiaries.
As chroniclers like Anna Komnene observed, fleets entering the narrows found themselves trapped by the very environment as currents worked against them, space constrained manoeuvre and missiles rained from both shores. The straits multiplied defensive power in a way open seas could not.
By the early 20th century, technological optimism revived the belief that chokepoints could be forced. Admiral Jackie Fisher had revolutionised the Royal Navy, and a generation of planners assumed that speed and firepower could crack ancient gates. Modern battleships, it was assumed, could overwhelm static defences.
However, the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 brutally exposed fallacy. Today, that campaign is the most frequently invoked historical analogy amid speculation of the U.S. attempting to land troops to seize Kharg.
In 1915, British planners, encouraged by an overconfident Winston Churchill, believed that forcing open the Dardanelles strait - a narrow waterway whose control promised the opening of a route to Russia, and the seizure of Constantinople, thereby knocking the Ottoman Empire (allied with Wilhelmine Germany) out of the war.
Instead, it became a sorry case study in strategic overreach which cost 250,000 Allied casualties - including heavy losses among British, French, Australian and New Zealand forces. The Ottomans, under commanders such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, exploited the terrain and interior lines to devastating effect. Allied forces, once landed, found themselves trapped between sea and ridge, unable to advance and unwilling to retreat.
Fisher himself grew sceptical as the operation unfolded, wary of committing capital ships to a geometry that favoured the defender. The intended decisive stroke had transformed into a nightmarish stalemate, ending in withdrawal and humiliation for the British.
The enduring allure of chokepoints lies in their deceptive clarity. They promise leverage over complex systems and suggest that control can be localised, decisive and swift.
Yet, History points in another direction. Chokepoints invite fierce contestation precisely because they matter. They justify evermore escalation and impose sustained costs on those who seek to dominate them.
From the Øresund to the Dardanelles, the lesson that recurs with stubborn consistency is that while narrow waters magnify power, they magnify its burdens too.
Whether that lesson will temper the feverish calculations now deliberated in Washington remains, as ever, uncertain.
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