The Seven Chokepoints

Why these seven

Six of them carry the world's oil, and appear on the energy chokepoint list the US government keeps: Hormuz, Malacca, Suez with Bab el-Mandeb, the Turkish Straits, and Panama. Gibraltar completes the picture of the sea itself, the one gate between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Three more sit just outside the set. The Danish Straits carry Russia's Baltic oil. The Cape of Good Hope is not a chokepoint but the route ships take when the others close. The Taiwan Strait is wide enough to be no physical narrows, and a chokepoint anyway, for the container traffic and the advanced computer chips that pass beside it.

A family reads this map the way it reads the Risk Index. Distance from these narrows is one measure of exposure: how much of what you depend on, and what your host state depends on, has to cross water a rival can grip. The Sovereign Family sets out the household version of the same idea.