Collective on Foreign Affairs
5th January 2024
1] INTRODUCTION
With little notice, Yemen changes everything on the Hamas-Israel war by blocking Israel’s supply chain (counterpunch 3rd. Jan 2024).
In The Cradle, Pepe Escobar expressed that Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors.
Escobar further emphasised the actions had further reduced the US naval global projection to mere irrelevancy. One has to read also Bhadrukumar’s incisive assessment on the failure of a cooperation amongst the QUAD, and with Indo-Pacific partners meddling in MENA, and where a US-led coalition of the willing is struggling to take on the challenge to maritime shipping posed by the indomitable Houthis of Yemen.
For another country and in due consideration to the geostrategic reason, China’s intention to open up another transportation channel from southwest China to the Indian Ocean, bypassing the dilemma in the Strait of Malacca, (Indo-Pacific Defense, October 2023).
China is victim to what’s known as the “Malacca dilemma”: 60% of its trade and 80% of its oil imports flow through the South China Sea and in and out of the Malacca Strait, a key shipping lane located between Sumatra and Malaysia. With such a heavy naval presence surrounding the chokepoint, the U.S. or its military allies could potentially blockade access to the port, or any surrounding sea line of communication, bringing the Chinese economy to a standstill.
Thus, China needs to seek an alternative option, and the potentiality lies in the southbound route through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, see csloh.substack, China’s Pakistan Economic Corridor – the challenges ahead.
The primary goal would be to connect with Sri Lanka, where the world-class harbour would string up one more entrepõt in the Indian Ocean.
2] SEAWAY CORRIDORS
The US and her allies want an alternative route to compete with China’s Belt and Road which is a key pillar in the global community of shared future, (The State Council Information Office of PRC).
The envisaged routes are to be interconnected through the India Middle East Europe Corridor (IMEC), frontline 5/10/2023.
where, however, it is debatable even before implementation its project feasibility, (Foreign Affairs, 2023) and the inevitable viability challenges ahead, (Australia International Affairs 2023).
In the lead towards IMEC, the Houthis, however, had executed a disastrous mayhem for both Israel and the United States, (theconversation, 1st. Nov. 2023) : they declared that any ship passing from the Hormuz Strait would get destroyed or confiscated if it was going to any Israeli port, or considered aiding Israel in the war effort, regardless of its ownership, (The Guardian, 13/12/23). Any disruption of seaways would have a major effect on world shipping – all big shipping companies stopped going through the Hormuz Strait to avoid the rising insurance costs and the potential cargo and ship loss. The world ship traffic got redirected and started going around South Africa, likely to increasing shipping costs and probably pushing up inflation in the West, (csis 2021). In addition to damaging all US and Western interests drastically, this would also cripple Israel’s key southern port Eliat, (farsnews 2023); read also csloh on the emerging Hezebollah-Israel deterrence equilibrium.
The dynamics of the blue water sea corridors are also now amplified with an alternative route bypassing the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). This is the Northern Sea Route — which, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, is the Arctic Silk Road as an alternative to the Suez Canal, (tass; thediplomat; The Arctic Institute).
3] STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES
As per World Economic Forum statistics, approximately 60% of global trade is transported in containers when any disruption of seaways would have negative consequences because:
a) Maritime transport is crucial for international trade, as it carries over 90% of the world’s goods, (UNESCAP 2020).
b) port call omission, where the containers destined for the omitted port are then discharged at the next port and transported back to the omitted port (the original destination) through alternate modes of transport (rail, feeder vessels, truck).
This would entail an adverse impact on schedule reliability and cargo delivery times.
c) compounding port handling delays are congestion at ports, with the congestion impacting port operations and evacuation of cargo to the final destination, which in turn causes delays in berthing and handling vessels, worsening schedule reliability.
d) often causing further shipment delays nearer to the Eid religious season in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Chineae lunar year in southeast Asia and the Far East.
e) At times, it might happen that ports are efficiently managed and handle container vessels in good time, but hinterland connections are either poor or unreliable, which can cause delays in shifting the container out of the port premises and onwards to their final destination.
This argument is relevant as the conflicts in MENA and Ukraine have yet to be subsided.
f) In such cases, containers will rapidly pile up at the port storage yard, pressuring allocated storage space, due to which the port will not have adequate space to unload and store containers from forthcoming vessels, causing delays in handling the subsequent vessels.
g) Such landside delays will aggravate the schedule reliability and lead to prolonged transit times.
h) With the growing prevalence of the hub and spoke model in container shipping, a development that has been precipitated by the introduction of increasingly bigger vessels, we effectively have introduced yet another link in the maritime transport chain. Consequently, schedule reliability and delivery times have one more handover point, which can potentially cause delays.
i) With the existing conflict in Ukraine and varied situtional instabilities enveloping MENA, bunker costs that comprise the biggest item amongst Operating Expenses for all Container Carriers are now spiralling.
With present cutthroat competition and wafer-thin margins, Carriers are forced to focus rigorously on costs and try to rationalize wherever they can.
j) Whereas during the covid19 pandemic, entire countries and ports are under lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid, vessels are forced to omit those ports/ countries, besides having to discharge their containers at alternate ports, which disrupts vessel schedules and impacts reliability; now there are the existential wars in MENA and hinterland Europe that disrupted the smooth operations of seafaring in the blue waterways.
These factors are affecting the trading pattterns in Asia where by 2020, 41.8% of the world’s exports and 38.2% of global imports come to or from Asia and the Pacific, UNESCAP 2020.
4] STRATEGIC CONVERGENCE
With the firm partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, or AUKUS, as announced, the U.S. Defense Department publicly states it needs at least 66 attack submarines to meet its operational requirements as the Virginia-class submarines are being retired. Further, the U.S. Navy’s SSN fleet is well below that requirement and expected to dip to 50 submarines by 2026. The declining size of America’s attack submarine fleet is particularly problematic given that the People’s Liberation Army Navy fields more than 60 attack submarines with at least seven SSNs and is working hard to increase both quality and quantity. To make matters worse, the United States must deploy its SSNs around the world, whereas Beijing focuses almost all of its attack submarine deployments in the Indo-Pacific. That provides Beijing a numeric advantage in attack submarines in locations where U.S.-China conflict is most likely to occur.
Various arguments on the AUKUS issues are presented in cfr, csloh, and johnmenadue.
Whence some of the troubling issues that confront Big Power relationships in the Pacific Basin where a demising hegemon is impacted by Global South’s geopolitical exertiveness – and the ensuing geopolitics of a multilateral world -yet unwilling to retire, but in a continuance of encirclement and containment of a peaceful rising civilisation state.
5] SEAWAY AND UNDERWATER WATERWAYS CHALLENGES
Often little said or frequently de-emphasised to conceal the role of Global North Big IT Infrastructure platforms are formation of spikes-and-hubs in multilateral alliances and the deployment of military assets. They are little discussed because the technological conduits and commuication servers like the Five-Eye underwater cables are linked in the sharing of intelligence-gathering among partnered entities, and the primacy in the preservation of such electronic devices pulsating through these connections; an expansion of such deepwater external threats are expansively expounded HERE; read also csloh, 2022, Techno-feudalism in Infrastructural Platforms.
With the Israeli government intently, and intensively, to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip, it held talks with Congo and other African countries to take in the involuntary refugees. Bribes will flow and some governments will agree to take in whoever comes, (Anadolu Ajansi, 03/1/2024).
Though the U.S. government seemingly and publicly opposed to those plans but US does nothing to prevent their realization, that is, pushing Palestinians out by making all living in Gaza unbearable is the underlying tactic to achieve that goal.
The rationale is simply in allegiance to the Military Industrial Congressional Complex to ensure the continuance of this conflict so that the sea corridors – the global blue waterways and the US merchant of death war profiteers in financialisation capitalism underpinning them – are in the sole hegemon control as ever before.
Firestorms 