Twenty-one miles. That is all that stands between the modern world and economic collapse.

CHOKE is the urgent, rigorously argued work of geopolitical non-fiction that explains why a handful of narrow waterways, undersea cables, and semiconductor factories hold the entire global economy hostage, and why the people who should be paying attention are not.

It opens on 28 February 2026. Aboard a crude carrier riding low in the Persian Gulf, Captain Petrov watches his AIS display in silence as the transponder signals of dozens of vessels vanish, one by one, from the screen. The Strait of Hormuz, the twenty-one-mile passage through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil travels every single day, is closing. Not because a superpower navy has blockaded it. Because a radio broadcast has been made, a few dozen missiles have been fired, and insurance underwriters in the City of London have quietly declined to renew their policies. Within seventy-two hours, without a single Western sailor being placed in danger, the strait is shut. The price of everything begins to move.

That prologue is fiction. The mechanism it describes is entirely real.

What CHOKE argues, and proves, is that geography has not been made irrelevant by technology and globalisation. It has been amplified by them.

Drawing on the strategic thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the lessons of Pearl Harbour, the economics of modern drone warfare, and the lived reality of the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping in 2023 to 2025, author David G. Oldham builds a unified theory of systemic vulnerability. The chokepoint, he demonstrates, is not merely a feature of maritime maps. It is the defining structural weakness of the interconnected world, recurring across oil tanker routes, fibre-optic cable corridors, rare-earth processing facilities, and the semiconductor fabrication plants of Taiwan.

The asymmetric mathematics alone will change how you see the news. A twenty-thousand-pound anti-ship missile forces the firing of a two-million-pound interceptor. A drone costing less than a second-hand car can disable a tanker carrying fifty million pounds' worth of crude. The leverage available to a weak actor over a wealthy, trade-dependent economy is staggering, and CHOKE makes it viscerally, uncomfortably clear.

Readers who want to understand why supply chains keep breaking, why energy prices lurch without warning, and why small geographical features keep appearing in the headlines will find in CHOKE the analytical framework they have been missing.

If you read Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography and wanted to go deeper, if Peter Zeihan's work on supply-chain fragility unsettled you, or if Daniel Yergin's writing on oil and global power shaped how you think about energy, CHOKE belongs on the same shelf. It is more focused than Marshall, more internationally balanced than Zeihan, and more urgent than either. For readers who followed the Houthi shipping crisis and felt they lacked the framework to fully understand it, this is the book that provides one.

CHOKE is for the reader who follows geopolitical news closely, who felt the Houthi disruptions as something more than a headline, and who wants a rigorous, readable explanation of why the modern world is so much more fragile than its leaders admit. It is for policy professionals, energy analysts, and logistics executives who need strategic clarity without academic prose. And it is for anyone who has ever looked at a map and wondered why the same narrow passages keep appearing, century after century, at the centre of every crisis.

The strait is twenty-one miles wide. The consequences of losing it are not measurable in miles at all.