Author: Syed Abdul Wajid

The ocean has never been neutral. From the Carthaginian grain fleets to the East India Company’s armed merchantmen, maritime commerce and military power have always been entwined. What has changed, dramatically, in the years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea, is the speed and systemic scale with which regional conflicts can now convulse the entire architecture of global seaborne trade. More than 80 per cent of international trade by volume moves by sea.1 When the ocean becomes a theatre of war, the consequences are not merely strategic. They are inflationary, ecological, and fundamentally political.