"Choke point" is having a moment.Why it matters: The term is an increasingly popular shorthand for the bottlenecks tying up the oil market and the AI buildout — and sometimes the entire economy — as the old global economic order gives way to intensifying competition and outright war. Where it stands: The latest choke point is in the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia has been routing more oil there via pipeline, bypassing the OG choke point in the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, Iranian-backed Houthi militants are targeting Saudi ships, threatening traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — which has seen increased oil flows, about 5.7% of the world's oil in the first three months of 2026, up from around 3.5% over the same period last year, according to Axios' calculation of EIA data.The big picture: "Middle East risk has become a two-choke-point problem," commodities researchers at Standard Chartered Bank wrote this week.Energy prices have surged, with Brent crude trading above $100 a barrel Thursday.Zoom in: Eddie Fishman saw it coming. Last year, he published a book titled (what else?) "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare."Since then, "it's been one choke point after another," says Fishman, who worked on sanctions policy in the Obama administration and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's becoming a concept that has in some ways really just transcended the book."Zoom out: "I noticed — and so did colleagues — that the term was cropping up with increasing frequency last year," says Andrew Hill, who organizes the Financial Times' Book of the Year Award, for which Fishman's book was shortlisted.
Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slok, published a post titled "The Chokepoint Risk" this week, looking at energy supply and demand dynamics. Geopolitical leverage isn't in oil reserves, he wrote, "but in the narrow passages through which the world's oil actually flows."Zoom in: Choke points aren't merely geographic, like the straits. They can be economic: dominance over a critical resource (China and rare earths), technology (advanced AI chips) or a financial network (the U.S.
dollar), for which there are few ready substitutes.Analysts are using the phrase to describe pressure points in the AI market where the supply of certain components isn't keeping up with demand, producing shortages and higher prices."The expansion of AI is curren…
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