The rise of the toll booths by Mathew Walls

There are few things more impressive in geopolitics than watching a superpower manufacture a crisis and then discover that everybody else has brought a cash register. Donald Trump’s latest adventures around the Strait of Hormuz have produced precisely that spectacle. What was supposed to demonstrate American dominance has instead reminded the world that maritime power is less like owning a motorway than owning a very troublesome crossroads. Close the road, threaten the traffic, rattle the barriers, and sooner or later somebody arrives with a collection box.

Now Vladimir Putin appears to have noticed the opportunity. The Kremlin has always possessed a finely tuned instinct for monetising disorder. Where other governments see a crisis, Moscow tends to see a market. Where Washington sees deterrence, Moscow sees leverage. And where everyone else sees another dangerous stretch of sea, Putin sees something resembling a toll road.

The irony is delicious. America spent years lecturing the world about maintaining freedom of navigation, only to discover that freedom becomes rather expensive when the global security architecture is handled like a casino chip. Every escalation in Hormuz sends another nervous shudder through the shipping industry. Every threat encourages companies to reconsider routes, insurance and risk. Every disruption creates incentives for other powers to insert themselves as indispensable middlemen.

The Red Sea, naturally, is where this gets particularly absurd. A waterway that should be a geographical fact has increasingly become a political bargaining table. Ships do not merely sail anymore; they calculate. They negotiate with geography, armed groups, governments, insurance companies and whichever geopolitical entrepreneur happens to be standing beside the channel with a hand extended.

Putin understands this instinctively. Russia does not need to control every route. It merely needs the world to believe that Russia can complicate enough of them. That is a different kind of power: not ownership, but nuisance value elevated into strategy.

And Trump, with his characteristic affection for maximum pressure and minimum patience, has proved remarkably helpful. The American president appears to believe that international politics works like a property dispute in which the loudest neighbour eventually gets the largest parking space. Unfortunately, oceans do not behave that way. Nor do markets. Nor do allies. Nor, for that matter, adversaries.

The consequences are larger than another quarrel over shipping fees. Every time Washington turns a strategic chokepoint into an arena for brinkmanship, it weakens the assumption that international commerce can operate above the ambitions of individual powers. Countries begin hedging. Companies begin rerouting. Rivals begin experimenting. Soon the exceptional becomes routine.

And once toll booths appear on one route, others are encouraged to build them. This is the great unintended gift of Trump’s foreign policy: he keeps demonstrating that American power can be used in ways that encourage other powers to imitate its most coercive habits.

Putin, naturally does not need an invitation. He merely needs another crisis, another frightened shipowner and another stretch of water where somebody can say, with a perfectly straight face… Pay up.