Red Sea attacks and Arctic ice melt are
now part of the same story: as one corridor has become a live-fire risk
for seafarers, planners sketch a Nordic-Arctic bypass that could weaken
the networks the United States relies on for leverage, and that underpin
today’s US-centric maritime system. The emerging question for US-linked
maritime actors is whether American sea power is becoming less a
guarantor of open routes and more an architect of “coercive
connectivity” that accelerates the search for alternatives.
Red Sea: when protection becomes a pressure point
In the southern Red Sea, Houthi attacks have turned a core lane of
Asia-Europe trade into a corridor where every transit is a calculation
about risk, insurance, and crew safety rather than just time and fuel.
Rerouting container services around the Cape of Good Hope increases
transit times and absorbs effective capacity, with estimates ranging
from about 3% higher global ship demand to around 9% less effective
container shipping capacity, depending on trade mix and assumptions.
Operation Prosperity Guardian has reintroduced convoy-style escorts,
with US and partner warships shadowing commercial ships through Bab
el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. Washington and its allies present this
as a defensive “highway patrol” to protect seafarers and keep vital
trade moving through an active conflict zone. This feels less like a
“freedom of navigation” mission and more like route-specific risk
management, where naval protection, flag, and compliance posture
determine who can move, where, and at what premium.
Greenland and the Nordic passage: credible but constrained hedge
Thousands of miles north, retreating sea ice and better ice class
capability are opening frequent seasonal windows along Arctic and
sub-Arctic routes, including options that bend around Greenland and the
North Atlantic rather than squeezing through the Suez-Red Sea axis.
Today, these flows remain tiny compared with Suez traffic, as Arctic
transits number in the hundreds per year, versus tens of thousands
through the canal, and are constrained by seasonality, ice-class
requirements, environmental concerns, and limited port infrastructure.
The point is not that a Greenland-adjacent “Nordic passage” is about
to replace the Suez Canal, but that it is becoming a serious hedge and
investment thesis for certain cargoes, asset owners, and states. For
now, that thesis is most compelling to a relatively narrow set of
Arctic-capable shipowners, energy cargo stakeholders, and Nordic
governments seeking to leverage their geography while limiting exposure
to US-centric maritime chokepoints. In this emerging map, Greenland and
nearby hubs are about resilience, optionality, and strategic advantage:
backup corridors, diversified bunkering and insurance portfolios, and
the ability to re-route around weaponized straits without shuttering
supply chains.
US strategy: the move from sea power to chokepoint control
The 2025 US National Security Strategy orders agencies to secure
‘independent and reliable access to critical goods and to deny rivals
control of ‘strategically vital assets’, while pledging to prevent
‘non-hemispheric competitors’ from owning such assets in the US
hemisphere, embedding them at the core of a US-centric maritime and
financial network. It also stresses alliances, shared maritime
awareness, and partner resilience, recognizing that no single navy or
legal system can underwrite international sea lanes alone. That language
places ports, canals, and terminals squarely inside national security
doctrine, treating them as levers of state power as much as
infrastructure for trade.
This has driven a more assertive posture at chokepoints. Panama’s
long-running debate over Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa’s concessions
at Balboa and Cristóbal is one example: US lawmakers have repeatedly
framed those leases as a security threat, and recent discussion of a US
asset manager taking a stake in the operations shows how quickly
commercial arrangements can be pulled back into Washington’s domestic
politics. The same coercive logic is visible at sea in the boarding,
diversion, and detention of tankers suspected of carrying sanctioned
Iranian or Russian crude, signalling to shipowners and insurers that
specific flags, routes, and ownership structures now sit in a zone of
heightened enforcement risk.
Market response: weaponized interdependence, weaponized choice
American naval reach and US-centric legal and financial networks
underpin a relatively predictable environment for high-value,
dollar-denominated trades across the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, and US
forces remain uniquely capable of sustaining presence at multiple
chokepoints simultaneously. Yet research on “weaponized interdependence”
shows that when a hub state leans heavily on its central position in
trade and finance to coerce others, the long-term effect is to push
those others to rewire around alternative ports, routes, currencies, and
legal regimes.
The Red Sea and Greenland sit on either side of this dynamic. Every
time a corridor like Suez-Bab el-Mandeb becomes a theater for recurring
interdictions, escorts, and insurance shocks, cargo owners and
financiers gain another reason to invest in physical bypasses such as
Nordic and Arctic routes, and in financial and legal alternatives that
dilute exposure to US-centric systems, even when those same US-backed
operations are credited with helping thousands of ships transit safely.
At the same time, the scale and speed of diversion remain uneven: some
carriers and segments are returning to the Red Sea as risk eases, and
Arctic options will likely remain niche for years, making the erosion of
US centrality a medium-term risk trajectory rather than a fait
accompli.
A leader’s playbook in an age of coercive connectivity
US-linked shipping and logistics providers, embedded in US-centric
legal and financial networks through dollar clearing, P&I cover, and
technology, are squarely within the scope of US sanctions and export
control law. At the same time, routing and investment patterns show some
non-US actors experimenting with Chinese-financed ports, Gulf and Asian
transhipment hubs, and insurance and finance providers less tightly
bound into US legal frameworks to diversify their exposure.
Boards and executive teams should consider five priorities that
follow from a Red Sea-to-Greenland view of coercive connectivity:
- Assign ownership of corridor risk: Make a
board-level risk or strategy group/team explicitly responsible for
mapping corridor-specific exposure (Red Sea, Suez, Panama, Arctic/Nordic
options) across fleets, customers, and counterparties, using digital
twins and scenario tools where available.
- Align internal decision-makers: Link
procurement, network planning, and customer-facing teams into a single
corridor-risk process so that routing, contracting, and customer
commitments reflect the same assumptions and triggers.
- Quantify exposure and thresholds: Define
numeric triggers, like war-risk premia, delay days, security incidents,
at which routes will be changed, contracts reopened, or options such as
Nordic diversions considered, and embed these thresholds into internal
playbooks and customer service level agreements.
- Treat strategic concessions as political
assets: When bidding for or operating terminals in places like Panama,
the wider Caribbean, or key energy routes, price in the risk that
arrangements may be revisited under national-security frames over the
life of the concession, and structure contracts with review and exit
mechanisms accordingly.
- Diversify legal and financial channels:
Where consistent with law and corporate values, avoid over-concentration
in any single jurisdiction’s currency, insurance, classification, or
tech stack so that enforcement spikes in one system do not automatically
paralyze global operations.
- Invest in seafarer safety and
communication: In an environment of convoys, diversions, and sudden
enforcement actions, credible, proactive engagement with crews and
unions on routing decisions, protection measures, and support in crisis
is a strategic necessity, not just a compliance box.
The leaders in this environment will be those who
master weaponized choice: the ability to walk away from any single
corridor, currency, or chokepoint and still deliver on time. The
strategic question, viewed from the Red Sea to Greenland, is whether US
policymakers and maritime actors can calibrate their use of chokepoint
control and enforcement to protect seafarers and supply chains without
accelerating diversification that could erode US-centric networks over
time.
Wolfgang Lehmacher is a global supply chain and logistics expert.
The former director at the World Economic Forum and President and CEO
Emeritus of GeoPost Intercontinental is an advisory board member of The
Logistics and Supply Chain Management Society, an ambassador for
F&L, and an advisor to Global:SF and RISE. He contributes to the
knowledge base of Maritime Informatics and is a co-editor of the book
Maritime Decarbonization.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
