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Is the West still capable of keeping its maritime trade routes functioning?

By Lorenzo Maria Pacini | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 6, 2025

The West risks facing an asymmetrical response to its illegal restrictions on shipping. Unlike Russia, most developed countries depend on the stable and secure functioning of maritime trade routes. The application of the measures used by the West against itself could trigger a crisis in maritime supply chains due to disruptions in the delivery of strategically important goods and raw materials.

A difficult dependency to manage

Unlike Russia, the West bases its economy and strategic security on a widely interconnected and stable global maritime trade system, established as a founding principle of the maritime power of sea-faring civilizations (Seapower, in the classical geopolitics of Mackinder and Mahan). Most developed Western countries are heavily dependent on the smooth and secure functioning of maritime trade routes to ensure the continuous supply of strategic goods, raw materials, and energy products. Maritime trade is an irreplaceable and essential pillar of Western supply chains, with the increasing complexity and vulnerability of these systems due to geopolitical and environmental dynamics.

This dependence means that illegally imposed restrictions on navigation, or pressure on key maritime routes such as the Suez Canal or the Red Sea passage, can have significant not only economic but also geopolitical impacts. The West as a whole, unlike Russia, which has developed an autonomous strategy to diversify its trade routes, does not have established and functional alternatives for many of its maritime supply lines. And this is a problem that is not easily solved.

In military science, the term ‘asymmetry’ refers to the use of strategies, tactics, and tools that do not mirror those of the enemy, but aim to exploit differences in capabilities, organization, and objectives to strike at the enemy’s weak points. Applied to the maritime domain, asymmetry describes how an actor, often weaker in conventional terms, can challenge a superior naval power by avoiding a head-on confrontation and instead seeking to destabilize its freedom of maneuver, logistics, and route security.

In the current geostrategic context, in fact, a crucial aspect concerns the risk that the West will face asymmetric responses to its illegal restrictions on navigation. This concept of asymmetry is central to the theory of contemporary maritime threats: Western powers, by unilaterally imposing restrictions on the routes or maritime activities of other states (e.g., through sanctions, blockades, or “no sail zones”), could generate unconventional reactions that are difficult to manage structurally, especially now that dominance of the seas is no longer the exclusive preserve of the old Atlantic empires.

The case of Russia is emblematic: despite being heavily affected by sanctions and restrictions on global maritime traffic, it has developed a maritime strategy aimed at building autonomous infrastructure and new routes—such as the development of the Northern Sea Route—to bypass Western restrictions and ensure internal and external economic continuity. The West, on the other hand, despite having provided important regulatory and military tools to ensure freedom of navigation, finds itself exposed to more damaging forms of retaliation precisely because it is unable to easily circumvent the key routes on which it depends.

The application of the same restrictive measures used by the West against itself would, in perspective, result in a potentially acute crisis in maritime supply chains. Disruptions in access to and passage through key trade routes would cause delays in the delivery of strategic raw materials and essential goods, with knock-on effects on industry, agriculture, energy, and final consumption.

The consequences of blockages or restrictions on strategic passages such as the Suez or Panama Canals include not only higher costs due to longer and more expensive alternative routes (with additional costs for fuel, insurance, and sailing time) but also port congestion, increased emissions, and misalignments between supply and demand in global chains. Furthermore, insecurity in maritime routes can raise insurance premiums, contributing to increased international transport costs and fueling market volatility.

Structural differences between the West and Russia and growing instability

Western vulnerability must be viewed in light of the structural differences in maritime management and strategy between the West and Russia.

Russia is gearing up to become a major maritime power, investing in infrastructure, shipbuilding, and new logistics hubs on its territory, aiming for more direct control of its export routes for resources (natural gas, coal, agricultural products) to non-Western markets such as Asia, which are becoming geopolitical and economic priorities.

For example, the Navy’s key role in Arctic routes is already a global excellence, for which the collective West lags far behind. The West, on the contrary, relies on an international maritime trade network that is increasingly subject to high interdependence and multilateral cooperation, and has not yet developed an equivalent system of autonomous routes and infrastructure capable of circumventing unilateral restrictions. This creates an imbalance that can result in asymmetric risk: while Russia can tolerate or circumvent certain restrictions due to its alternative shipping options, the West cannot do the same without serious disruption in terms of trade flows and costs.

Current geopolitical trends increase the likelihood that illegal restrictions on navigation, applied for political reasons, will translate into significant crises in Western supply chains. The effects manifest themselves in:

• Increased delays and misalignments in the delivery of raw materials and finished products (e.g., critical materials, energy, agricultural products);
• Higher costs for maritime transport and insurance, reflected in higher prices and potential pass-through to end consumers;
• Risk of port congestion and logistical disruptions that can trigger temporary regional or global economic crises;
• Increased geopolitical tensions in key regions, with exposure to maritime conflicts or asymmetric actions by state and non-state actors.

The application of restrictive Western measures on oneself is not only a technical challenge, but also a factor that could trigger chain reactions that are difficult to control, as other maritime powers and regional actors could adopt asymmetric strategies, including the militarization of routes, piracy, and targeted sabotage.

A war of maps

But how did the West construct these restrictions? This corresponds to a ‘war of maps’: whoever controls cartography and security warnings dominates the very perception of freedom of navigation.

Three types of restrictive measures have been applied: economic sanctions, maritime exclusion zones (mainly in areas of open or potential conflict) and the updating of maritime charts. And when sailing, maps are essential.

The map war is a cognitive and regulatory domain, in which the representation of space becomes a weapon, more or less directly. Those who control the maps, i.e., decide what to show, what to obscure, and which routes are safe or prohibited to follow, effectively exercise strategic dominance that influences many actors.

The map war at sea is played out on several levels:

Cartographic: updates to official charts (e.g., NOAA for the US, UKHO for Great Britain) can delimit restricted areas, minefields, and training areas. This forces civilian and military ships to change their routes, even if the sea remains physically free.

Digital: ECDIS and AIS systems, which are mandatory in commercial navigation, receive updates from Western sources (Navtex, Inmarsat, IMO). By adding or removing “digital layers,” the West can channel traffic.

Narrative-legal: maps are never neutral; they reflect a vision of the law of the sea. A NATO map will show as “international waters” areas that Russia or China consider “territorial waters.” It is a form of “cartographic lawfare.”

Operational: navies reinforce on the ground what the map represents. If an area is marked as “restricted” and is patrolled by frigates or naval drones, the cartographic representation becomes reality.

Cognitively controlling space means dominating representation, i.e., conditioning the movements of commercial and military fleets, driving up insurance and logistics costs, legitimizing a certain view of maritime law and, most importantly, transforming the sea into a sort of “mosaic” made up of mandatory corridors and prohibited areas. In other words, it is no longer just the strength of ships that determines control, but also the use of the power of representation, which constrains reality geopolitically speaking.

The problem is that the West, with its maritime powers of glorious memory, cannot be denied, is still convinced that it has immeasurable and unchallenged power. However, this perception does not correspond to the truth. Western leaders have promoted sanctions and restrictive policies, driven by the desire to maintain control that has long since ceased to belong to them, and have ended up compromising their own economies and damaging their interests. The schizophrenia seems never-ending.

Even sanctions have not worked

Economic sanctions and export controls are now the main weapons of US national security. With a simple administrative act, Washington can exclude its adversaries from the dollar-dominated international financial system and limit their access to advanced technology supply chains. These tools, designed to reinforce foreign policy and defense objectives, are often used as an intermediate response: more effective than diplomacy alone, but less risky than direct military intervention. Their apparent low cost and ease of use have encouraged their frequent use, with the risk of gradually reducing their effectiveness and raising doubts about the stability of the dollar as a global reserve currency.

Over the past two decades, these tools have been applied against a growing range of adversaries. The campaign against Iran saw intensive use of financial leverage, in particular through pressure on European banks to sever ties with Tehran, a model that inspired the approach towards Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014: targeted sectoral sanctions were introduced, calibrated to affect future growth prospects without causing immediate shocks to energy markets. Subsequently, attention shifted to China, with technological restrictions directed at giants such as Huawei and ZTE in an attempt to slow down the development of advanced capabilities in areas such as artificial intelligence and defense.

After 2022, with the start of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the measures became more complex, with oil price caps and new controls on the export of advanced semiconductors introduced in addition to financial and trade blockades, the result of coordination with European and Asian allies. This combination of instruments showed how economic measures can be integrated into a single strategy, even if they fail to produce positive effects. Arrogant rhetoric clashed with harsh reality: sanctions are no longer as effective a deterrent as they once were, and their effect is much less controllable and predictable.

Behind every sanctions package lie intricate decision-making processes, in which coordination with allies and calculation of the effects on global markets play a decisive role, and, above all, a discreet sense of masochism. Countless hours of work, commissions, discussions, and proclamations in the media have produced only an unprecedented accumulation of disadvantages.

Because, to be honest, the sanctions system simply does not work. On the one hand, sanctions have evolved in response to increasingly sophisticated threats, combining financial, commercial, and technological levers, but entirely in a self-congratulatory sense, as they are not pragmatically effective. on the other hand, they have rarely produced significant political change in the affected states on their own, instead generating side effects on the global economy and tensions with the private sector or with Western partners themselves, creating a disastrous boomerang effect.

If the West does not decide to stop, it will be forced to pay the price for all its misdeeds, a price that is much higher and more painful than it can imagine. And then it will be too late to turn back.

September 6, 2025 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism | European Union, Russia, UK, United States | Leave a comment