Why did Taiwan spend part of this month deliberately slowing down its own mobile internet?

The civil defence exercises that opened in early August are testing what the island’s communications — reliant on undersea cables — would feel like under blockade, with bandwidth throttled on purpose to see how citizens would talk to one another if it became scarce.

At the same time the defence ministry has also been rehearsing the relocation of weapons production lines and the conversion of civilian factories to military use, so that Taiwan is able to continue defending itself if the supply hubs were hit.

This is probably the most honest piece of policymaking anywhere in the world this year, because it does not begin by asking how to keep the passages and supply chains open but rather by assuming they have closed and tries to figure out how long we can live inside the closure, a question that should be running through the minds of policymakers across nations given the uncertainties that the world faces in 2026 and beyond.

The world’s hardest challenges today are in Ukraine, the Strait of Hormuz, Greenland, the bond market, the data centres and more. The list might look like a jumble of wars and spreadsheets, but it is not because each chokepoint matters as we aren’t sure when it will get closed and how long will it remain shut.

The Strait of Hormuz – the largest single energy chokepoint in the world — is a case in point. The Iran War shut the Strait on 28 February, a memorandum reopened it from around 17 June, and it has been effectively closed again since the first week of July. What that means is that the passage can be reopened but the reopening does not hold. According to estimates, a full closure removes close to 20 percent of global oil supplies. The U.S. Energy Information Administration figures roughly four-fifths of the crude that normally moves through it is bound for Asia. The World Bank recorded the consequence in its April commodity outlook: Brent rose from $72 a barrel at the end of February to $118 by the end of March, an increase of about 65 percent and the largest monthly increase the series has ever registered. It is now hovering around $90 a barrel.

In April, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut its global growth forecast for 2026 to 3.1 percent and raised headline inflation to 4.4 percent, with a severe scenario in which growth falls to 2 percent and inflation runs above 6 percent. Its July update moved the numbers lower, to 3.0 percent growth and 4.7 percent inflation, the disinflation of the past two years having stalled. That is the price of one narrow passage, held closed by Iran whose refineries and command structure had apparently already been destroyed in the weeks of bombing by the United States.

Ukraine is a similar story, pointed the other way. Ukrainian long-range drones have struck every one of Russia’s largest refineries this year. Kyiv’s General Staff put 42.7 percent of designed refining capacity out of action by early July, and Bloomberg, citing EA Analytics, reported July throughput at 3.6 million barrels a day, the lowest since May 2002 and roughly a third below the seasonal norm. Russia’s answer has been to fire more ballistic missiles in a month than it manufactures in the same period, drawing down stockpiles to exploit Ukraine’s shortage of interceptors. But even as the two sides rain explosives on each other, the ground has not moved much. Attrition is simply what a war looks like when both sides can close things and neither can open them.

The blockages aren’t limited to geography. Sovereign debt is another chokepoint that governments have built for themselves: the OECD expects governments and companies to raise $29 trillion from bond markets this year, with 30-year yields up and issuers responding by shortening maturities, which lowers the coupon today and concentrates the refinancing risk into a narrower window tomorrow. U.S. debt stands at nearly $40 trillion, a number that exceeds the country’s entire output.

Artificial intelligence, dressed as an expansion, is a chokepoint too. The OECD’s own reading is stark: nine major players raised $122 billion from bond markets in 2025, nearly half of all technology issuance worldwide, and have collectively forecast capital expenditure of $4.1 trillion for 2026 to 2030. That’s $1.1 trillion more than every non-financial company in America spent on capital expenditure in 2025 combined. All of it funnels through the same handful of fabs, constrained grid and the same few firms.

Even the power to tax imports has become a chokepoint, and a visibly fragile one. The U.S. Supreme Court closed it on 20 February, ruling six to three that President Donald Trump’s emergency powers act never authorised tariffs at all. The administration re-plumbed within hours. When the replacement surcharge hit its statutory ceiling and expired at midnight on 24 July, a Section 301 regime took effect the same minute at 10 to 12.5 percent across some 60 economies, including India. No importer, exporter or finance ministry can plan such sudden changes in such a short period – twice in five months in this case.

India sits at the sharp end of all of this. It is not because it is a party to any of these fights, but because it has maximum exposure to chokepoints and minimal control over them. The Kiel Institute’s modelling of a full closure of the Strait of Hormuz puts the heaviest welfare losses on South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, and finds the damage roughly doubles if Saudi exports are also blocked.

India imports its energy through the passage it cannot police, denominated in a currency it does not issue, under trade rules that keep being rewritten by Americans. The 25 percent penalty imposed on Indian goods over Russian oil purchases was rescinded in February, and then declared by the Supreme Court to have been invalid from inception, with refunds now in litigation. The lesson is not that Delhi won that round; it is that the terms were never stable enough to be worth winning.

And now there is the prospect of a 100 percent tariff on the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, a list on which India sits alongside China, Azerbaijan, Hungary and Slovakia. Earlier this month the U.S. Senate passed, by 86 votes to 11, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, named for the late senator from South Carolina who had pushed it for years. It is an aggressive sanctions package aimed at Russia, extending the Iran Sanctions Act to 2031 as well, and it can hit India hard. The House of Representatives, currently in recess, is due back at the end of August. September is a month to watch.

And then there is the angst in Europe, as the old NATO faces pressures from the United States and Washington throws the old rules into the bin. For 80 years one power made a business of keeping passages open, and it is now closing some of them itself. In January the White House threatened tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland — all treaty allies — until Greenland was sold.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s answer was that if the United States militarily attacked a NATO country, everything would stop, and that “includes NATO and therefore post-second world war security.” Two weeks earlier American forces had taken a sitting head of state out of Venezuela and arraigned him in New York. Whatever one thinks of Nicolás Maduro, the precedent is now on the books and every capital has read the chapters in detail.

Europe realises it is mostly on its own and has no option but to spend more on defending itself. The European Union’s defence expenditure reached €418 billion in 2025 and is projected at €454 billion this year, on European Defence Agency data published in July. However, spending more is not the same as building a defence. Europe can’t buy its way out of an asymmetry in which the closing side spends thousands and the opening side spends billions.

What we see is not a list of enemies, it is that the world’s narrow passages have never been cheaper to shut, never been more load-bearing, and never had a less reliable guarantor. Taiwan, at least, has stopped pretending otherwise and started timing how long the lights stay on. It is time for others to start thinking hard not about how to hold the passage, but about how to live once it closes.