A growing number of threats

The Western economic order, in particular, is based on the assumption that, at most, chokepoints will be disrupted sequentially and that, at all times, rerouting options will be available as temporary alternatives. Moreover, Europe has relied on the United States, with its global naval presence, to ensure open sea lanes and undisrupted supply chains. The restrictions on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, however, are part of an ever longer chain of disruptions to critical sea lanes.

As early as the beginning of the 2000s, piracy and armed robbery off the coast of Somalia was causing such serious dis­ruptions to global shipping that many mem­bers of the international community felt compelled to intervene militarily. On the basis of UN Security Council reso­lutions, the EU-led Operation Atalanta and the multinational Combined Task Force 151 were established in 2008 and 2009, respectively. That there is a shared con­viction worldwide about the need for mari­time security is reflected in the rota­tion of command over the latter: besides the United States and the United Kingdom, the task force has been led by Kuwait, Pakistan and Thailand, among others.

While it was possible to contain piracy for a time, the threat appears to have returned to the Gulf of Aden. Not least because of the power vacuum created by the absence of an actor enforcing the law at sea, attempted acts of piracy are once again being recorded in growing numbers.

In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given paralysed the Suez Canal for six days; and the subsequent delays in deliv­eries of imported goods had a direct impact on Germany and the rest of Europe. The incident showed what consequences even a single event at a maritime chokepoint can entail.

In recent years, the Houthis have been threatening shipping in the Red Sea and at the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint. Between October 2023 and 2025 alone, they attacked 178 vessels with missiles and drones. As part of the EUNAVFOR Aspides mission, European naval forces, including the German Navy, intervened to protect the transit of merchant vessels, with the US Navy being significantly involved. But as the Houthis are supported by the Iranian regime, the risk of renewed disruptions remains and has only increased with the announcement of a naval blockade and further territorial gains in September 2026.

Challenges posed by state actors

The Strait of Malacca, which lies between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, is essential for daily trade between Asia and Europe. Here, too, isolated cases of piracy are being recorded. However, there has been another, more important signal: refer­ring to events in the Strait of Hormuz, Indonesian Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa recently asked whether the littoral states of the Strait of Malacca should levy a transit fee for the water route. Such ideas are untenable under international law, but they are emblematic of the growing chal­lenge to international norms, including by state actors. If such conduct is allowed, it is tempting to exploit dependencies and profit from geographical location.

Russia, too, is making territorial claims that go beyond individual sea lanes. It is thereby pursuing a strategy of lawfare, that is, the deliberate misuse of international law as an instrument for its own advantage. For example, Moscow is seeking to have the Arctic Northeast Passage legally declared part of its own territorial waters. By persis­tently laying claim to and declaring sover­eign waters, it aims to bring large parts of the Arctic sea regions under its control and its own legal regime. In other words, it is attempting to set the course today for un­lawful control of sea lanes in future. And it has the support of China, which, in return, is to be granted its own exclusive rights in the Arctic.

At the same time, China is attempting to enforce national territorial claims in the Taiwan Strait and far into the South China Sea in defiance of international law and regional littoral states, while ignoring inter­national arbitration rulings. To this end, it is not only constructing artificial islands but also steadily increasing the presence of its naval and air forces, its coastguard and its maritime militia, a state-controlled fleet of civilian fishing vessels. Concerns about growing Chinese influence over sea lanes have been voiced by the United States, among others: Washington warns that the Panama Canal (whose transit capacity is, in any case, shrinking owing to prolonged periods of drought) is becoming ever more subject to Chinese influence.

Similarly, maritime infrastructure on the seabed is increasingly at risk. Sub­marine cables are more frequently exposed not merely to accidents but to deliberate damage that has been linked to Russia and China. This applies to European waters such as the Baltic Sea as well as to the Asia-Pacific region, particularly around Taiwan. Threats by the Houthis and Iran to take action against the submarine cables in their respective straits only reinforce the image of infrastructure lying largely unprotected on the seabed.

What is required for the capacity to act

In the case of Germany, the capacity to secure sea lanes requires, above all, a Bun­deswehr that is as well equipped as possible. Its primary mission – operational readi­ness within the NATO framework along Europe’s northern and eastern flanks – is undisputed. Going forward, the conditions should be created so that, when necessary, sufficient assets for deployment beyond home waters can be provided. For the Ger­man Navy to live up to its own claim of being “regionally rooted, globally committed”, the synergetic use of maritime capa­bilities, including for the purpose of inter­national crisis management, should at the very least be considered. This is the neces­sary complement to a range of instru­ments of power that are indispensable for counter­ing threats from adversaries such as Russia. At the same time, strategic planning can prevent another abrupt U-turn in Ger­man security policy.

Both approaches are relevant. That is because symmetric adversaries such as Russia can pose asymmetric threats at re­gional and global chokepoints – from Hormuz to the Port of Hamburg – namely, at those points where Germany and Europe are particularly vulnerable.

There is no contradiction between today’s protection of sea lanes and the (correct) decision to refocus on collective defence. Such protection is an essential part of the necessary strategic planning. That much is evident not least from Germany’s immediate geographical situation. The Kiel Canal, which runs from the North Sea into the Baltic Sea and is the world’s busiest arti­fi­cial waterway, provides a very good example of how the functions of important trade routes overlap with the requirements of national and collective defence. Furthermore. the new Overall Concept for Military Defence (Gesamtkonzeption militärische Vertei­digung) names the protection of international sea lanes and communication links as one of four military-strategic priorities.

The refocusing on national and collective defence should remain the central strategic guideline of German security and defence policy. However, that prioritisation should not lead to the total neglect of out-of-area capabilities. The testing of modular weapon systems for the F125 “stabilisation frigate” has demonstrated how Germany can main­tain those capabilities in parallel if it wants to remain capable of responding to future threats to global maritime trade routes.

European potential for optimisation

At present, there is a problem of overstretch when it comes to adopting such a broad strategic posture. German and European naval forces are preoccupied with building a credible deterrence and defence capability vis-à-vis Russia. Thus, the capabilities neces­sary to secure global sea lanes are available, at best, within narrow timeframes and under heavy prioritisation pressure. To ad­dress this issue, a strategic orientation should be pursued that combines the tar­geted development of military capabilities, forms of cooperation with partners and an arrangement whereby responses to inter­national demands are undertaken to a greater extent within the European frame­work.

Similarly, in view of limited financial and personnel resources, that framework could play a much more prominent role when capabilities and operations are being planned and conducted. This applies both to maritime platforms and to the procurement of weapon systems. The aim should be to build cost-efficient capabilities that take into account the fact that precision weapons are increasingly becoming avail­able in large numbers (precise mass).

Equally important is the joint prioritisation and pooling of maritime activities. For example, it should be examined whether Germany’s lead responsibility for the NATO support mission in the Aegean, which has been in place since 2016, needs to be exer­cised permanently by a German unit or whether alternative solutions would allow for more efficient use of the forces avail­able.

Meanwhile, availability and effectiveness could be increased through a more closely coordinated European foreign and security policy. This applies, for example, to the Indo-Pacific region, where European states maintain a considerable presence but have so far pursued only limited coordination of their activities on land and at sea. The already initiated and coordinated deployment of carrier strike groups could serve as an anchor for the establishment of a joint European task force for the Indo-Pacific; and rotating the lead nation each year could increase the diplomatic weight of such a presence and at the same time enable more intensive cooperation with old and new partners. Furthermore, the existing fragmentation of national deploy­ments could be at least partly overcome.

Once these consolidation measures have been implemented, more demanding activ­ities should be considered and existing strategic paradigms questioned. Such activ­ities could include freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs), which have so far been conducted mainly by the United States to uphold freedom of navigation around the globe (even though the US, like Iran, has not ratified UNCLOS). Given Washington’s changed political and military prior­ities and the growing challenge to international legal norms by state and non-state actors, it is valid to ask whether Germany and Europe can continue to afford to forgo FONOPs.

To date, European naval deployments have tended not to be carried out under an explicit FONOP declaration and thus not avowedly in the service of an unambiguous rejection of unlawful maritime territorial claims. Europe’s own normative interest in a globally enforceable order of the law of the sea, however, requires the applicable law to be regularly affirmed. And such affir­mation is even more necessary given the potential for confrontational protests by those actors already attempting to change the law of the sea in their favour.

Untapped potential in the Gulf

The war around the Strait of Hormuz opens up the possibility of strengthening cooper­ation with partners in the region. So far, there has been only limited such cooperation. An institutional framework for rem­edying that situation is provided by NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), which, launched in 2004, involves Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The potential of this initiative has not yet been exploited to the full.

Given the disastrous consequences that the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has for these states, there is currently a window of opportunity for Germany and NATO to use existing structures and chan­nels of communication to develop long-term and sustainable security partnerships in the region. For example, there are short­comings among the littoral states in the protection of critical maritime infrastructure, not least as regards the undersea di­mension. And as far as the Strait of Hor­muz itself is concerned, mine-clearance capa­bility needs to be expanded considerably.

After coordinating within NATO, Ger­many could build on its capabilities in this specialist field by suggesting to the ICI partners that it take part in the envisaged mine-clearance activities in the Strait of Hormuz. Such confidence-building cooper­ation could mark the start of a long-term deepening of the partnerships. Joint for­mats could be established for exchanges and for expanding existing capabilities and developing new ones – both in mine hunt­ing and in the protection of critical mari­time infrastructure. There are also over­lapping interests with regard to securing submarine cables. Beyond that, opportunities could arise for joint investment and broader-based procurement projects – for example, to build joint repair capacities.

Counter-lawfare in the Indo‑Pacific

In the Indo-Pacific, unlawful territorial claims and challenges to transit passage should be contested through a jointly devel­oped counter-lawfare strategy. This strategy could be regional in scope at first and grad­ually expanded to the global level.

In concrete terms, this means the consolidation of multilaterally agreed legal posi­tions and informing the public of UNCLOS-based common positions against violations of the law of the sea. In this way, the power to define central norms of the law of the sea would not be left to actors seeking to change the legal order but would be defend­ed in a multilateral framework. Besides traditional partners, the countries particularly suited to be involved are those of Southeast Asia, which are already confronted with such challenges on the front line.

One possible approach to follow is that of the Philippines’ naming-and-shaming campaign. By publicising aggressive actions by the Chinese coastguard and the mari­time militia in the South China Sea, Manila has come up with an instrument that makes violations of the law of the sea visible and draws international attention to those activities. It is effective, however, only if the accusing state is able to defend its position by appropriate means in an emergency and has credible partners at its side. For German policy, this means participating more vis­ibly in the initiatives of Indo-Pacific partners – for example, by making public statements in response to rigorously documented incidents of attempted breaches of the law at sea. If that were to happen, it is more likely that those states would support Euro­pean concerns in return.