Over 154 pages, a new report by Anthropic details some of the ways in which its Claude model has been misused over the past several months. With its talk of cyber-attacks, espionage and propaganda, it makes for terrifying reading, especially given how many actors — from Russian hackers to Chinese spies to Iranian propagandists — are now using the technology. As for Anthropic, it is able to monitor and assess how its systems are being used in real time, allowing the firm’s threat-intelligence team to track how Claude is being used.

One of the most eyebrow-raising examples comes from Yemen, particularly striking given the Houthis have established a presence on Perim Island, a strategically important position in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Control of the island could strengthen the militants’ ability to threaten shipping through this narrow southern gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, the primary maritime corridor linking Asia and Europe.

It’s striking, then, that Anthropic’s team identified a weapons-engineering cell in the north of the country that used Claude to work on three distinct programs, including a guided rocket and a ballistic missile with a range exceeding 2,000 kilometers. Tracking this activity made it possible to reconstruct the militia’s engineering workflows.

To put simply: the Houthis — or their affiliates or hired helpers — effectively used Claude Code as a substitute for software engineers, getting it to help develop guidance, navigation and control systems; integrate an open-source autopilot into a flight computer; tune controls; and even run simulations. Several Claude operations ran at once: one coding, another researching, and a third checking the first agent’s work. This was not mere experimentation by geeks with laptops. After all, it apparently resulted in the test-firing of a guided rocket. When this seemingly failed, the results were quickly plugged back into Claude to diagnose what had gone wrong.

Anthropic says it has no evidence that an operational weapon was ultimately fielded, but the episode exposes an uncomfortable weakness in the way AI safety controls currently work. It is worth noting that Claude would not simply agree to design a missile on request; in fact, Anthropic says its safeguards blocked many of the Houthi cell’s requests. Still, they did not block all of them. By disguising the purpose of individual requests, and distributing the work across multiple sessions, the engineers were able to bypass controls.

Next stop: Iran. Here, we’re shown evidence of how Claude has been used to support propaganda, espionage and domestic repression. Again, this was not simply a matter of asking a chatbot to knock out a few inflammatory posts. Anthropic describes three operations in which Claude helped construct the machinery of an influence campaign: including writing campaign manuals; designing fake online personas; and compiling databases of people and organizations to target.

In one example, official intelligence bulletins were fed into Claude and transformed into content for different audiences — from Farsi to Arabic, Urdu to English — with the tone shifting alongside the language.

Iran also used Claude to disguise government narratives as the work of foreign writers. One network produced material intended for more than 100 online Iranian channels, including ones linked to the IRGC. More than that, Anthropic found evidence that Iranian propaganda was being camouflaged, falsely attributing arguments and findings to respected Western institutions like CSIS or the Brookings Institute.

More specific examples of Iranian AI-built propaganda are just as disturbing. Tehran-linked actors have been using Claude to build detailed profiles of hundreds of Israelis, and members of the Jewish diaspora, installing malicious software to steal people’s usernames, passwords and other login details. Elsewhere, Claude built a system to track US naval forces, securing personnel information from military photographs, among other sources.

The implications here are stark. Iran is hardly a superpower — and the Houthis certainly aren’t either — yet AI allows both to develop systems that would once have taken armies of engineers, programmers, analysts and linguists. That, in turn, opens the door to further disruption by non-state actors, causing chaos on the cheap. If the war in Ukraine shows how drones and other simple gadgets can nonetheless hamstring a well-armed opponent, AI could now do the same for espionage, cyber-warfare, propaganda and weapons development.

It’s telling, here, that even serious powers are learning these lessons too. After all, Anthropic’s tools have also been extensively used in Russia, despite the latter already boasting a formidable espionage apparatus of its own. That, however, hasn’t stopped Moscow from using Anthropic’s tech to make its activities better, faster and harder to tackle. That’s clear enough in the case of Midnight Blizzard, a hacking group closely linked to, or indeed part of, Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.

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In practice, the hackers seemingly used Claude to make phishing attacks more convincing, while also helping them break into computer systems more effectively. For instance, hackers used the AI to double-check whether security software had spotted newly installed malware and, if it had, rewrite the code and try again until it slipped past the defenses. These tools were then deployed against a swathe of targets outside Russia: including government ministries, intelligence and defense bodies, think-tanks, and more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ukraine and its drone industry feature prominently.

It has been fascinating, too, to see Claude turning up in the toolkit of another major power: China. Again, the examples here are remarkable in their scope, with an outfit likely based in central China using Claude to spy on roughly 50 organizations worldwide, spanning industries from energy and healthcare to finance and technology.

One obvious question is why China would plump for the foreign-made Claude, not least given the People’s Republic has DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and other domestic AI tools to choose from. Though Anthropic’s report does not address this, the obvious explanation is that, for some jobs — not least a Chinese police-surveillance project — China thought Claude was the best option: particularly for coding, technical research, and coordinating complicated tasks.

According to Anthropic’s report, Chinese companies have also attempted to scale and distill Claude’s capabilities. Again, China hardly lacks engineers, data or computing power. But, just as a pace-setter is invaluable in a marathon, so too can Anthropic be exploited by its rivals, another reason to doubt Trump’s latest claims.

Nevertheless, it would be a stretch to conclude, as Trump has done, that America is winning, let alone has “won”, the AI race. If anything, indeed, the episode illustrates the peculiar nature of that contest. American companies may build the most capable models — but once those capabilities exist, the US’s adversaries can use them to their own advantage.

In a broader sense, meanwhile, these varied use cases put a subtler spin on all that breathless talk of AI collapse. The technology has hardly invented espionage, or propaganda, or ballistic missiles. But it is reducing the amount of expertise, labor and time required to do them all. Whatever the claims of looming extinction, the technology is being used, in nefarious ways, by a variety of flesh-and-blood actors right now. Rather than mass suffering and death, we should perhaps be more immediately worrying about our credit-card details being sold and our accounts drained — not by AI agents, but by human criminals a lot like us.

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In an open letter published around the same time as his company’s report, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, seems to acknowledge that the threat architecture has changed — and fast. Building AI too quickly is dangerous, he writes, but failing to build it risks placing the most powerful technology of the age “in the hands of authoritarian powers”. Any attempt to slow AI and tech development in the US is a threat: if the democratic world slows down, Amodei argues, “CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk”.

Among other measures, Amodei is therefore demanding tighter restrictions on the sale of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China; a crackdown on chip smuggling and remote access to overseas data centers; and measures to stop Chinese companies distilling the capabilities of American frontier models. If these measures work, Amodei adds, they could “widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3-5 years.”

Seen in another light, though, Amodei’s proposals look a little more complicated. As CEO of a company preparing one of the largest flotations in history, arguing that its technology is so dangerous that the government needs to intervene in the market around it is unusual. He wants tighter controls on advanced chips; stronger restrictions on the dissemination of frontier capabilities; measures to stop competitors catching up; and government assistance to overcome antitrust problems. In all, it looks like a bid towards establishing a monopoly, rather than simply a concern with the consequences of new technologies. The longer the furor over the monopoly persists, anyway, the longer foreign misuse of Claude will remain obscured: to the West, if not its enemies.

This is a field that is moving extraordinarily fast, reason enough to take the warnings seriously. But the last few days have raised more questions than they have answered: about how immediate the dangers really are, who should decide how quickly AI develops, and about where safety and national security end and commercial self-interest begins. The risks are plainly enormous, as are the opportunities. What is less clear is whether we are witnessing genuine panic among those closest to the technology, or the opening moves in a struggle over who gets to control it. It may well be both.

***

This article was adapted from the Global Threads Substack.

15 minutes later, he posted again. It was obvious, the Ayatollah claimed, what President Trump was really after: “Iran possesses numerous attractions: Its oil, gas, rich minerals, and geographic location are attractive. The US wants to seize control of this country just as they controlled it before.” Soon after, he was back online once more. “Iran stands firm and will continue to stand firm, and — God willing — will put an end to the United States’ mischief and harassment.”

As it turned out, Khamenei himself would not stand firm, dying weeks later in a devastating US-Israeli airstrike. Yet those frantic February posts remain much more than a strange internet footnote. For in his talk of mischief and control, the former Ayatollah hit upon the great fear of Iran stretching back not decades but centuries — that the country has been manipulated, exploited and undermined by outside forces, especially the West.

Of course, fingering external enemies as evil is one of the oldest tricks in the political playbook. In autocratic systems, though, the value is exponential. Anyone, anything, any time can be declared to be a threat to the stability and even viability of the regime. As such, the ends always justify the means. Hence the attacks on protesters across Iran at the start of the year — assailing them as Zionist agents — and hence the bloodbath that followed.

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Amid the usual despotic cynicism, though, it’s also true that Iranian fears have often proved justified. In the most immediate sense, after all, President Trump has fulfilled many of the warnings that the late Ayatollah articulated. Less than a week before the US and Israel began their attacks, Steve Witkoff, the President’s favorite negotiator, wondered why Tehran hadn’t “capitulated”. There’s plenty more where that came from. A month into the conflict, Trump told the Financial Times he would have taken Iran’s oil but for “some stupid people” back in America, while the recent seizure of an oil tanker in the Gulf led the President to positively gloat. “It’s a very profitable business,” he said. “We’re like pirates.”

Even if only semi-serious, such threats chime with how Iran has viewed outsiders for many hundreds of years. If the US, and Israel today face special ire — there’s a reason they’re respectively known as the “Great Satan” and “Little Satan” — Britain, France, Russia have all been feared too. And, again, there have historically been good reasons for this disdain.

From the early-19th century onwards, Persia (which was renamed Iran in the Thirties) found itself repeatedly caught between stronger imperial powers seeking political influence and commercial advantage. Its relations with Russia were particularly thorny. Defeats in the Russo-Persian Wars of 1804-13 and 1826-28 led to the humiliating Treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay, by which Persia lost vast territories in the Caucasus, including what is now Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The memory of these defeats cut deeply, not least because they exposed how militarily and financially weak Persia had become.

It did not help that the ambitions of others were growing too. For London, Persia mattered above all because its location on the approaches to India, the jewel of the British Empire. Anxieties in Britain rose as Russia advanced south through Central Asia, triggering constant fears that India itself might one day be threatened. Persia was a key location in what became known later as “the Great Game”, as British and Russian agents, bankers and diplomats became fixtures in Tehran — offering loans and gaining influence that might one day prove vital if arms ever had to be twisted.

Ironically, though, these varied foreign incursions can partly be understood by Iran’s domestic failures, with its leaders consistently reluctant to create an economic model that was both sustainable and fair. Instead, power and wealth have been concentrated in the hands of the few — a characteristic shared by the old Qajar dynasty, the Pahlavis who supplanted them in 1925, and indeed by the Islamic revolutionaries who took power in 1979. This, in turn, has encouraged rulers to take the easy way out: relying on short-term foreign assistance, with all the opportunities for meddling that implies.

In the late 19th century, for example, Persia’s rulers repeatedly borrowed heavily from French or British banks, or else sold concessions that provided short-term financial relief at the expense of long-term sovereignty. One classic example was the grant of a monopoly over the production, sale and export of tobacco to a British army officer, in return for a fixed annual fee and a share of profits. Signed in 1890, this wasn’t just a bad deal on its own terms, but also led to riots and eventually to a massive compensation fee paid in return for canceling the concession.

Or else there were the rights signed away in 1872 to Paul Julius de Reuter, an Anglo-German entrepreneur, encompassing not only the “the mines of coal, iron, copper, lead and petroleum” across the whole of the Persia, but also options to build roads, public works and other infrastructure projects. As an incredulous Lord Curzon put it, this represented “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of, much less accomplished, in history.”

For British officials like Curzon, Persia was an important piece on a foreign policy chessboard — one becoming more complicated still at the start of the 20th century. Russia’s intentions remained a concern, even as a newly unified Germany began circling too. Little wonder Britain did its best to keep Persian leaders happy, in 1902 even investing Shah Moẓaffar od-Dīn with the Order of the Garter.

Soon enough, this symbiotic relationship between Iran, its resources and the wider world would take on even greater significance — with the discovery of oil in 1908. First struck by William Knox d’Arcy, in yet another foreign concession, it quickly became clear that the mineral wealth that lay under Persian soil was the greatest prize of all. Certainly, efforts to access and control Iran’s oil not only helps explain the history of the Middle East, but also both world wars. In 1914, for instance, the Royal Navy was able to set to sea safe in the knowledge that the British government had bought a (secret) controlling share in Anglo-Persian, the holder of the oil concession in Iran. And if Anglo-Persian was crucial in the Royal Navy’s operations against the German Imperial Navy, it remained so 30 years later against Nazi Germany, where Hitler’s lack of gasoline ultimately stopped him launching offensive operations.

As Iranian petroleum came to dominate world affairs, meanwhile, efforts to influence, manipulate or otherwise control the country became ever-more brazen. At the end of 1915, the British representative in Tehran made clear that London had a particular candidate in mind to become prime minister — with the chosen princeling duly appointed a few days later. After the Great War finally ended, Britain tried to install “advisers” to run both the military and the treasury, prompting outrage not only in Persia but elsewhere too, where Shah Ahmad Shah Qajar was denounced in furious terms. He was a half-centimeter-tall midget, said Le Figaro in a piece that widely circulated in Tehran, a man “had sold his country for one centime”.

By 1925, even the British had given up on Ahmad Shah, installing a cavalry officer named Reza Khan in his place. The founder of the Pahlavi dynasty was the right man at the right time, according to a report sent back to London from Tehran by Foreign Office officials. He was a “powerfully built, well set up, big boned man, well above average height”; best of all, though, he “does not waste time in exchanging the delicately phrased but perfectly futile compliments so dear to the Persian heart”.

Such shenanigans would only become more intense. In 1941, concerned at the pro-Nazi sympathies of Reza Khan — who purportedly oversaw the renaming of Persia to Iran as a nod to the “Aryan” principles expounded so loudly by Hitler — the British forced him to stand down in favor of his son Mohammed Reza: an immaculately turned-out playboy with a love for French crime novels and fast cars.

Not, of course, that Iranian leaders always accepted pressure or interference from outside. Even before Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized his country’s oil supply in 1951, there had been repeated attempts by Iranian reformers to push back against foreign domination. For instance, outrage at corruption, foreign concessions and economic weakness had forced the Qajar monarchy to accept a constitution in 1906, one that established an elected parliament and attempted to remove the state finances from the Shah’s whims.

Such efforts though proved illusory. As the case of Mossadegh showed, outside powers were always able to muscle in on Iran’s affairs. Though chaotic to the point of ineptness, a CIA-backed coup nonetheless deposed Mossadegh in 1953, condemning the former prime minister to prison and house arrest until his death in 1967. This episode became key for later generations of Iranian radicals, who saw his fate as emblematic of the ill-designs of outsiders, as well as the complicity of Shah Reza Pahlavi. The latter had initially fled to Rome in terror, before returning home after Mossadegh’s fall, as tone deaf as ever about his reputation in Iran.

Rather than finally reforming his country, indeed, the Shah kept up the old tradition of kowtowing to foreigners while wallowing in domestic authoritarianism — creating opportunities that Ruhollah Khomeini understood perfectly. A highly effective speaker, the cleric began making firebrand speeches condemning the poverty of regular Iranians, even as the Shah and his friends prospered. As far back as 1964, Khomeini announced that US President Lyndon Johnson should know “that in the eyes of the Iranian people [the Shah] is the most repellent member of the human race” — a harbinger of the kind of comments that became commonplace in revolutionary parlance over the decades to come.

After Khomeini took power as Iran’s Supreme Leader 1979, he continued the same theme. “All our problems come from America,” he said. When threatened with sanctions by the Carter administration, meanwhile, he dismissed them as pointless, ironically twisting his country’s economic primacy back on its exploiters. “The world needs oil,” Khomeini proclaimed. “The world does not need America. Other countries will turn to those of us who have oil, and not to you.”

This history — this complex dance between Iran’s leaders, their domestic enemies, and foreign interlopers — helps explain the Islamic Republic’s positioning down to today. Khamenei may now be dead, but the Islamic Republic continues to see shadows of malign intent everywhere. As such, the regime’s insistence on strict discipline, on unflinching loyalty, and on a constant search for traitors, became a hallmark of a system that believes — rightly or wrongly — that it’s being undermined by the grand strategies of pernicious outsiders.

As is so often the case in revolutionary systems, that has helped drive the centralization of decision-making, but also power the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC): whose specific aim has always been to protect the revolution and its principles. At the same time, this long legacy tells us why Tehran has dedicated so much time, money and effort to build up proxy networks across the Middle East. Dismantling Hamas, Hezbollah and other militant groups has, of course, been a decades-long strategic priority for Israel and the US — even before the October 7 attacks. Again, though, from Tehran’s perspective, developments like the IDF’s brutal campaign in Gaza aren’t just moral outrages: they’re attempts to cripple Iran and compromise its sovereignty.

These attitudes also explain one of the reasons why Iran has put so much effort into having a nuclear-enrichment program. While analysts disagree on the ultimate willingness of the Islamic Republic to actually secure weapons-grade capabilities, no one doubts that being able to do so — and quickly — represents a threat in itself. That, of course, is precisely why Tehran has been reluctant to surrender what it considers as a key card in maintaining its independence.

And so we have a classic standoff: not only in Hormuz, but also over enrichment and indeed the very fundamentals of Iranian sovereignty. Like all countries, Iran needs the ability to defend itself. Here in Europe, it is hard to find voices claiming that defense spending should go down; most accept that in a fragmenting and increasingly competitive world, resilience comes at a price. In Britain, the debate centers on how much to spend and on what. Iran’s calculation is more acute when the United States, Israel and several Gulf states openly favor reducing its military capabilities to near-zero. In that context, the line between security and vulnerability becomes a thin one where the measures Iran sees as necessary for survival are precisely those that others regard unacceptable.

The regime in Tehran has clearly understood this better than the US. As a colleague put it recently, the US has been fighting wars of choice for the last half century. For Iran, though, this latest challenge from Washington’s war machine is existential, fitting into the familiar pattern of confrontation.

What, then, comes next? Well, because the Islamic Republic views pressure through this long historical lens, it is unlikely to respond to confrontation by becoming more conciliatory. On the contrary, Tehran will probably double down on the very tools it believes have preserved Iranian sovereignty for decades: asymmetric warfare; rebuilding proxy networks; boosting missile programs; investing in cyber operation; maintaining the strategic ambiguity surrounding nuclear enrichment, even if it accepts a time limitation in the short term.

Economically, too, Iran is likely to deepen efforts to build sanction-resistant trading systems with China, Russia and others, rather than reintegrating into a Western-led order it fundamentally distrusts. And, of course, the Strait of Hormuz itself has become a cipher for Iranian leverage. Of course, Iran’s leaders know perfectly well that there is no chance of defeating the United States in a straight military fight. But they also know that disrupting shipping, suffocating flows of oil, urea and helium gives Tehran a seat at the table where it can negotiate, if not from a position of strength then at least one where it has real skin in the game. The future posture of the Islamic Republic is therefore unlikely to rest on trust or compromise, but on deterrence, disruption and the conviction — shaped by two centuries of intervention and humiliation — that vulnerability invites exploitation.

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That still leaves one more irony. For all the Islamic Republic’s rhetoric about resisting outsiders determined to plunder Iran’s wealth, many ordinary Iranians today see the country’s resources being monopolized by domestic elites instead. In one sense, the current regime resembles the compromised governments of the past — ones unwilling to introduce social or economic reforms, and which centralized power and wealth in the hands of a minority. Estimates vary, but analysts often suggest that entities associated with the Revolutionary Guards control anywhere between a fifth and a third of the Iranian economy, their interests spanning construction, energy, telecoms, ports and banking, not to mention smuggling networks and illicit sanctions-busting trading.

Perhaps that is the central tragedy of Iran’s modern history: that a country with such deep traditions, and such a proud view of its past, has spent so much of the last 200 years trapped between pressure from without and failure from within. Foreign powers have repeatedly sought influence, leverage, access and control; Iranian rulers, whether kings or revolutionaries, have responded by tightening authority, concentrating wealth and invoking the language of national survival. All the while, resistance to foreigners always leads back to the same place: a corrupt establishment where loyalty is key.

The result has been a cycle of suspicion and coercion that has proved extraordinarily difficult to break. Seen in that light, the present confrontation is not simply about enrichment, ballistic missiles or even the clerical regime itself. It is about memory, sovereignty and the accumulated weight of history. That does not make Tehran’s actions virtuous, nor Washington’s fears illegitimate. But it does help explain why threats, sanctions and overwhelming force have failed to break the Islamic Republic’s resolve. For many in Iran, the issue has long ceased to be about this or that government; it is about whether the country can determine its own future without capitulation to the demands of others.

Raleigh lived in a different era, of course — one that most of us imagine as a time of swashbuckling sailors and risk-taking pirates, when control of the High Seas was a competition between the European states building empires in both the New and Old Worlds.

This was also an age when geography mattered every bit as much as resources. Many of the first European footholds overseas were chosen less for what lay in the ground than for where they sat along the great sea routes that were beginning to bind the world together. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 was not about spices growing nearby but about controlling the narrow maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea through which much of Asia’s trade passed.

The same strategic logic shaped the expansion of the British empire. Outposts were established above all because of their position along the world’s shipping arteries. The British occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 secured control over the entrance to the Mediterranean and the vital route between the Atlantic and Europe’s inland sea. In the Caribbean, islands such as Jamaica — seized from the Spanish in 1655 — were major naval and commercial hubs sitting astride the shipping lanes linking the Americas and Europe. Likewise, further south, control of Cape of Good Hope allowed Britain to dominate the maritime passage between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The empire that Raleigh’s generation started building was not only created through conquest and extraction: it was built through the control of the sea lanes and strategic points that allowed commerce, information and manpower to move across the oceans. The same ports that handled cargo could shelter naval squadrons, repair ships and project force across vast distances. Britain’s empire was fueled by sugar, silver, slaves and more; but it was built on being able to move these at will across the oceans, and on the islands, harbors and strongpoints that underpinned maritime, economic and imperial power.

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These days, we have become used to future-gazers insisting that the future belongs to those who control data and algorithms, or satellites and space rockets, or rare earths and critical minerals. Ships, shipping, and transport networks do not sound quite so exciting, so fresh or so unknown. To a historian, though, in a world that is hyper-connected, logistics are king.

In its heyday, Britain’s reach rested heavily getting the basics right. At Gibraltar, ships entering or leaving the Mediterranean could refuel and undergo repairs, while Malta secured British control of Mediterranean shipping routes. Further east, Aden functioned as a crucial coaling station at the mouth of the Red Sea once steam navigation transformed long-distance travel; or there was Singapore, which, from the early 19th century, grew into a key naval base guarding the approaches between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Each of these places mattered less for what they produced than for the services they provided: coal, water, repairs, provisions, intelligence and protection. Ships could not roam the oceans indefinitely; they required an interconnected chain of harbors capable of maintaining hulls, repairing sails or (later) overhauling, to provision with fresh food and water. Maritime power was not just about ships, captains and crews — but about a dense mesh of locations that were spread out around the world and reinforced each other.

Over time, however, it became easy to forget just how central these routes and nodes were. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of globalization underpinned by overwhelming American economic, political and military power — and by the mantra of free trade being the engine of prosperity and the bedrock of the international world order. Attention shifted elsewhere, and strategists and commentators forgot about shipping lanes. Yet as geopolitical competition intensifies and the world moves into a more multipolar era, the importance of the arteries of global commerce has once again become startlingly clear.

Maritime transport moves over 80% of goods traded worldwide. Around 11 billion tons of goods are transported by sea each year — roughly one and a half tons per person. Ships carry around two thirds of global oil production, as well as around a fifth of natural gas, moving energy to places where they are most needed. Without global shipping networks, computers can’t be switched on, assembly lines can’t work, and houses can’t be heated.

While the crisis in Iran and the Gulf have focused attention on oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum products, global shipping is fundamental in almost every aspect of daily life. Seaborne trade moves almost two billion tons of iron ore per year, with major exporters in countries like Australia, Brazil and South Africa being matched with demand in China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. Hundreds of millions of tons of bauxite and alumina are sent by sea from mines and processing plants in Guinea, Indonesia and Australia, as are tens of millions of tons of copper ores from Chile, Peru and south East Asia.

Global shipping is not just the backbone of international trade; it is crucial in keeping the world fed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN body, international trade plays a crucial role in supporting global food security by linking food surplus with deficit areas and enabling access to basic food products. 80% of agricultural commodities are transported by sea, with shipping again playing a crucial role in matching “breadbasket regions” with those that suffer from food production deficits.

As Sir Walter Raleigh would have recognized, globalization makes control of the seas more, not less important; as peoples, regions, goods and resources get moved from one part of the planet to another, dependencies rise — and so, therefore, do vulnerabilities. Things that we take for granted are always ones that we should pay special attention to, not least since it never seems to cross people’s mind that small shocks can have major implications.

*****

In the summer of 2011, Thailand experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall, which had an enormous impact on global car production. At the time, Thailand was one of the world’s leading producers of hard-disk drives and wiring harnesses for cars, as well as electronics modules. As factories closed because of flooding, the effects spilled over into the global economy. Hard drive prices doubled in a matter of weeks; shortages of parts crippled automotive production not only in Thailand, but across Asia, North America and even Europe. The associated costs ran to tens of billions of dollars.

If that gives one example of the risks that come from the assumption that supply chains are dependable, then another comes from Covid-19. Lockdowns and collapsing industrial demand caused an immediate decline in maritime activity. Global maritime trade volumes fell sharply, with estimates suggesting a reduction of as much as 10% in the first eight months of 2020, representing cargo worth at least $225 billion in trade value — if not considerably more, precipitating an unprecedented logistics crunch.

In the past few days we have seen another classic case of the risks posed by pressure on supply chains. Energy markets have been spooked by the implications of attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, with oil prices almost doubling in a matter of days. But it is shipping prices that have truly gone through the roof. Spot charter rates for LNG carriers are six times larger than they were before 28 February — a rise some industry experts refer to as “unthinkable”. Some charterers are paying as much as 10 times the rate they paid before the attacks on Iran began to secure prompt tonnage because of the scale of the shock.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s key chokepoints, a narrow stretch that connects the Gulf with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, a crossroads where geology and geography dovetail to create perfect opportunities for disruption.

Bordered by Iran to the north and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south, the Strait is one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways. At its narrowest navigable point, the shipping lanes are only a few kilometers wide in each direction, meaning that at a time of conflict — such as today — the ability to restrict shipping is considerable. Considerable volumes of goods pass through the Strait — something that is clear from the fact that Jebel Ali in Dubai is the ninth-busiest port in the world. But Hormuz is more crucial to global energy markets, with around 15 million barrels of oil passing through each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. Other chokepoints are significant; but Hormuz is the most important oil chokepoint in the world.

At the moment, almost no shipping is transiting the Strait, with an estimated 1000 vessels waiting for the conflict with Iran to pass. A small handful of ships have sailed through, with several others reported to be trying their luck by either claiming to be Chinese or by turning off transponders that reveal both their location and their true identities. More than a dozen ships have been damaged so far, with Iran saying that British ships are “legitimate targets”.

Political leaders have tried to project confidence. Donald Trump said that merchant crews and shipowners simply needed to show “some guts” if they wanted trade to keep moving through the Strait. Yet the reality suggests that courage alone is rarely enough to keep maritime commerce flowing during wartime. Guts are one thing; a US Navy ship being damaged by Iranian mines, missiles or attacks from land is another. For now, then, such are the risks to crews, cargo and hulls that shipping in the Gulf is at a standstill.

Just how high the strategic stakes have become is clear from the military deployments now underway. That message has not been lost on Greece, Italy or France — all of which have dispatched warships towards the Gulf to secure maritime traffic and monitor the Strait, although it remains unclear whether or how they will solve the problem of getting traffic moving again. In Britain, there has been fierce criticism of the Royal Navy’s absence from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, but the absence is not imminently solvable. It is the result of the British government’s catastrophic lack of foresight, decades of not investing in the sort of naval forces one needs in this century.

Trump has insisted that the shutdown in the Gulf is temporary and that oil, gas and more besides will soon start to flow again. It is typical fighting talk from a president who chose to start a confrontation with Iran because he was not able to understand why the regime in Tehran had refused to “capitulate” to American demands regarding nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile programs and more.

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Starmer's perfect storm

By Helen Thompson

Trump came to office promising never to drag the US into “forever wars”, sneering at the “so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits” from who had inflicted disaster on the Middle East. Now, while Trump and his team work out how to stop Iran from inflicting damage on its neighbors, others must pay the price. India imports the overwhelming majority of its oil and gas by sea, partly because it has access to a limited network of pipelines. So the collapse of shipments from the Gulf is producing an existential crisis: although the US has granted a “temporary waiver” to allow Delhi to buy Russian oil, the facts that the rupee has weakened sharply, and that authorities are reportedly speeding up customs procedures to allow faster unloading, are signs that compression of logistics at sea is already having ripple effects. Moscow emerges as an unexpected beneficiary of the crisis, as the spike in oil and gas prices will provide much-needed relief to a beleaguered economy. Russia’s geopolitical role could be additionally bolstered by the country’s purported long-standing “security concept for the Persian Gulf” as an off-ramp for the US intervention in Iran.

The consequences of the current crisis, however, extend well beyond the coming days or even the coming weeks. What we are witnessing is not simply a temporary disruption in the Gulf, but a reminder of a deeper truth about how power works in the modern world. Maritime routes remain the arteries through which prosperity, security and resilience flow. Data, algorithms, satellites and artificial intelligence may dominate the language of the 21st-century economy, but they still depend on the movement of physical goods across oceans. Microchips require minerals, energy and specialized manufacturing equipment that must be transported. Data centers require copper, aluminum, rare earths and vast amounts of energy infrastructure. Without ships and secure sea lanes, even the most advanced digital economy quickly runs into very practical limits. Power is and always has been about logistics.

For Britain in particular, this requires a series of profound shifts. The protection of shipping routes is already a central strategic task. The Gulf is one theater where the risks are currently obvious, but it is far from the only one. The North Atlantic and the High North are rapidly emerging as arenas of growing geopolitical competition as melting Arctic ice opens new routes and as submarine cables, energy infrastructure and shipping lanes become ever more exposed to interference and disruption.

These are not challenges that can be addressed through strategy documents or policy papers; they require investment in ships, in platforms, in training and in the infrastructure that allows maritime forces to operate effectively across long distances. They also require the rebuilding of the kind of interconnected networks of ports, facilities and partnerships that once underpinned Britain’s global reach. In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which predation, risk-taking and opportunism are often rewarded — maritime resilience will become a defining measure of national strength.

In that sense, the current crisis offers a glimpse of the future. Control and protection of shipping routes is key to stability, to reduction of risk and to long-term national resilience. The resources on which new economies depend may have changed, technologies may have evolved and ships may look different. But the underlying reality remains exactly the same as when Raleigh wrote four hundred years ago: whoever commands the sea commands far more than the sea itself.

Today, we are already in the midst of a deep and deepening crisis of water availability. Though more than 70% of the world’s surface is covered by the stuff, almost all of it is seawater. In fact, on average, only around one in every 10,000 drops is accessible freshwater that humans can easily use. Demand for it has surged as global populations have grown, diets have changed and cities have expanded into arid regions from Riyadh to Mexico City.

With cities expanding faster than the water systems that sustain them, what was once a mere constraint has become a defining crisis of the 21st century. At the same time, the ways we live have depleted water sources or made them unusable — either because of pollution, because groundwater is being extracted faster than it is being replaced, because rivers are being dammed and diverted, or because natural buffers like wetlands are being reclaimed for other uses.

In 2023, the UN World Water Development Report warned that humanity’s relationship with water had become dangerously extractive, describing modern water use as “vampiric” and noting that around 3.5 billion people already experience severe water stress for at least one month every year. The problem has only become worse since the UN study was written.

A major report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health published last month put it bluntly: we have now entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” in which societies are living beyond their hydrological means. Today, it notes, nearly three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries that are water-insecure or critically water-insecure; around 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water; groundwater depletion and land subsidence are already irreversible in many regions; and shrinking lakes, rivers and glaciers mean future supplies will become more scarce even if demand stabilizes.

Over the past 18 months, there has been much talk about how rare earths will rule our century.  Yet with half of the world’s 100 largest cities located in areas of high water stress, and many inhabitants seemingly oblivious to the risks, urban planners and policymakers are increasingly talking about “day zero”: the moment our taps run dry. The consequences could yet define our age — arguably far more than neodymium or cerium ever will.

Already, the signs are ominous. In 2017, for instance, Cape Town came within a hair’s breadth of becoming unviable, with city officials poised to shut down water infrastructure and tell inhabitants to gather rations from distribution points. Other major cities — as far afield as São Paulo and Istanbul — have struggled too, with some reaching genuine crisis. In June 2019, for instance, all four of the city’s main reservoirs in Chennai ran dry, forcing the Indian city’s 11 million residents to queue to wait for a small allocation of water brought in by trucks. In December, meanwhile, Tehran’s supplies came perilously close to exhaustion; Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, even talked of having to evacuate the capital.

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It is not just far-off places that are at risk here. Strikingly, a host of cities in well-resourced countries are also finding themselves under pressure  — including Los Angeles, New York, London. The case of the UK is instructive. Last May, Steve Reed, then the environment secretary, warned that “rapid population growth, crumbling infrastructure that has been left to decline, and a warming climate mean the UK could run out of clean drinking water by the middle of the next decade without a major infrastructure overhaul”. Such concerns are not new. As far back as 2010, almost a fifth of the territory of the European Union, and more than 10% of its population, were already exposed to water scarcity.

How, then, have we got to a position where global freshwater demand is expected to outstrip demand by 40% not in some abstract future — but in just four years time, by the end of this decade?

There are multiple overlapping factors at play here. The most obvious is demographic. The global population has more than doubled since 1970, meaning there are billions of new consumers of water for drinking, sanitation, food and energy. Patterns of consumption have also changed. For instance, data centers require vast volumes of freshwater to cool their servers. That figure already stands at roughly 560 billion liters a year, and, as cloud and AI workloads expand, could double by 2030. Just one facility gobbles up millions of liters of water a day, the equivalent to the annual household needs of tens of thousands of people.

It is hardly surprising, then, that engineers and policymakers have begun to explore radical alternatives — from relocating data centers to cold climates, to offshore platforms, or even to space, where cooling could be achieved without competing for scarce resources on Earth. The problem, though, is that for every step forward, humanity takes two back.

After all, massive man-made interventions in water systems mean that resources have been reallocated, redistributed and diverted, transforming ecosystems in potentially dangerous ways. China has built, on average, at least one large dam every day since 1949, and indeed now has more large dams than the rest of the world combined. But these dams can cause issues all their own. While they provide hydropower and irrigation, they also trap sediment, alter river flows and reduce downstream water availability, often exacerbating shortages for farmers and cities far downstream.

Alongside this, the past three decades have seen the fastest and greatest urbanization in history. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, with many expanding into regions that were never hydrologically suited to support large populations. Urban growth concentrates demand, often far from reliable surface water, leading cities to rely heavily on groundwater. That is not helped by inefficiency: in the UK, for example, an estimated three billion liters of water are lost every day because of leaks and decades of under-investment in pipes and treatment systems. Pricing too often fails to reflect scarcity, while governance struggles to keep pace with growth or adequately regulate water companies. The result is widespread inefficiency and uncontrolled extraction, with water treated as an inexhaustible input rather than a finite asset.

Indeed, the scale of groundwater extraction has reached levels that are reshaping the planet itself. Scientists have shown that so much water has been pumped from the Indo-Gangetic plains in northern India that the redistribution of mass has measurably shifted the Earth’s rotational axis, contributing to the movement of the geographic poles by several centimeters per year — something that has an impact on GPS accuracy, satellite navigation, and the precise measurement of time and space on which modern technology depends.

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One small comfort, at least, is that such upheavals — in principle if not scale — only fit the pattern of history. One of the earliest recorded wars, fought more than 4,500 years ago between a pair of Mesopotamian city states, was triggered by disputes over irrigation canals and access to river water in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates. Stone inscriptions describe the destruction of dikes and canals as acts of aggression. From the very beginning of recorded civilization, then, control of water meant power, prosperity and survival: and denying it to others was a means of coercion.

Combined with those bubbling demographic and technological pressures, it’s unsurprising that this ancient pattern has only accelerated. Since 2022, incidences of water-related violence have almost doubled worldwide. These incidents range from attacks on pipelines and dams to protests that turn violent when communities lose access to drinking water or irrigation. In central Nigeria, for instance, clashes between farmers and pastoralists, driven in part by shrinking rivers and degraded grazing land, have killed thousands over the past decade, with entire villages burned and populations displaced. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 unleashed catastrophic flooding downstream, cut off drinking water to large parts of the south of the country, and demonstrated how water infrastructure itself has become a direct weapon of war.

Looking ahead, several flashpoints stand out. The Indus basin is among the most dangerous. Under the Indus Water Treaty, India and Pakistan share one of the world’s most complex water systems. Signed in 1960, and often cited as a rare success of Cold War diplomacy, it was among the earliest major transboundary water treaties registered with the United Nations. Yet now, rising demand, glacier retreat in the Himalayas and infrastructure development upstream have all put the treaty under strain, with water increasingly framed in nationalist terms on both sides of the border. “I would like to tell the younger generation how this country was ruined,” as Narendra Modi put it in May 2025, adding that reading the Water Treaty today would leave Indians shocked. Combined with similar sabre-rattling from Pakistan, and things could easily escalate — with consequences that could easily transcend the Himalayas.

There’s scope for diplomatic blunders elsewhere, not least in northeast Africa, where Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam is reshaping power dynamics along the Nile. While Addis Ababa has viewed this enormous project as essential for development and energy security, Egypt has long feared existential threats to its water supply: over 90% of its freshwater comes from the river. Despite years of negotiations, no comprehensive agreement has been reached, leaving water as a persistent source of diplomatic and potentially military tension.

In the autumn of 2025, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty warned the UN Security Council of Ethiopia’s “unilateral actions” and affirmed that Egypt “will not allow its water rights to be compromised and will take all measures guaranteed by international law and the UN Charter to defend the existential interests of its people”. Such statements are not just warnings — but implicit threats of armed conflict.

And if that again hints at how human foibles can mix with water politics to worrying effect, Western countries aren’t immune either. One might look, here, at water agreements between the United States and Mexico over the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, and which are being tested by prolonged drought, shrinking reservoirs and competing demands from agriculture, cities and natural ecosystems. Especially in the age of Donald Trump, where coercion is an increasingly popular tool for settling disputes, it isn’t hard to see how treaties signed way back in 1944 are either deemed void — or else renegotiated to American benefit and Mexico’s loss.

Another complicating factor is the way global climate patterns are shifting, unevenly and unpredictably. Some areas are experiencing far wetter conditions than historical norms, while others are becoming markedly drier. The problem is not simply scarcity, but volatility. Rain increasingly arrives in the wrong places, at the wrong times and in the wrong quantities. Long-standing assumptions about seasonality — when rains come, how long they last, how rivers respond — are breaking down.

These swings matter because infrastructure, governance and social systems are built for averages, not extremes. Pipes, reservoirs, canals and drainage networks were designed for a climate that no longer exists. To return to India, having effectively run out of water in 2019, Chennai upgraded its reservoir systems — only to be hit two years later not by drought, but by devastating floods.

The good news is that many of the technical tools to address water stress already exist. Desalination has expanded rapidly, particularly through advances in reverse osmosis that dramatically reduce costs and energy use. Wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, smart metering and leak detection can stretch existing supplies much further. Artificial intelligence and advanced modeling offer the possibility of optimizing distribution, forecasting shortages earlier, and managing systems dynamically rather than reactively.

Yet technology alone is not enough. Today’s world is also one of predation, in which vulnerabilities are increasingly easy to identify and exploit. Water infrastructure can be sabotaged, politicized, weaponized — as has happened in Gaza and Ukraine. Data systems can be manipulated. Dependence on single sources or cross-border flows can be turned into leverage. All the while, global governance looks fragile. International cooperation is strained as the world order buckles and cross-border solutions, essential for rivers, aquifers and shared basins, appear increasingly precarious.

Some may still hope that markets or innovation will quietly resolve the problem, and extraterrestrial data centers may yet do something to help. But water does not behave like other commodities. It is local, finite, and political: unlike rare earths or hydrocarbons, water cannot be stockpiled at scale, substituted or shipped across oceans to smooth out shortages; it must be consumed where it falls or flows. So when water is scarce, there is no global market to arbitrate supply — only hard decisions, made locally, about who goes without. In a century defined by ecological pressure, then, water sits near the top of the hierarchy of risks. This is not because it is unsolvable, but because it is foundational.