The Forty Miles That Run the World

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide at its narrowest. Twenty percent of the world's oil passes through it every day. The Taiwan Strait is 110 miles wide — a gap whose closure would collapse the global semiconductor industry within months. The GIUK Gap is where Russian submarines disappear into the Atlantic. The Cape of Good Hope is irrelevant, until it isn't, and then suddenly 15,000 container ships are adding two weeks to their journeys. Geography has never stopped mattering. It doesn't matter most of the time; it matters catastrophically some of the time. This track maps the physical pinch-points where every assumption about global trade, energy security, and naval power gets tested against the reality of water and land.

Memorise these eight places. When one of them makes the news — and one of them will — you’ll already understand why it matters and what happens next.