Why do some limited regional conflicts in the maritime domain have global consequences? Evidence from two Middle Eastern wars

This article investigates the conditions under which some limited regional conflicts generate disproportionate global consequences in the maritime domain. While global wars predictably disrupt global maritime systems, existing scholarship offers limited theoretical leverage for explaining why some geographically bounded conflicts reverberate across global trade, shipping, and naval order whereas others remain locally contained. The study advances a comparative framework centered on maritime domain centrality, chokepoint adjacency, and actor type, and employs a structured, focused comparison and mechanism-tracing design to test three hypotheses linking these factors to systemic maritime effects. Empirically, it compares two recent most-similar Middle Eastern conflicts (the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war and the 2023–2025 Middle East) using common indicators including disruption to shipping flows, extra-regional naval intervention, and market effects. The findings show that low maritime domain centrality alone does not preclude global consequences. The 2006 conflict had limited maritime engagement, and indeed produced negligible systemic effects. However, the 2023-2025 war, which unfolded in a bounded region and had a marginal maritime aspect compared to the overall combat arenas, generated significant global maritime disruptions. Regional actors projected coercive power into the Bab-el-Mandeb chokepoint, triggering large-scale rerouting, insurance shocks, and multinational naval deployments. These results provide strong support for the chokepoint projection mechanism and demonstrate that non-state belligerents are more likely than state actors to exploit chokepoint leverage. The article concludes that chokepoint adjacency, rather than overall maritime intensity, is the critical pathway through which regional conflicts generate global maritime externalities, thereby contributing a comparative, mechanism-oriented explanation to debates in maritime security and conflict studies.