Maritime Corridor Readiness Under Chokepoint Disruption: A Distributionally Robust Decision Model for Eastern Mediterranean Supply Chains

Maritime chokepoint exposure can be quantified, but supply-chain risk management still requires an ex ante decision about which alternatives to keep ready. The objective is to identify and evaluate an ex ante corridor-readiness portfolio before the disruption state is known, while accounting for shared regional capacity, distributional ambiguity, and tail risk. This study models the Eastern Mediterranean as an interconnected maritime-logistics system comprising five countries, five sectors, five corridors, and six empirically calibrated disruption states. A two-stage distributionally robust decision model couples pre-disruption corridor readiness with post-disruption flow recourse under shared regional capacities, Wasserstein ambiguity, and CVaR tail-risk pricing. Relative to the inferred status quo, the optimized portfolio reduces the composite USD-equivalent objective by USD 241.623 billion, equivalent to 22.6% of the model’s average annual trade-account base under the maintained normalization. This is a calibrated benchmark-distance-to-base ratio, not a realized saving. The optimized portfolio concentrates readiness and improves aggregate performance, yet it performs USD 14.465 billion worse in the Turkish Straits disruption state. Doubling and renormalizing that state’s policy weight shifts the portfolio away from the Turkish Straits and reverses the state-specific loss. The contribution is a transparent decision-analytics framework that places system boundaries, infrastructure interdependencies, advance preparedness, recourse, and residual vulnerability in one auditable supply-chain risk model.