The Malacca Myth: Lessons on Economic Warfare from the History of Naval Blockades

December 14, 2023
Hoover Institution | Stanford University
A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Eyck Freymann.
There is a widespread assumption that the United States could impose a “far blockade” on Chinese maritime trade passing through the Malacca Straits, and thereby gain an advantage in a conflict with China. Some scholars have even posited that China’s insecurity about the so-called “Malacca dilemma” might deter it from military aggression.
This article rejects both arguments, drawing on Chinese-language primary sources and five case studies of far blockades imposed by the Royal Navy between 1770 and 1945. We find an emerging consensus in Chinese open-source scholarship that the threat of a Malacca blockade is exaggerated. Far blockades rarely succeed and often backfire, and their architects appear systematically to overestimate their chances of success; the key problem is that neutral states face powerful price incentives to subvert the blockade, so blockaders must either accommodate neutral states or coerce them into participating. Both approaches are costly and undermine the operation’s effectiveness over time.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he studies the geopolitics of climate change and strategic deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. His first book is One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World. His writing on current affairs has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic.
Before Hoover, Freymann held concurrent postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program. He earned his doctorate in China Studies from Balliol College, University of Oxford; two masters degrees in China Studies from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where he was a Henry Scholar; and a bachelor's degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

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