The Turkish Straits Stay Open Through Rules, Turkey, and Allied Vigilance
Hoover Institution researcher Ziyi Wang argues that the Turkish Straits’ relative stability during the Russo-Ukrainian war shows how maritime chokepoints can remain open when enforceable rules, capable regional authorities, and allied vigilance align. The 1936 Montreux Convention has allowed Turkey to limit wartime naval passage while preserving commercial traffic, including Black Sea grain exports, she says. But that arrangement remains vulnerable to Russian coercion or low-cost disruption, with consequences for global food, energy, and trade flows.
A regional closure can transmit an energy shock globally
Ziyi Wang argues that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the conflict in Iran showed how quickly a regional military crisis can become a global economic shock. In her account, the closure upended financial markets and produced the world’s largest energy-supply shock to date because a single narrow passage indispensable to oil and natural-gas supplies was disrupted.
That is the structural vulnerability of maritime chokepoints: international commerce depends on a small number of narrow, strategic waterways. Wang calls them “the global economy’s Achilles heel.” The policy task is therefore not simply reopening a passage after it has been disrupted, but keeping it safe and usable during war—before local escalation becomes an energy, food, or trade crisis.
The Turkish Straits offer a contrasting case. Near the entrance to the Black Sea, they have remained comparatively stable through the Russo-Ukrainian war. Wang calls their relative absence from broader discussion of the conflict a diplomatic success: commercial shipping has continued through the straits, enabling Black Sea grain exports even while the war has otherwise disrupted maritime trade.
The contrast with Hormuz does not mean that the Turkish Straits are insulated from conflict. Their continued functioning rests on a particular legal and political arrangement—and on whether regional and allied actors can sustain it.
Turkey’s wartime authority preserved space for commercial traffic
Ziyi Wang identifies the 1936 Montreux Convention as the foundation of the Turkish Straits’ relative stability. The convention grants Turkey sovereign authority to restrict warship passage through the straits during wartime. It is, in her telling, a little-known but longstanding diplomatic achievement with a practical consequence in the war in Ukraine.
By limiting military escalation at the chokepoint early in the war, Turkey helped preserve space for commercial shipping. The arrangement did not end the broader conflict or eliminate maritime disruption in the Black Sea. It did allow commercial traffic through the straits to continue, including shipping tied to Black Sea grain exports.
The stakes extend beyond Ukraine’s exports. Wang describes the Turkish Straits as essential to global grain and fertilizer flows and as a nexus for the increasingly vital Middle Corridor trade route. A disruption would therefore affect not just the immediate Black Sea region but supply chains dependent on those flows.
Maritime chokepoints stay open not by chance, but through enforceable rules, capable regional partners, and sustained allied vigilance.
Montreux supplies an enforceable wartime rule and places clear authority in the hands of the state controlling the passage. Turkey, as the Black Sea’s gatekeeper, has the capacity to use that authority. But neither the treaty nor Turkey’s position is self-executing: Western allies must remain alert to the possibility that the straits could become an instrument of coercion.
The risk is not only closure but deliberate weaponization
Ziyi Wang says Russian dominance in the Black Sea is “non-negotiable” for Moscow, rooted in Russia’s imperial identity and codified in its maritime doctrine. Hormuz demonstrated how a single chokepoint can paralyze the global economy; in Wang’s account, the Kremlin could draw the same lesson from that crisis.
The principal counterweight is Turkey. Whether Russia can expand its position in the Black Sea will depend heavily on the state that controls its principal maritime gate. Yet Wang does not cast Turkey as a straightforward ideological ally of the West. Its relationship with Russia is transactional, shaped by energy, grain, and security interests rather than shared values. That relationship could help check Russian expansionism, she says, or fracture under postwar pressure.
The danger in such a rupture is disproportionate to the means required to create it. Wang warns that even a small number of floating naval mines could choke the Turkish Straits, paralyze Ukrainian grain exports, and produce a major food-supply shock.
Even a few floating naval mines could choke off the Turkish Straits, paralyze Ukrainian grain exports, and plunge the world into a major food supply shock.
The implication is that commercial access and wartime stability are not the same thing. Shipping can continue through a conflict when escalation is constrained, yet remain exposed to relatively low-cost disruption if the political relationship supporting restraint breaks down. Keeping the route usable therefore requires attention not only to formal passage rules, but to the conditions that deter their circumvention or collapse.