Arabic → English transcript

A waterway no more than two kilometers and seven hundred meters wide,

through which twenty- three million barrels of oil pass daily, and goods worth

three and a half trillion dollars annually.

The Strait of Malacca has recently overtaken the Strait of Hormuz

to become the world’s largest oil chokepoint. If it suddenly closed,

who would choke first?

The first to be harmed would be the United States,

as it exports through it eight hundred thousand barrels a day toward East Asia.

Any closure would hit technology supply chains and drive

up electronics prices worldwide. Then we have Taiwan, which relies on

it to import most of the energy it needs to run the global semiconductor sector,

and it has no practical alternatives other than this strait. After that we have

South Korea, which imports ninety percent of its energy,

of which seventy percent is crude oil and twenty percent is liquefied gas,

transported through this vital passage.

And from Korea we also find Japan, which relies on the strait to secure more

than Eighty percent of its oil

imports coming from the Middle East, and any disruption means paralysis of

industry at once. The most affected by closing the strait is China,

as eighty percent of its seaborne oil imports and sixty percent of its

natural gas pass through the strait, and it alone accounts for forty- eight

percent of the total oil flows through it.