What Weaponised Interdependence Does and Does Not Explain About Corridors
ABSTRACT
Weaponised interdependence locates coercive power in asymmetric network structure. This paper argues that the framework has been applied too loosely to transit geography, where hosting a route is treated as equivalent to controlling one. Using Trans-Caspian corridor data it distinguishes chokepoint control from redundancy provision, shows that the two generate different revenue models, and specifies the condition under which a transit state becomes a hub.
1. The framework
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s account of weaponised interdependence rests on a structural claim: global economic networks are not flat but hub-and-spoke, and states with jurisdiction over central nodes can convert that position into coercive capacity. They identify two mechanisms. The panopticon effect gives the hub state privileged information about flows passing through it. The chokepoint effect gives it the ability to deny others access to the network. Their canonical illustrations are financial messaging infrastructure and the dollar clearing system, where the hub is a genuine single point of passage and substitution is prohibitively expensive.
The framework travelled quickly into discussions of physical infrastructure, where it is often used to argue that a state hosting an important transport route thereby acquires leverage over its users. That inference does not follow from the framework. It requires an additional premise about substitutability, and where that premise fails the mechanism does not operate.
2. The substitutability condition
Chokepoint power exists when the cost to a user of routing around the hub is high relative to the cost of accepting the hub’s terms. In financial infrastructure, the substitution cost is close to prohibitive in the short run, which is precisely why the mechanism works. In physical logistics, substitution costs are usually finite and frequently modest, because most cargo can travel by more than one mode and more than one route at a calculable premium.
This yields a testable distinction. A transit state exercises chokepoint power when users have no economically viable alternative. It provides redundancy when users have alternatives but value having more than one. The two positions look similar on a map and behave differently in negotiation.
3. The Trans-Caspian case
The Middle Corridor, or Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, is a multimodal chain running from western China through Central Asia, across the Caspian, through the South Caucasus and into Türkiye and Europe. It is the leading empirical candidate for a Turkish chokepoint position, and the data do not support that reading.
Volume. Trans-Caspian freight rose from roughly 1.5 million tonnes in 2022 to about 2.7 million in 2023, 4.5 million in 2024 and 5.2 million in 2025. The growth rate is high and the base is small. Global seaborne trade is measured in billions of tonnes annually, so the corridor’s share of the flows it nominally competes for is negligible.
Price. World Bank analysis places the cost of moving a forty-foot equivalent container between China and Europe via the Middle Corridor at 2,500 to 3,250 dollars, against roughly 2,599 to 3,121 dollars on the northern route through Russia and 1,500 to 2,000 dollars by sea. Transit time on the corridor has fallen from 38–53 days to 18–23 days, against 28–40 days for the maritime route. The corridor therefore sells time at a price premium to a subset of cargo, which is a normal commercial proposition rather than a coercive one.
Physical constraint. The binding limits sit at the Caspian crossing rather than on land. The Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway was upgraded in 2024 to 5 million tonnes of annual capacity and the port of Alat is expanding from 15 to 25 million tonnes, so fixed infrastructure is not the constraint. Vessel availability is: roll-on/roll-off and container tonnage on a landlocked sea cannot be redeployed from elsewhere, and procurement remains at feasibility stage. Declining Caspian water levels have already cut rail tank car ferry movements on the Baku–Kuryk route by 22 percent.
4. Redundancy as a distinct asset
None of this makes the corridor strategically unimportant. It changes what kind of importance it has. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz from March 2026 demonstrated the mechanism precisely: a maritime chokepoint failure raised the value users place on land alternatives without altering the land route’s unit cost. Redundancy is option value, and option value rises with the variance of the primary route rather than with the attractiveness of the alternative.
Option value is real and monetisable, but it is monetised differently from chokepoint rent. Chokepoint control permits extraction: the hub charges more because the user has nowhere else to go. Redundancy provision does not permit extraction, because raising the price of the alternative destroys the reason for holding it. It is monetised instead through the services attached to the flow — insurance and reinsurance, trade finance, customs technology and single-window systems, warehousing, cold chain, maintenance and repair, terminal handling, and the legal and arbitration services that follow multimodal contracts.
The distinction has a sharp practical consequence. Value in a services model accrues to whoever performs the function, not to whoever the cargo crosses. A container that passes through Turkish territory on a Kazakh wagon under a Georgian bill of lading insured in London leaves very little behind. The same container handled at a Turkish terminal, financed by a Turkish bank, cleared through a Turkish customs platform and repaired in a Turkish facility leaves a great deal. Geography determines the first; industrial and regulatory policy determines the second.
5. When a transit state becomes a hub
The condition can be stated precisely. A transit state becomes a hub when the services attached to the flow are performed within its jurisdiction at a scale that makes relocating them costly. At that point substitutability falls, because the user is no longer choosing between routes but between service ecosystems, and ecosystems are harder to replicate than track. This is the mechanism by which Rotterdam, Singapore and Dubai converted position into structural advantage, and none of them did it by controlling access to a strait.
Measured against that condition, Türkiye’s corridor position is currently upstream. The relevant policy indicators are not corridor tonnage but the share of corridor-related insurance premiums, trade finance volume, customs transactions and terminal handling performed domestically. Those series would show whether hub formation is occurring; tonnage will not.
6. Limitations
The argument is bounded in three ways. It applies to bulk and container freight and not to pipelines, where substitution costs are genuinely high and chokepoint logic does apply, which is why energy transit and container transit should not be analysed with the same framework. It treats substitutability as exogenous, whereas a sufficiently large investment programme could in principle lower maritime alternatives’ reliability enough to change the calculus. And it does not address the panopticon mechanism, which may operate on transit data even where the chokepoint mechanism does not — a state hosting corridor digital infrastructure acquires information about flows regardless of whether it can deny them.
7. Conclusion
Weaponised interdependence explains a great deal about financial and digital networks and rather less about roads and railways, because the mechanism depends on a substitutability condition that physical logistics rarely satisfies. Trans-Caspian volumes of 5.2 million tonnes moving at a price premium to sea freight describe a redundancy asset, not a chokepoint. The strategic proposition for a state in that position is not to extract rent from passage but to capture the service layer that travels with the cargo, and hub status is produced by service depth rather than by geographic position.
SOURCES
Farrell, H. & Newman, A. (2019) ‘Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion’, International Security 44(1): 42–79.
World Bank (2023) The Middle Trade and Transport Corridor: Policies and Investments to Triple Freight Volumes and Halve Travel Time by 2030.
Kazakh Ministry of Transport and Trans-Caspian International Transport Route volume series, 2022–2025.
Jamestown Foundation (2026) ‘Middle Corridor Makes Progress Toward Operational Reality’, April 2026.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2026) ‘The Much-Touted Middle Corridor Transport Route Could Prove a Dead End’.
EY Kazakhstan, Trans-Caspian International Transport Route cost and transit-time analysis.
International Energy Agency, Strait of Hormuz oil security briefing, 2026.
Furkan Mahmut Tameroglu