At the start of 2026, the BRICS members sent their navies to the coast of South Africa for the Will of Peace drills. As of August 22, 2026, ship traffic through the Cape route has increased because of what is happening in the Bab Al Mandab Strait trait, a choke point between Yemen in South West Asia and Djibouti and Eritrea on the East African coast, which is a ripple effect of a bigger crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. It turns out the expanded BRICS efforts of Will of Peace were a forerunner to what is now known as the Cape Detour in global supply chains.
For the global south the effect is very grave, especially for landlocked countries like Uganda, while major economies can try to absorb higher sea transit expenses during geopolitical Shockwaves like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it’s very cascading and the rising fuel prices are a example of that today here in Kampala. For almost everything, in places like Uganda and most of East Africa there is heavy reliance on the northern and central transit corridors that connect the region through Port Mombasa in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania that depend on a stable Indian Ocean maritime supply chains.
Currently, in Uganda and the greater East Africa there is a feeling of the surging global shipping and fuel prices that translates directly into skyrocketing costs for imported fuel, heavy machinery that is supposed to spur industrialisation and vital agricultural inputs like fertilizers that come directly from the Strait of Hormuz, remember agriculture is the backbone of the Ugandan economy especially with the recent coffee export peaks.
What is happening is great-power miscalculation that is forcing the world’s poorest to pay the price. All this can be pointed to what happened a few weeks after the BRICS Naval drills, on 28th of February 2026, Washington and Tel Aviv launched operation Epic Fury targeting Iranian military infrastructure and leadership resulting into the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and in an immediate retaliation the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) decided to close of the Strait of Hormuz by March 4, 2026, especially to traffic connected to US, Israel and their allies. One fifth of the world’s traded petrol chemicals transited the Strait before President Trump decided to go to war with Iran.
It’s not the first time the post Second world War world order has faced such a situation, in 1956 the Suez Crisis happened after the Egyptian President then Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July of 1956, leading to the joint military invasion by Britain, France and Israel in November of the same year, leading to the closure of the water way for six months until some time in 1957, forcing oil shipments around Africa also denting traditional European hegemony. Then it was Nasser and the Canal; now it’s Tehran and the Strait and the world’s poorest paid the toll both times. The weaponization of supply chain choke points is not new, in both cases global energy economy was and is massively affected threatening the entire global economy in turn. Just like in 1956, today is also about imperial overreach geopolitical miscalculations by those powers that think it’s normal to dominate smaller nations, which again and again is exposing limits of unilateral military enforcement.
When powers like U.S. engage in military action against countries like Iran, De facto control overruns the legal norms and diplomacy, at the moment the world has even forgotten about the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example for a while the U.S. and EU members have taken up actions that have undermined the fact that international waters and straits used for international navigation are governed by the right of transit passage with the continued capture of Venezuela and Russian oil tankers at Sea, with that background they can’t morally challenge the actions of the IRGC and the Houthis.
The U.S. and it’s European allies have directly intercepted and commandeered sovereign linked vessels on the high seas under the banner of sanctions enforcement. The most recent instances include the U.S. seizure of the crude oild tanker Skipper on December 10, 2025 and the subsequent capture of the M/T Sophia and the Russian flagged tanker Mariners on January 7, 2026, alongside the French Navy’s interception of the tanker Tagor on June 1, 2026.
As the world watches Trump stick to his failing gunboat diplomacy, that is characterized by military action during ongoing diplomatic talks with Iran. Closure of critical water ways is certain, because for one side It symbolizes the ultimate leverage against Washington’s military and economic coercion through sanctions that can turn a regional geopolitical crisis into a global vulnerability. Again as the world watches on, its also getting more clear that that unipolar security frameworks by Washington can’t work any more since regional players can now effectively paralyze global supply chains in the face of superpower naval presence. Iran’s response to President Trump’s reckless war efforts in South West Asia will for ever scar how the world approaches, trade, diplomacy and security to guarantee survival of whole civilizations especially in the global south.
