Following L’Affolement du monde [The World in Turmoil] (French Geopolitical Book Prize 2019), Guerres invisibles [Invisible Wars] (2021) and Les Ambitions inavouées [Unspoken Ambitions] (2023),[1] Thomas Gomart’s new geostrategic opus takes to the sea. L’Accélération de l’histoire. Les nœuds géostratégiques d’un monde hors de contrôle [The Acceleration of History: The Geostrategic Nodes of a World out of Control] explores the situation in three straits: the Strait of Formosa (between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan), the Strait of Hormuz (between Oman, the United Arab Emirates and the Islamic Republic of Iran) and the Bosporus (gateway to the Black Sea). As bottlenecks in global supply chains, these crossroads are destined to be catalysts for major geopolitical transformations, which are accelerating at an astonishing rate in the current period.
The author, Director of IFRI (the French Institute of International Relations), identifies two current shifts and their impact on these “geostrategic nodes”.
First shift: Chinese power has reached maturity
At the heart of numerous networks, China is now in a position to project global ambitions. In the future, it will be helped by the melting of the ice and the opening up of the sea route north of Russia. Far from being insignificant, this climatic transformation should give Taiwan access to the Atlantic via a route beyond American control, an unprecedented phenomenon. But in the shorter term, Taiwan is clearly the catalyst for Sino-American rivalry.
The consequences of a conflict could extend beyond the Straits of Formosa, starting with the Korean peninsula, as revealed, for example, in March 2023 by the reacti...
