A Strait of Hormuz blockade has exposed Japan and South Korea's deep dependence on maritime trade for food and fuel, prompting both nations to reassess their strategic vulnerabilities.

There is a gate across this road. The modern man says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, I will not let you remove it. Go away and and think. When you can tell me why it is here, I may let you destroy it.”

We find ourselves currently observing a most peculiar sort of gate-breaking in the Far East. The economists and the architects of global commerce, those clever men who have spent decades convincing the world that a border is merely a nuisance and a supply chain is a magical, self-sustaining river, are suddenly finding themselves staring at a blockage in the Strait of Hormuz. They are looking at the sudden, terrifying presence of a physical reality - a blockade - and they are reacting with the frantic, wide-eyed confusion of a man who has spent his whole life believing that gravity was merely a suggestion made by the unimaginative.

For years, the great intellectual project of our age has been the removal of all fences. We have been told that the world is a single, seamless workshop, that distance is an illusion, and that the reliance on a single, narrow artery for the lifeblood of a nation is not a vulnerability, but a triumph of efficiency. The reformers of the global market looked at the old, clunky, expensive ways of local production and said, “Why bother with the heavy, redundant, and often inconvenient local warehouse when we can have a slender, elegant, and incredibly cheap stream of goods flowing from the furthest corners of the earth?” They removed the fences of distance and the fences of self-sufficiency, and they replaced them with a magnificent, shimmering web of interdependence.

It was a beautiful web. It was a masterpiece of mathematical elegance. It was, quite clearly, a disaster waiting to happen.

Now, the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz has arrived to remind the inhabitants of Tokyo and Seoul that a web, while excellent for catching flies, is a terrible thing to rely upon when one is trying to move heavy tankers of oil. The sudden realization of Japan and South Korea is not that the world has changed, but that the world has merely reverted to its original, stubborn state of being physical. They are discovering that the “efficiency” they so highly prized was actually a form of profound, invisible fragility. They had been celebrating the removal of the fence of “redundancy,” only to find that the fence was actually a shield.

The tragedy of the modern expert is that he mistakes the removal of a difficulty for the achievement of a victory. He looks at a stockpile of grain or a local refinery and sees only “waste” and “inefficiency.” He looks at a closed border and sees only “stagnation.” He is so enamoured with the idea of a frictionless world that he forgets that friction is what allows a wheel to turn. Without the friction of local reserves, without the “inefficient” buffer of domestic energy, the entire machinery of the state simply slides into a void the moment the gears of global trade are jammed by a single, well-placed obstruction.

The clever men in Seoul and Tokyo are now “reassessing their strategic vulnerabilities.” This is a polite, diplomatic way of saying they have realized they have been living in a house made of glass and are now being pelted with stones. They are looking for new fences. They are looking for ways to rebuild the very redundancies they once mocked.

The paradox is this: the more we attempt to create a world without boundaries, the more we find ourselves at the mercy of the most brutal boundaries imaginable. We sought to escape the tyranny of geography by making the world a single, borderless marketplace, only to find that geography has been waiting in the shadows, ready to assert itself with the sudden, violent authority of a closed gate. The true radical is not the man who removes the fence to create a global market; the true radical is the man who realizes that the fence was the only thing keeping the market from becoming a trap.