Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the world's third-largest ocean, stretching from the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the northwest to the Bay of Bengal and the waters off Australia and Indonesia in the east. It carries a large share of global seaborne oil, most of it loaded at Gulf terminals and bound for Asian refineries, funnelled first through the Strait of Hormuz and then across the open Arabian Sea before splitting toward South and East Asian ports.

Its littoral and near-littoral states span Gulf producers, South Asian powers including India and Sri Lanka, and further naval actors such as Australia, all with a direct stake in keeping its shipping lanes open. Because so much tanker traffic has no route home except across this ocean, disruption anywhere along the Gulf of Oman approaches or further east has knock-on effects on freight and insurance costs long before it reaches a headline chokepoint like Hormuz itself.