In February 2026, Federico Bordonaro published a sharp, data-driven account of what he calls the end of the “Pax Maritima” — the era of unchallenged American naval supremacy that guaranteed seamless passage across every ocean, strait, and chokepoint on earth. His figures are striking: Suez Canal traffic down 60–90% in 2024–2025, Red Sea war-risk premiums hitting 0.7–1% of hull value per transit, and global maritime trade growth set to stall at 0.5% in 2025 after recording 2.2% the year before. These are not fluctuations. They are structural ruptures in the maritime order that sustained three decades of post-Cold War globalization.
Bordonaro’s concluding prescription — the elevation of a Chief Geopolitical Officer (CGO) to the corporate C-suite — deserves credit for its pragmatism. Yet it also deserves a harder examination. Because the maritime order is not a logistics disruption that smarter org charts can contain. It is a systemic crisis rooted in hegemonic decline, and its dynamics are best understood through a lens that predates PowerPoint by several centuries.
So, before we discuss corporate remedies, we need to discuss history. The parallels are uncomfortable, and precisely for that reason, illuminating.
The ghost of 1890
Between 1815 and 1914, the Royal Navy maintained global maritime order through a combination of overwhelming force and institutional credibility. The British did not police the seas out of altruism; they did so because an open trading system served their commercial empire. But from 1890 onward, Germany, the United States, and Japan began building their own blue-water fleets, and British maritime primacy eroded steadily while the appearance of dominance was carefully preserved. The lesson of that period is brutal: a hegemon can look functional long after it has ceased to be so. And the gap between perception and reality, when it closes, tends to close violently.
The parallel with today’s maritime order requires no particular imagination. The United States retains the most capable navy on earth. But it no longer has the political will to bear the full cost of functioning as the planet’s maritime policeman. China, meanwhile, has built “the world’s foremost shipbuilding enterprise and merchant marine,” and the People’s Liberation Army Navy has formally adopted the “Far Seas Protection” (远海防卫) doctrine, explicitly extending its operational ambitions beyond the First Island Chain. The era of unchallenged American maritime primacy is, in structural terms, already over. The paperwork has not yet been filed.
We are not witnessing a transition between maritime orders. We are entering a maritime interregnum, a prolonged phase in which no power is both willing and able to provide the public goods that sustained the previous system. One critical asymmetry separates this moment from 1918: when Britain’s maritime order collapsed, a successor emerged within the same strategic culture. Today, no comparable successor exists. China does not seek to guarantee the freedom of the global maritime commons. It seeks to deny Washington the ability to blockade Chinese energy imports — 83% of which flow through the Strait of Malacca — in a conflict scenario. That produces a world without a maritime policeman, not a world with a new one.
The winners of disorder
The fracture of the maritime order produces clear winners — and this is where the analysis turns uncomfortable. Restoring order is not merely difficult. For several key actors, it is actively undesirable.
China’s posture illustrates the logic with precision. For decades, Beijing free-rode on American protection of Indian Ocean sea lanes while systematically building the forces to contest them. This is not hypocrisy, it is rational statecraft. Similarly, Türkiye has discovered that geography is a revenue stream: Bosphorus transit fees have risen sevenfold since 2022, with a further 15% increase enacted in July 2025. Other chokepoint controllers are watching and learning. The UAE and India, for their part, have constructed a bilateral trade architecture worth $100 billion in FY2024–25, deliberately insulated from both Western and Chinese maritime dependencies. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Türkiye now operate — as one recent analysis aptly puts it — as “multipolar entrepreneurs”: states that hedge between great powers to extract maximum national advantage rather than underwrite any particular order. They do not profit despite the disorder. They profit because of it.
The shadow fleets complete the picture. By December 2025, approximately 3,300 vessels were operating in grey-zone logistics networks, moving an estimated 6–7% of global crude flows. Western sanctions have not dismantled this system. They have hardened it. Enforcement pressure has produced a parallel maritime infrastructure with its own insurance ecosystem, its own flagging registries, and its own financial channels. The shadow fleet is not a symptom of the old maritime order breaking down. It is the embryonic architecture of the new one — opaque, fragmented, and surprisingly resilient.
The CGO illusion
Bordonaro’s call for a Chief Geopolitical Officer at the corporate level reflects a genuine and measurable demand. The WEF Global Risks Report 2026 places geoeconomic confrontation at the top of its two-year severity ranking — up eight positions from the previous year. The World Economic Forum identifies a deepening geopolitical and geoeconomic fracture as the defining challenge for business leadership. Companies with heavy maritime exposure — energy majors, commodity traders, container carriers — do need more rigorous geopolitical intelligence embedded in their decision-making. On this, Bordonaro is entirely correct.
But inside a maritime interregnum, the CGO solves for the wrong variable. A CGO optimizes an individual firm’s exposure within disorder. Yet when every major player in a sector does the same simultaneously, the aggregate result is an acceleration of fragmentation, not its containment. This is the prisoner’s dilemma operating at a geopolitical scale: individually rational responses to collective failure do not resolve the collective failure — they institutionalize it. Furthermore, as one governance analysis notes, no consensus exists on how to approach these risks systematically, precisely because geopolitical exposure varies so dramatically across firms, sectors, and geographies.
The deeper issue is substitution. Corporate geopolitical intelligence can adapt to a collapsing maritime order. It cannot replace the public goods — freedom of navigation, treaty-based dispute resolution, naval presence — that constituted that order in the first place. Hiring a CGO is entirely rational and entirely insufficient. It is the corporate equivalent of buying a generator in a city whose grid is failing: a sensible individual precaution that changes nothing about the underlying infrastructure problem.
The maritime order of the post-Cold War era rested on a political settlement in which a single power absorbed the costs of keeping the seas open. That settlement is dissolving, and no corporate function — however sophisticated — can substitute for it.
What is emerging is not a new order but a system defined by selective enforcement, opportunistic actors, and the steady normalization of friction in global trade. In this environment, adaptation is necessary. It is not strategic. Adaptation ensures survival. It does not confer advantage. The actors that will shape what comes next are not those best at managing risk, but those capable of imposing rules — or exploiting their absence. Everyone else will operate inside a system designed by others and controlled by none, pricing instability as a permanent cost rather than a temporary disruption.
History suggests that such periods do not resolve themselves gradually. They end when power, not coordination, reimposes structure. Until then, the sea will remain open — but no longer free.