New Delhi, April 23 -- If the Iran War has taught us nothing else, it's that weaponizing shipping routes is now the military move du jour. That has rightly turned attention to the Taiwan Strait, but in this era of intense US-China rivalry, the Strait of Malacca is just as important.

The shipping route-which carries roughly 40% of global trade and around 80% of China's imported oil-has long been regarded as vulnerable to disruption. Southeast Asia's divisions will make any crisis much harder to contain.

The confrontation between the US and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz has shown how easily chokepoints can be militarized and how quickly economic fallout can spread. The same logic applies to Malacca, except that here, the consequences wou...