A Neglected Region? The Strategic Value of the South Atlantic

In March 2021, a colossal container ship named Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes for almost a week. It was reported that the delay held up some $10 billion USD in global trade.Footnote1 Although an incident like this is relatively rare and does not pose a structural threat to global trade, it highlights the fragility of commercial maritime routes, and how interconnected the world’s maritime regions—also known as maritime orders—are. Of these, the Indo-Pacific and the South Atlantic are the most significant maritime orders, transporting the vast bulk of global sea freight, which notably surpasses both land and air freight by a wide margin. Yet with all the focus on the Indo-Pacific maritime regional order, the South Atlantic’s centrality to global peace and prosperity is often neglected. By “South Atlantic,” we are referring to those areas of the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and South America below the equator, and whose roughly eighty countries—including important economies like Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa—are part of the Global South. As the world’s other key maritime order, the South Atlantic represents an indivisible component of the three-quarters of the planet that is covered by water. It also includes two highly strategic passageways—the Panama Canal and Cape Hope—which provide, in practical terms, the only access to and from the Indian and Pacific oceans. Recent scholarship has tangentially drawn attention to the centrality of the South Atlantic maritime order and how these regions relate to the Indo-Pacific, the nexus of contemporary great power rivalry.Footnote2 Yet as we argue in this article, the South Atlantic remains neglected at the level of grand strategy. Despite this maritime order being in its own backyard, Washington has singularly failed to provide a comprehensive policy outlook for the South Atlantic. This appears to be a glaring omission given that the stability of the South Atlantic order is more relevant than ever at a time of reemerging rival geopolitical blocs, loosely led by the United States and China.Footnote3 Moreover, the South Atlantic is an indispensable shipping route and abundant in natural resources and thus has consequences for the global economy. Our article makes two key arguments. First, the South Atlantic not only represents a highly strategic region in its own right, but it has a tangible structural function in supporting the flows of global trade and supply chains that underpin other regional orders, particularly the pivotal Indo-Pacific. The South Atlantic’s significance derives from the globalization of shipping lanes, the region’s plentiful natural resources, and the geographical dependency of the Indo-Pacific on the Panama Canal and Cape Horn for westward shipping lanes. Increasingly significant in an era of trade wars, the South Atlantic provides an alternative geography for rerouting supply chains, supporting Western states as they engage in derisking and decoupling of their trading arrangements away from China. With the world slipping back into bloc politics, governments of the South Atlantic have so far resisted being pulled one way or another, which cements this region as a viable option for supply chain rerouting. Second, Western states would reap benefits in rebalancing their grand strategies toward the South Atlantic. This is not about military engagement with the region, as has characterized the Western pivot toward the Indo-Pacific, but more about developing a comprehensive strategy to maintain the region as a peaceful environment. Targeted and sustainable measures such as an Atlantic-wide emphasis on multilateral engagement, promotion of regional trade, and provision of maritime security would increase the stability of the wider world order. At the same time, Western engagement with the South Atlantic should avoid exclusionary minilateral frameworks—as seen in the Indo-Pacific—so as not to undermine the West’s legitimacy as an external hegemonic actor. Despite the recent flashpoints for global security (most obviously the Ukraine war and Gaza conflict), the centrality of regional maritime orders suggests that not all threats are localized or single-ticket items. Rather than viewing crises in isolation, Western policymakers would do better by connecting decision-making with grand strategic priorities rather than being on their back foot in responding to crises, particularly in an era where China and other adversaries are increasingly resorting to the weaponization of supply chains that concern critical commodities. Even more fundamentally, contemporary great power rivalry can be viewed through the lens of maritime orders, and herein may lie the solutions. Rather than viewing the region as a collection of weak and irrelevant economies disenfranchised by vast geographical distances, it is their very connectedness and interdependence afforded by their maritime dimension as a global shipping and infrastructure route that makes the South Atlantic so critical to the stability of the global system

Geography · Political science · Statistics · Value (mathematics · Economic Zones and Regional Development · Global trade and economics · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Mathematics