For a few weeks, the Strait of Hormuz has been the cynosure of all eyes. The world is on edge. The cessation of the US and Israeli attack on Iran has yielded no agreement between Iran and the US, who are exchanging hostile and confusing ideas about who can most effectively blocked the Strait. On all sides, geography is being treated as destiny. Both the ceasefire and plans for a second round of talks in Islamabad hang by a thread.This lesson is crystallised in the virtually universal agreement that Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is the new foundation of their leverage, their strategic gains and their strong negotiating position. The Iranians themselves believe this, even if they do not crow about it. With the new popularity of words like geopolitics, geoeconomics and even geo-diplomacy, what has been forgotten is that no geographical fact speaks for itself. History, ideology and political conflict, all defined by human actors, drive geography and not vice versa. Forgetting this fact can lead both politicians and analysts to highlight the wrong geography in their models.The “geo” prefix is the go-to mantra of our times. It was first used by Parag Khanna, as early as 2003, to build on the already well-established idea of geopolitics, firmly defining realpolitik and international strategy in the United States by such theorists as Brzezinski (1997), Kissinger (2001), Spykman (1944) and Walsh (1949). It has since been further refined to emphasise geostrategy, the geoeconomics of energy, rare earths and global supply chains (Conway 2023; Marshall 2015; Blackwill and Harris 2016; Durr and Heilman 2025). From its earlier roots in 19th century European political and geographical theories, this overlapping body of work uses geographical facts and factors to optimise security, stability and national interests.Over its long history, and its modern evolution into a key prefix in conceptual and practical approaches to international politics, the geo prefix has become a blinder rather than a tool. It represents an old strand of Western geographical determinism, traceable to Montesquieu, and even further back to Aristotle, in which geography, climate and culture tends towards distinct natural types. It is the underlying disease in Trump’s global vision of places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Greenland. It is indeed a short road from the myopic focus on micro-geographies such as the Strait of Hormuz to the macro-destruction of civilisations like Iran.The geography mythThis blinder is what explains how Trump and Netanyahu could have given Iran its domination of this 23-mile chokepoint for 20% of the world’s energy transportation. The belief in a deadly strike on Iran’s leadership, the prediction of an internal overthrow of the ruling elite, and the joint political fantasies of Netanyahu and Trump (both in deep trouble in their own societies) led to this this blind spot which is even more surprising knowing that his military and intelligence officials had warned Trump about the criticality of Iran’s power over the Strait of Hormuz.This naked, even obvious fact of strategic relevance was buried under ideology, bravado and armed arrogance in both the Trump and Netanyahu camps. Now this narrow body of water has come back into view, along with analogies to the Suez crisis of 1956, the tactical survival of Ukraine in its battle with Russia, and the possible risks of global access to Red Sea shipping through the Bab El Mandeb Strait. This specific geography was only brought back into view because of a series of decisions by historical actors in the US and Israel, and consequently by the leadership of Iran. Even the simplest geographical factor only becomes salient because of prior political, military, commercial or administrative actions. The Strait of Hormuz has proved to be Trump’s Dunkirk. But even Dunkirk was a not a singular or predetermined landing point for Allied troops in World War II.How histories make geographiesLet us widen the lens a bit more. Whenever we look at the formation of national boundaries from earlier frontiers, what we see is the imposition of some sort of cultural and political discourse on the brute facts of geography. The establishment of the Pyrenees as a border between the nation states of Spain and France was a joint product of local ideas of identity, changing theories of sovereignty and new ideas about territory.The Pyrenees were the stage on which these changes were enacted and not their driver. The McMahon Line, a cartographic boundary created in 1914 to demarcate British India from China in the early 20th century, continues to plague relations between India and China on the northeastern boundaries of the Indian nation-state and involves a century of disputes between colonial and postcolonial powers, including new states such as Myanmar. This important boundary has no geophysical primacy and only becomes effective in cultural, strategic and military contestations, of which the most dangerous point was the Indo-China War of 1962.The Russian Winter is frequently invoked to explain Russia’s strength against foreign invaders or enemies, from Napoleonic France to Hitler’s Germany and today’s Ukraine. But the “weaponisation” of the Russian Winter has changed dramatically over two centuries due to climate change, naval technological innovations, oil and energy markets and political shifts in both Russia and in Europe.Today’s Russian winter is as much a risk to Russian oil infrastructure, naval options and Putin’s economy as it is a weapon with which to exhaust Ukraine or bully Europe. Climate, as much as physical geography, is a tool not a determinant in global politics.The 38th Parallel remains a boundary between North and South Korea, which have technically been at war for seven decades, and is the artificial product of a Cold War decision by the Soviet Union and the US, which hardened into this arbitrary geographical marker. Much of central and southern Europe is a product of similar cartographic decisions produced by Great Power whims. The borders between India and Pakistan created a series of wars starting in 1948 and produced the current national geography of both states, rather than geography. Cartographies of containment, expansion and defense throughout modern history produce such geographies, though they are often and mistakenly seen as causal drivers of identity, sovereignty and national interest.Found geographiesThere is no better way to see how geographical determinism has led us to distort history, context and contingency in human affairs than the ideologies of the nation-state. The idea that the nation is above all an “imagined” community created by print capitalism, imperial maps and census and modern mass media was first made by Benedict Anderson (1983). As for the state, Michel Foucault has shown us that the modern state is created by the production of boundaries, populations and sovereign jurisdictions which are tied together by taxes, armies and bureaucracies rather than by soil, blood or natural barriers. The modern nation-state is an artefact of law, power and policing, not of any pre-existing geographical affinities. Thus are peasants turned into Frenchmen, Punjabis into Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians into Turks and Iranians, Okinawans into Japanese.Today’s nation states work hard to convince citizens with prior identities to put the nation first. The instruments of this task include textbooks, linguistic standardisation, national rituals and pageants, mass media content and regulation, military recruitment and spectacles. Through these tools the history of nations as young as a few decades is projected back into the hoary chronology of heritage, archaeology and geography. Through this chronology, every nation renders its boundaries sacred and its national identity is portrayed as geographic.Education, tourism and cultural festivals are tools of this geographical reverse engineering. They turn maps of imperial partition, cultural conquest and linguistic hegemony into evidence of the truths of geography and the naturalness of entirely contingent, and sometimes arbitrary human decisions.Hence, the disputes about territories, boundaries and sovereignties that can be seen from Greenland to Taiwan and from Sudan to Bolivia represent major modern examples of the urge to make geographical realities evidence for political and economic claims. Geography is often made the basis of destiny, and since this logic can also be reverse engineered, it is an inevitably volatile and contentious basis for international politics.The Hormuz that roaredLet us return from this point of view to look at the strategic victory that many analysts have rightly awarded to Iran, for tightening its control over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital node in the global energy market. Given the relative smallness of this chokepoint, does it not testify to the outsize importance of geography and nature’s map, at least in this special instance?Look again… the geography that Iran’s strategic victory really exposes is that the Persian Gulf itself, all the states of the GCC, including Saudi Arabia, as well as Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, is an assemblage of petrostates, produced entirely by the confluence of British and American interests in the region for over a century. Their elites are recent beneficiaries of enormous oil and natural gas wealth, split with Western corporations and states through a variety of profit and defence sharing arrangements. These defense arrangements have shown their inability to contest Iran’s regional power and the incapacity of the US to protect key assets, notably the Strait of Hormuz.Ships are stranded, oil and gas can barely be contained in storage, migrant workers are being laid off and expat professionals are fleeing. The Strait of Hormuz is no more than a strategic keyhole which exposes the fragility of Western interests in the Gulf. With a population of 90 million and a land area of 1,700,000 square kilometers, Iran is the landmass that wags the tail of the Gulf, and not vice versa.It is not that geography (landmasses, oceans, mountains, space, oceans) does not count. But since geography is omnipresent on the surface of our planet, it cannot explain or predict specific political events and alliances. The geographies that count are the ones we choose to prioritise, for reasons that might be transient or long-term. But we often choose the wrong geographies for our explanations, mistaking effects for causes, and post facto realities for path determining causalities.This Iranian landmass, along with the IRGC and a deep cultural history anchored by the Persian language and Shia theology, accounts for the Iranian capacity to destroy any hostile force which threatens its strategic hold over the Strait of Hormuz. It is a massive nation-state that, by any realist account, is not available for a hostile takeover. Iran does not depend on its control of the Strait of Hormuz. It is in its entirety a large and sovereign chokepoint over the politics of West Asia. Oil is the hostage. But Iran holds the choke. Trump and Netanyahu might be waking up to that reality. Still, their vanity might hold them hostage to the wrong geography – that of the Strait of Hormuz – to account for their failures, rather than to recognise the larger ideological, political and religious assets of Iran.This excessive habituation to geography – and to geographical determinism – produces mimetic strategies among opponents, thus perpetuating their shared error. The most recent warnings from both Iran and the US about their intentions to blockade the Strait of Hormuz are a mutually assured misperception. In the medium to long run, some unpredictable series of decisions is likely to lead each side to see that the choke which holds them both prisoner is in the narrow Strait of Hormuz. It is the chokehold of geographical determinism, not of geography as such. Tomorrow’s chokehold will be somewhere else. Meanwhile lives, energy and money will continue to hemorrhage.Arjun Appadurai teaches in New York and Berlin.