History has rarely been kind to countries without a coastline. When armies move and alliances shift, the absence of direct maritime access turns geography into a liability. Transit corridors become choke points. Neighbors become gatekeepers. And the cost of conflict, whether distant or near, is paid in delayed shipments, inflated prices, and stalled development. That pattern is old. What has changed is the scale and sophistication of the systems that now bind these countries to the rest of the world—especially in energy—and the growing recognition that many of the poorest landlocked states sit atop the very minerals that modern warfare and its supporting technologies require.
In earlier centuries the problem was often immediate and physical. Landlocked polities depended on the goodwill or weakness of coastal powers for trade and military resupply. Bolivia’s loss of its Pacific access after the War of the Pacific in the late nineteenth century left a lasting scar on its economy and national psyche; the country still negotiates over outlets more than a century later. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, successive empires and then Soviet planners treated inland territories as hinterlands whose resources could be extracted while their strategic vulnerability remained someone else’s problem. During the Second World War, several European landlocked states discovered how quickly neutrality or limited access could be overridden once larger powers decided the surrounding transit routes mattered more than formal borders. The pattern repeated in the proxy conflicts of the Cold War: inland African and Asian states became arenas precisely because their isolation made external sponsorship cheaper and deniability easier.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries altered the mechanism more than the underlying exposure. Global supply chains grew longer, more specialized, and more dependent on continuous flows of oil, gas, refined products, and critical minerals. Landlocked countries, whether relatively prosperous or desperately poor, found themselves inserted into these chains without controlling the entry and exit points. Pipelines, rail corridors, and road networks crossing multiple sovereign jurisdictions became the new coastlines—fragile, politicized, and expensive to secure. When those corridors are disrupted, the effects cascade. European landlocked economies learned this sharply after 2022 as Russian gas volumes fell and alternative routes proved slower and costlier to activate. The same logic applies, with far thinner margins, to poorer states whose fuel imports, fertilizer shipments, and export earnings all travel through the territory of neighbors who may themselves be unstable or opportunistic.
A clear segmentation has emerged between the northern and southern experiences of this vulnerability. In much of Europe and parts of temperate Asia, landlocked countries possess denser infrastructure, stronger institutions, and deeper capital markets. They can absorb temporary shocks, finance alternative routes, and negotiate from positions of relative strength. In the southern hemisphere and across large stretches of Africa and interior Latin America, the same disruptions hit harder and last longer. Limited fiscal space, thinner transport networks, and higher baseline poverty mean that a closed border or a sabotaged pipeline translates quickly into fuel shortages, power cuts, and rising food prices. Climate stress compounds the problem: erratic rainfall and shrinking water tables already strain agriculture in many of these regions; war-related interruptions to fertilizer and fuel supply turn seasonal hardship into structural food insecurity.
Yet the same countries that suffer most from these dynamics often hold the raw materials that contemporary conflict and its technologies demand. Cobalt, copper, coltan, uranium, rare earth elements, and other inputs essential to advanced electronics, batteries, guidance systems, and AI-enabled defense platforms are concentrated in a handful of inland or near-inland jurisdictions, many of them low-GDP. These resources leave the ground, cross multiple borders, and enter global manufacturing chains that ultimately equip both conventional and high-technology forces. The producing countries capture only a fraction of the final value while remaining exposed to the very conflicts their minerals help sustain. The arrangement is neither accidental nor sustainable.
Current theaters illustrate the point without requiring the formal declaration of a third world war. The prolonged fighting in and around Ukraine has rewritten European energy maps and demonstrated how quickly pipeline politics can reprice security for inland states. Tensions involving Iran continue to threaten maritime and overland energy routes that landlocked importers cannot easily bypass. Persistent instability across parts of Central Africa disrupts mining and transit in regions that supply critical minerals. Political and economic turbulence in Venezuela and broader Latin American flashpoints affect oil markets and regional trade patterns that inland neighbors feel indirectly. In the Far East, sustained strategic competition keeps supply chains for advanced components under permanent stress. Taken together, these overlapping crises resemble less a classic world war than a distributed, multi-domain contest—call it a WW2.0—in which economic coercion, infrastructure sabotage, resource denial, and demographic pressure matter as much as kinetic force.
Demographic change and climate pressures make the next decade decisive. Many of the most resource-rich landlocked countries have young, rapidly growing populations. Without reliable energy, water, and food systems, that demographic dividend risks becoming a source of instability rather than growth. Climate-driven stress on shared river basins and agricultural zones will intensify competition over the same corridors that wars already threaten. Waiting for external powers to stabilize these systems has produced limited results. A more coherent response would see groups of landlocked states deliberately cluster—coordinating infrastructure, energy storage, transit agreements, and mineral-value addition—while selecting partners who understand that post-conflict regional orders will be shaped by who controls reliable access, not merely who wins the last battle. Such partners need not share ideology; they need to share an interest in predictable corridors, transparent resource governance, and long-term demographic and climatic realism.
The historical record shows that landlocked countries have rarely written the rules of great-power conflict. They have, however, repeatedly paid for them. The complexity of modern energy and mineral supply chains has raised the price of that payment. The concentration of strategic resources inside many of the same countries has created both leverage and danger. Decision-makers in capitals that still treat inland states as peripheral would do well to recalculate. The next phase of global competition will not be decided solely on coastlines or in open ocean. It will also be decided in the corridors, pipelines, and mining districts of countries that have no sea of their own—and that can no longer afford to remain passive nodes in someone else’s supply chain.
Author: Dr. Mohamed El Sahili