Suez Canal
AIS observation, distinct from the structural share above. Meaning comes from the gap between the two.
The Asia–Europe axis. Heavily disrupted since 2024 by attacks in the Red Sea, forcing the detour around the Cape of Good Hope, weeks of added delay.
The Ever Given, a dress rehearsal
On 23 March 2021, a 400-meter container ship turned sideways across the channel and blocked it for six days. No damage, no attack: a single poorly positioned ship was enough to interrupt the Asia–Europe axis. Nearly 400 vessels piled up at the two entrances, immobilizing at its peak the equivalent of several billion dollars of goods per day. The canal has neither slip road nor local bypass, its internal resilience is nil.
The episode revealed the true nature of the bottleneck: a single tube, near-alternating in direction over its southern half, where the failure of one link freezes the whole line. This rigidity is structural, not accidental. Two years later, a threat of a different kind would show that a canal can empty out without ever being blocked.
The bottleneck one chooses no longer to take
Since late 2023, Houthi drone and missile attacks in the southern Red Sea and at Bab-el-Mandeb have never physically closed Suez: they have made it too dangerous to use. The major shipping lines, Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, voluntarily rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, roughly 40 % more distance and ten to fourteen extra days per rotation, plus a fuel surcharge on the order of a million dollars per voyage.
A passage point can cease to exist economically while remaining open. For Egypt, whose tolls constituted a hard-currency rent of nearly 10 billion dollars a year, the effect was brutal, a shortfall of about 7 billion in 2024. The canal stayed open, but deserted.