From Suez 1956 to Suez 2021

The same canal, the same lesson — sixty-five years apart, the world's most important chokepoint exposed the same vulnerability

By VastBlue Editorial · 2026-03-26 · 18 min read

Series: How We Got Here · Episode 9

The Geometry of Dependence

The Suez Canal is 193 kilometres long, roughly 205 metres wide at its narrowest navigable point, and approximately 24 metres deep. These are modest dimensions. A fit person could swim across it. A decent sprinter could clear its width in under thirty seconds. Yet this narrow trench of dredged sand, cut through the Isthmus of Suez between 1859 and 1869, carries approximately 12 to 15 per cent of global trade by volume. On any given day, fifty or more vessels transit the canal — container ships, oil tankers, bulk carriers, liquefied natural gas tankers — carrying goods worth billions of dollars between Asia and Europe, between the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic, between the factories of the East and the consumers of the West.

The canal exists because of geography, and its importance persists for the same reason. Without it, a vessel sailing from Shanghai to Rotterdam must go around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa — adding approximately 6,000 nautical miles and ten to fourteen days to the journey. For a large container ship burning 150 to 200 tonnes of fuel per day, that detour costs roughly $1 million in additional fuel alone, plus the opportunity cost of the vessel being at sea rather than loading or unloading cargo. Multiply that by the thousands of transits per year, and the canal's value becomes clear: it is not merely a convenience but an economic necessity, a piece of infrastructure so critical that the global trading system has been built around the assumption of its continuous availability.

That assumption — continuous availability — has been tested twice in the canal's modern history, sixty-five years apart. The first time, in 1956, the interruption was deliberate: a geopolitical crisis that shut the canal for months and reshaped the balance of global power. The second time, in March 2021, the interruption was accidental: a single ship, caught by wind and poor visibility, wedged itself sideways in the canal and blocked global commerce for six days. The causes were different. The lessons were identical. And the fact that the world had to learn the same lesson twice — that building an entire trading system around a single chokepoint is an invitation to catastrophe — tells us something important about how supply chains are built, how risk is assessed, and how rarely the obvious vulnerabilities are addressed until they fail.

De Lesseps and the Ditch

The idea of a canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea is ancient. Pharaoh Necho II attempted one around 600 BCE, running from the Nile to the Red Sea rather than cutting directly across the isthmus. Various rulers — Darius I, Ptolemy II, Trajan, the early Arab caliphs — maintained or extended versions of this Nile-to-Red Sea channel over the following two millennia. Napoleon Bonaparte, during his Egyptian campaign in 1798, commissioned a survey for a direct Mediterranean-to-Red-Sea route, but his engineers mistakenly concluded that the Red Sea was ten metres higher than the Mediterranean, making a sea-level canal impossible. The error — corrected by later surveys — delayed the project by half a century.

The canal that exists today was the vision of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat with no engineering training but considerable political skill. De Lesseps secured a concession from Said Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, in 1854, granting the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez the right to build and operate the canal for 99 years. Construction began in 1859, using a combination of European engineering expertise and Egyptian labour — much of it forced. The corvée system, under which Egyptian peasants were conscripted to dig, provided the bulk of the early workforce: at peak construction, as many as 30,000 labourers worked the site at any given time, digging with hand tools in brutal desert conditions. Thousands died. The human cost of the canal is rarely included in triumphalist histories of engineering achievement, but it is inseparable from the canal's origins.

The canal opened on November 17, 1869, and immediately transformed global trade routes. The voyage from London to Bombay, which had taken four to six months around the Cape, could now be completed in weeks. The British, who had initially opposed the project — Lord Palmerston called it "a most futile attempt and totally impossible to be carried out" — quickly recognised its strategic value. In 1875, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli purchased the Egyptian government's 44 per cent stake in the canal company for £4 million (roughly £500 million in today's money), financed by an emergency loan from the Rothschild banking family. By 1882, Britain had occupied Egypt outright, and the canal became the jugular vein of the British Empire — the route through which Indian cotton, Malay rubber, Australian wool, and Persian Gulf oil flowed to British factories and consumers.

For nearly a century, the canal operated under this arrangement: nominally Egyptian territory, practically controlled by the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company, militarily guaranteed by British forces stationed in the Canal Zone. The arrangement survived two world wars, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the gradual erosion of European colonial power across Asia and Africa. It did not survive Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The Crisis of 1956

Nasser came to power in 1954 as the leader of the Free Officers Movement, which had overthrown King Farouk in 1952. He was 36 years old, charismatic, ambitious, and determined to assert Egyptian sovereignty over every square metre of Egyptian territory — including the canal. The context was the broader wave of decolonisation sweeping Asia and Africa in the 1950s: India had gained independence in 1947, Indonesia in 1949, Libya in 1951. The European colonial empires were retreating, and Nasser positioned himself as the leader of Arab nationalism and a voice for the non-aligned world.

The immediate trigger for the crisis was the Aswan High Dam. Nasser sought Western financing to build a massive dam on the Nile — a project that would control flooding, generate hydroelectric power, and symbolise Egypt's modernisation. The United States and Britain initially offered to finance the dam, but withdrew the offer in July 1956, partly because of Nasser's recognition of the People's Republic of China and his arms deal with Czechoslovakia (a Soviet proxy). The withdrawal was intended as a rebuke. It became a catalyst.

On July 26, 1956, one week after the American and British withdrawal, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company. In a speech in Alexandria — deliberately timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of King Farouk's abdication — he announced that Egypt would take control of the canal and use its revenues to finance the Aswan Dam. The speech was electric. Across the Arab world, Nasser became an instant hero. In London and Paris, the reaction was panic.

The Suez Canal is an Egyptian canal. It was dug by the efforts of the sons of Egypt — 120,000 Egyptians died in the process. The Suez Canal Company is an Egyptian company that was usurped by the British.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, Alexandria, July 26, 1956

The British and French response was driven by a combination of economic interest, imperial reflex, and genuine strategic concern. Two thirds of Europe's oil passed through the canal. Britain's entire Middle Eastern strategic posture depended on it. Prime Minister Anthony Eden compared Nasser to Mussolini — a comparison that revealed more about Eden's frame of reference than about Nasser's actual ambitions — and resolved that nationalisation could not stand. France, furious at Nasser's support for the Algerian independence movement, was an eager co-conspirator. The two nations, joined by Israel (which had its own grievances against Egypt, including the blockade of the Straits of Tiran), devised a plan of breathtaking cynicism: Israel would invade Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula, and Britain and France would intervene as supposed peacekeepers, occupying the Canal Zone under the pretext of separating the combatants.

The military operation began on October 29, 1956, when Israeli forces crossed into Sinai. On October 31, British and French aircraft began bombing Egyptian airfields. On November 5, British and French paratroopers landed at Port Said. Militarily, the operation was succeeding. Politically, it was already dead.

The United States, under President Eisenhower, was furious. Not consulted in advance, and facing a presidential election in days, Eisenhower saw the Anglo-French-Israeli action as precisely the kind of colonial adventurism that undermined American interests, alienated the non-aligned world, and distracted from the simultaneous Soviet invasion of Hungary. The American response was devastating and immediate: the US threatened to sell its holdings of British government bonds, triggering a run on sterling. The pound, already under pressure, began to collapse. The International Monetary Fund, under American influence, refused to provide Britain with emergency financial support unless it agreed to a ceasefire. Within days, the British — their currency in freefall, their American alliance in tatters, their moral authority destroyed — agreed to withdraw. France followed. The canal, which Nasser had blocked by ordering the sinking of forty ships in its channel, remained closed until April 1957.

What the Closure Revealed

The canal was closed from November 1956 to April 1957. Five months. In the context of a waterway that had operated continuously for eighty-seven years, five months might seem manageable. It was not. The closure exposed, with painful clarity, how deeply the global economy had embedded the canal into its operating assumptions — and how few alternatives existed when those assumptions failed.

The most immediate impact was on oil. In 1956, approximately 1.5 million barrels per day of crude oil transited the canal, representing roughly two thirds of Europe's oil supply. With the canal blocked, that oil had to go around the Cape of Good Hope — but the tanker fleet of 1956 was not designed for Cape routing. The ships were too small, too slow, and too few. The additional distance — roughly 6,000 miles — meant that each tanker took significantly longer per round trip, effectively reducing the available fleet capacity by a third. Oil shortages hit Europe within weeks. Petrol rationing was introduced in Britain, France, and several other European countries. Industrial output fell. The crisis demonstrated, with a specificity that abstract risk assessments never achieve, what happens when a chokepoint closes.

The strategic response was equally revealing. The crisis accelerated two developments that would reshape the global oil industry for decades. First, it drove the construction of supertankers — very large crude carriers (VLCCs) and ultra-large crude carriers (ULCCs) that were too big to transit the canal but could carry enough oil on the Cape route to make the longer journey economical. The supertanker era, which would dominate oil shipping from the 1960s onward, was a direct consequence of Suez 1956. Second, it accelerated the development of pipelines as alternatives to maritime shipping — most significantly, the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) and, later, the pipeline networks connecting North African and Middle Eastern oil fields to Mediterranean terminals, bypassing the canal entirely.

But the most important revelation was political. The Suez Crisis demonstrated, with finality, that Britain and France were no longer great powers capable of unilateral military action against the wishes of the United States. The age of European imperial projection was over. The canal, which had been the physical embodiment of European dominance over global trade routes for nearly a century, had become the site of that dominance's most humiliating collapse. Nasser survived. Eden resigned. The canal returned to Egyptian control, where it has remained ever since. And the world moved on, having learned — or so it seemed — that dependence on a single chokepoint is a strategic vulnerability of the first order.

The Sixty-Five-Year Interval

Between 1956 and 2021, the canal closed only once more — from 1967 to 1975, during and after the Six-Day War, when it served as the front line between Egyptian and Israeli forces. Fifteen cargo ships, trapped by the closure, sat in the Great Bitter Lake for eight years, their crews rotating home while the vessels rusted, earning the nickname "The Yellow Fleet" for the desert sand that coated their decks. The eight-year closure was far longer than the 1956 episode, but its economic impact was, paradoxically, less severe. The supertankers built in response to 1956 had made Cape routing commercially viable for oil. Alternative pipeline routes had been developed. The global economy had, to some degree, adapted to the possibility of canal closure — at least for bulk commodities like crude oil.

But the decades between the canal's reopening in 1975 and the events of March 2021 saw a transformation that made the global economy far more dependent on the canal than it had been in 1956 — and far more vulnerable to its disruption. That transformation was containerisation.

The container revolution, which began in the late 1950s and reached maturity in the 1980s and 1990s, changed everything about how goods moved. Before containerisation, cargo was loaded and unloaded piece by piece — sacks, barrels, crates, pallets — by teams of longshoremen at each port. The process was slow, expensive, and prone to damage and theft. A cargo ship might spend more time in port being loaded and unloaded than it spent at sea. The standardised shipping container — a steel box, 20 or 40 feet long, stackable, transferable from ship to rail to truck without being opened — eliminated most of those costs. It turned shipping from a bottleneck into a utility. It made global supply chains possible.

The implications for Suez were profound. In 1956, a ship transiting the canal carried oil, or grain, or steel — a single commodity in bulk. By 2021, a large container ship transiting the canal carried 20,000 or more individual containers, each containing different products from different suppliers destined for different customers in different countries. A single vessel might carry automotive parts from Japan, consumer electronics from China, textiles from Bangladesh, pharmaceuticals from India, and industrial components from South Korea — all bound for European distributors who expected delivery within precise, contractually specified windows. The canal was no longer just carrying cargo. It was carrying supply chains — thousands of them simultaneously, each one calibrated to deliver the right goods to the right place at the right time.

This shift from commodity shipping to supply-chain shipping transformed the nature of the vulnerability. In 1956, when the canal closed, Europe ran short of oil. That was a serious problem, but oil is fungible — a barrel from Venezuela substitutes for a barrel from Kuwait. Supply-chain shipping is different. A missing container of automotive wiring harnesses from a specific factory in Shenzhen cannot be replaced by a container of wiring harnesses from somewhere else, because the specifications are unique, the tooling is customised, and the production schedule is synchronised with assembly lines thousands of miles away. The just-in-time manufacturing revolution — pioneered by Toyota and adopted across global industry — had stripped buffers out of supply chains. Inventory was minimised. Warehousing was reduced. Everything depended on continuous, predictable flow. The canal was the narrowest point in that flow, and the consequences of interruption had grown not arithmetically but exponentially.

Six Days in March

On March 23, 2021, at approximately 07:40 local time, the Ever Given — a Golden-class container ship, 400 metres long, 59 metres wide, with a capacity of 20,124 twenty-foot-equivalent units — entered the Suez Canal from the Red Sea, northbound toward the Mediterranean. The ship was operated by Evergreen Marine Corporation and owned by Shoei Kisen Kaisha. It was carrying cargo from Asia to Europe. It was one of the largest container ships in the world, and it was about to become the most famous.

The conditions that morning were poor. A sandstorm — a khamsin — had reduced visibility and was generating wind gusts of up to 40 knots. The Ever Given was under the guidance of two Suez Canal Authority pilots, as all transiting vessels are required to be. Approximately six nautical miles into the canal, in a single-lane stretch south of the Great Bitter Lake, the ship lost the ability to steer. The precise sequence of events remains debated — wind, bank effect (a hydrodynamic phenomenon where a large vessel's hull interacts with a narrow channel's walls), possible engine or rudder malfunction — but the result was unambiguous. The Ever Given's bow struck the eastern bank of the canal. Its stern swung toward the western bank. The ship was wedged diagonally across the channel, blocking it completely.

For six days — from March 23 to March 29, 2021 — the Suez Canal was closed. No vessel could pass in either direction. At the peak of the blockage, over 400 ships were queued at both ends of the canal, waiting. The queue included container ships, tankers, bulk carriers, and car carriers, collectively carrying cargo worth an estimated $9.6 billion per day. The Ever Given sat immovable, its bow buried in the sandy eastern bank, its massive hull acting as a dam across the waterway that carried 12 per cent of global trade.

The effort to free the ship combined dredging, tugboats, and tidal calculations. Approximately 30,000 cubic metres of sand and mud were excavated from around the bow. Thirteen tugboats pulled and pushed at the hull from multiple angles. The rescue teams waited for a spring tide to provide maximum buoyancy. On March 29, at approximately 15:05 local time, with the spring tide at its peak, the Ever Given's stern began to move. By 15:30, the ship was floating free. The canal reopened, and the queue began to clear.

Six days. That was all it took to demonstrate that the lesson of 1956 had not been learned — it had been forgotten.

The Ripple Effect

The physical blockage lasted six days. The economic disruption lasted months. This asymmetry — between the duration of the event and the duration of its consequences — is the signature of fragile systems. Robust systems absorb shocks. Fragile systems amplify them.

The immediate impact was straightforward: approximately 400 ships, delayed by an average of six days, arrived at their destinations late. But in a global supply chain system built on just-in-time delivery, "late" does not mean "slightly inconvenient." It means cascading failure. A container ship arriving six days late at Rotterdam means that the containers it carries miss their scheduled connections to feeder vessels, rail services, and truck dispatches. The goods inside those containers arrive at distribution centres days or weeks late, disrupting production schedules at factories that were expecting components, retail restocking cycles that were expecting products, and pharmaceutical supply chains that were expecting active ingredients.

The port congestion was severe. Rotterdam, Felixstowe, Hamburg, and other major European ports experienced weeks of disruption as the delayed vessels arrived in clusters rather than the steady, manageable flow that port operations are designed to handle. Berth schedules were disrupted. Container yards overflowed. The shortage of empty containers — already acute due to pandemic-related trade imbalances — worsened, because containers that should have been unloaded and returned to Asia were sitting on ships in the Mediterranean or stacked in congested European terminals.

• Automotive manufacturers in Europe reported production stoppages due to delayed components, adding to disruptions already caused by the global semiconductor shortage.
• IKEA reported delays to furniture deliveries across multiple European markets, with some products unavailable for weeks.
• European refineries experienced crude oil delivery delays, contributing to short-term price spikes in energy markets.
• The livestock industry in several Middle Eastern countries faced animal feed shortages, as grain shipments from the Black Sea region were delayed in the canal queue.
• Global container shipping rates, already elevated due to pandemic demand, spiked further — the Shanghai Containerised Freight Index rose by approximately 6 per cent in the weeks following the blockage.

The insurance implications were staggering. The Suez Canal Authority initially demanded $916 million in compensation — later settled for reportedly around $550 million. Lloyd's of London estimated total insured losses at $1.5 to $3.5 billion, excluding uninsured losses that were likely several multiples larger.

The Same Canal, the Same Lesson

Strip away the specifics — the Cold War politics of 1956, the sandstorm and the container ship of 2021 — and the structural lesson is identical. A global trading system had been built around a single point of failure. When that point failed, the system did not degrade gracefully. It seized.

The parallel is not metaphorical. It is architectural. In both cases, the canal was not merely one route among several. It was the route — the one around which shipping schedules, fuel calculations, insurance premiums, delivery contracts, and inventory management had been optimised. In both cases, the alternative — the Cape route — existed but was not a genuine substitute, because the entire logistics infrastructure had been built on the assumption that the canal would be available. Ports, warehouses, factories, and retail operations were synchronised to canal transit times. Switching to the Cape route did not just add distance and cost; it broke the synchronisation that made the supply chain function.

The lesson of Suez — 1956 and 2021 — is not that chokepoints are dangerous. Everyone knows that. The lesson is that knowing a vulnerability exists and actually mitigating it are entirely different things. The global economy has consistently chosen efficiency over resilience, optimisation over redundancy, and has been surprised each time the bill comes due.

Editorial observation

The reasons for this repeated failure are not mysterious. They are economic. Redundancy is expensive. Building supply chains that can function without the Suez Canal means maintaining alternative routes, carrying larger inventories, running ships on longer voyages, and accepting higher per-unit costs — all of which reduce profit margins in industries where margins are already thin. The logic of competition drives companies toward the leanest, most efficient supply chain possible, and the leanest supply chain is one that assumes nothing will go wrong. When something does go wrong, the cost is borne not by the company that optimised too aggressively but by the entire system — customers, suppliers, and competitors alike. This is the classic structure of a systemic risk: the benefits of efficiency accrue to individual actors, while the costs of fragility are shared by everyone.

The 1956 crisis produced structural responses — supertankers, pipelines, diversified oil sourcing — but these addressed the specific commodity (oil) that had been disrupted, not the underlying architectural vulnerability. By 2021, the canal was carrying not just oil but the entire material infrastructure of globalised manufacturing. The vulnerability had not been reduced. It had been deepened and broadened, even as the memory of the last disruption faded.

Beyond Suez: A Geography of Fragility

Suez is not unique. It is one node in a network of maritime chokepoints on which global trade depends — narrow passages where geography compresses the flow of commerce into channels that can be blocked by accident, conflict, or political decision. The Strait of Hormuz, 33 nautical miles wide at its narrowest, carries approximately 20 per cent of the world's oil. The Strait of Malacca, connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans, handles roughly 25 per cent of global shipping. The Panama Canal, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the Turkish Straits, the Danish Straits — each is a bottleneck where the entire global trading system narrows to a point.

The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping that began in late 2023 demonstrated yet again how fragile this architecture is. Militant strikes on commercial vessels transiting the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — the narrow passage at the southern end of the Red Sea, the gateway to the Suez Canal from the Indian Ocean — forced major shipping lines to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to transit times and billions to shipping costs. The same detour. The same consequences. A different cause, but the same structural vulnerability.

The concentration of global shipping through a small number of narrow waterways is not a design choice that anyone made deliberately. It is an emergent property of geography, economics, and path dependence. Ships funnel through the gaps. Infrastructure clusters around the gaps, reinforcing their centrality. Over decades, the chokepoints become so deeply embedded in logistics planning, insurance pricing, and contractual obligations that routing around them is technically possible but operationally impractical.

This is the pattern that Suez illustrates with such clarity: a vulnerability that is known, quantified, and discussed at every logistics conference in the world, yet never adequately addressed because addressing it would require accepting costs that no individual actor has an incentive to bear. The canal will be disrupted again. When it is, the consequences will follow the same pattern: immediate shock, cascading disruption, belated calls for resilience, a gradual return to the optimised-for-efficiency status quo, and then the next disruption.

What Would Resilience Actually Require?

If the lesson of Suez — both Suezes — is that the global trading system is architecturally fragile, the obvious question is: what would a more resilient system look like? The answer is uncomfortable because it involves trade-offs that the logic of global commerce resists.

First, inventory. The just-in-time revolution eliminated buffer stocks across global supply chains, replacing warehouses full of components with precise delivery schedules. This was enormously efficient — and enormously fragile. A more resilient system would carry more inventory at multiple points in the supply chain: at factories, at regional distribution centres, at ports. This costs money. It ties up capital. It requires warehouse space. It is, by the logic of efficiency maximisation, waste. But it is also insurance — the physical equivalent of the financial reserves that regulators require banks to hold against unexpected losses. The pandemic, followed by the Ever Given, followed by the Red Sea disruptions, has pushed some companies — particularly in automotive, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors — toward "just in case" inventory strategies. Whether this shift persists beyond the current crisis atmosphere remains to be seen.

Second, route diversification. Genuine diversification would require developing alternative corridors — overland rail connections between Asia and Europe, Arctic shipping routes that bypass both Suez and Malacca, and shorter regional supply chains that reduce the distance goods travel. Each alternative has limitations: rail is slower and more expensive, Arctic routes are seasonal and contentious, reshoring sacrifices cost advantages. But a system that depends on a single route through a single canal is not optimised for anything except the assumption that nothing will go wrong.

Third, infrastructure investment. The Suez Canal has been widened and deepened multiple times, most recently with the "New Suez Canal" bypass completed in 2015. But the canal's capacity has not kept pace with the growth in ship size. The Ever Given was within the canal's technical limits but left almost no margin for error. The next generation of container ships will be even larger. The infrastructure is playing catch-up with the vessels it serves — increasing, rather than decreasing, the risk of future disruption.

• The Ever Given was 400 metres long — longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall, and nearly as wide as the canal's navigable channel in several stretches.
• Container ship capacity has grown from approximately 1,000 TEU in the 1960s to over 24,000 TEU today — a twenty-four-fold increase that canal infrastructure has not matched.
• The "New Suez Canal" bypass, completed in 2015, added capacity but did not widen the original single-lane stretches where the Ever Given ran aground.
• Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of sandstorms in the Suez region, raising the risk of future visibility-related incidents.

The Efficiency Trap

The deeper lesson of Suez — the one that connects 1956 to 2021 and extends forward into whatever disruption comes next — is about the relationship between efficiency and fragility. These are not opposites. They are consequences of each other. Every optimisation that removes cost from a supply chain also removes a buffer. Every buffer removed makes the system faster, cheaper, and more vulnerable. The most efficient supply chain is one where every component arrives exactly when it is needed, travels the shortest possible route, and sits in inventory for the shortest possible time. It is also the most fragile — because it has no slack, no redundancy, no capacity to absorb disruption without transmitting it instantly to every connected node.

This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. Global supply chains are optimised for cost because the actors who build them — shipping companies, manufacturers, retailers, logistics providers — compete on cost. A company that carries six months of inventory loses to a competitor that carries six days. A shipping line that routes around the Cape when the canal is open wastes fuel and time that a competitor saves by going through Suez. The logic of competition drives the entire system toward the efficient frontier — and the efficient frontier, by definition, is the place where there is no remaining slack to absorb shocks.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his work on fragility and antifragility, described systems that are optimised for efficiency in stable conditions but catastrophically vulnerable to disruption as "fragile." The global shipping system is the canonical example. It functions beautifully when everything goes right. When something goes wrong — a ship runs aground, a missile strikes a tanker, a pandemic disrupts labour markets, a war closes a strait — the absence of buffers means the disruption propagates through the entire network, amplifying as it goes. The six-day blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 caused months of supply chain disruption not because six days is a long time, but because the system had been so thoroughly optimised that it could not absorb even six days of interruption without cascading failure.

The Suez Canal is 193 kilometres of dredged sand in the Egyptian desert. It is also a mirror, reflecting back at the global economy a truth it prefers not to see: that the system we have built is extraordinary in its efficiency and terrifying in its fragility, and that these two qualities are not in tension but are the same thing.

Editorial observation

Sixty-five years separated the two Suez crises. The causes were different — Cold War geopolitics versus a sandstorm and an oversized ship. The world was different — colonial empires versus containerised globalisation. But the lesson was the same. A chokepoint is a vulnerability. A system built around a chokepoint is a system waiting to fail. And a system that fails, recovers, and then rebuilds itself around the same chokepoint has not learned the lesson at all. It has merely reset the clock until the next time.

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