By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN
For most of the past decade, the story of global shipping’s vulnerable chokepoints has been a story told one crisis at a time. The Red Sea crisis of 2023-24 forced container lines around the Cape of Good Hope. The Panama Canal drought of the same period cut daily transits by more than half. The two overlapped briefly but were, in essence, separate emergencies with separate causes — one geopolitical, one hydrological — and each eventually eased on its own schedule. That pattern is why so much of the policy literature on maritime resilience, useful as it is, still tends to treat chokepoint disruption as something that happens to one artery of world trade at a time, testing a single alternative route before the system returns to something like normal.
The 2026 has broken that pattern. As of this September, the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively contested for close to seven months, following the US and Israeli strikes on Iran that began on 27-28 February and Iran’s subsequent missile, drone and small-boat campaign against tankers transiting the strait — a low-intensity war that the US House of Representatives has now voted three separate times to try to end, without success, and that the International Maritime Organization says has already killed seafarers aboard attacked vessels. At almost exactly the same moment, the Houthis in Yemen — who had suspended their attacks on Red Sea shipping after the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire — resumed strikes against Israel in March 2026 as part of the wider Iran war, extended their targeting to Saudi Arabia in July, and by September were fighting renewed clashes with Yemeni government forces even as the broader regional conflict continued. And the Panama Canal, which had spent all of 2025 recovering from its own drought and reached near-record water levels by February 2026, found itself cutting daily transits again by September as a returning El Niño pattern dried out the watershed feeding Gatún Lake for a second time in three years.
That is not three separate emergencies. It is three of the world’s most consequential maritime corridors under simultaneous or overlapping stress, in the same calendar year, for reasons that range from open warfare to weather. It is worth asking whether the resilience toolkit that emerged from the 2023-24 experience — better digital coordination, targeted infrastructure spending, corridor-level contingency plans — is actually built for a year like this one, or whether it was designed for a world where chokepoints fail politely, one at a time.
What the numbers actually show
The scale of the Hormuz disruption alone justifies treating it differently from the Red Sea and Panama episodes that preceded it. Around 20 million barrels a day of oil and petroleum products, close to a fifth of the world’s petroleum liquids, normally transits the strait; in the opening weeks of the crisis, transits collapsed as insurers withdrew war-risk coverage and shipowners judged the route too dangerous regardless of what naval escorts might promise. Brent crude, which had been trading near $71 a barrel just before the US and Israeli strikes began, spiked above $114 within two weeks and has swung violently ever since — plunging by nearly 9 percent in a single session in March on reports that Washington was considering direct military action to reopen the strait, then climbing again as Iranian forces declared it “closed” and the US moved to blockade Iran’s own remaining exports in April. Seven months on, the strait is neither fully open nor fully closed; it sits in the kind of prolonged, contested state that is arguably harder for shippers, insurers and importing governments to plan around than a clean closure would be, because every week brings a fresh judgment call about whether the risk premium justifies the voyage.
The Panama Canal’s second act of the decade is smaller in absolute terms — the Canal Authority’s cut from 36 to 34 daily transit slots this September is nowhere near the collapse to 18 vessels a day seen at the depth of the 2023-24 drought — but it matters precisely because of the timing. Roughly 3.2 million barrels a day of crude, condensate and petroleum products, plus some 600 million cubic feet of LNG daily, were moving through the canal as of the second quarter of 2026, much of it US Gulf Coast supply heading to Asian buyers who might otherwise have looked to the Pacific route as a Hormuz-era alternative. A canal that is simultaneously trying to absorb rerouted traffic from a Middle East crisis and rationing its own transit slots because of drought is not the reliable release valve that resilience planning assumes it will be.
The Red Sea, for its part, never fully recovered from its first disruption before being hit by its second. Traffic through Suez had only partially rebuilt when the Houthis, whose late-2025 pause had briefly allowed some shipping lines to test a cautious return to the route, resumed attacks in March 2026 as the Iran war widened. For a shipping industry that had spent 2025 gradually recalibrating its risk models around a Red Sea that was becoming safer, the resumption in 2026 was a reminder that these disruptions do not necessarily end — they pause, sometimes for the better part of a year, before the underlying conflict re-erupts on a fresh trigger.
Why the standard resilience prescriptions are necessary but not sufficient
The case for digital trade facilitation and targeted infrastructure investment, which has become the standard policy response to chokepoint vulnerability, is genuine and evidence-based. Countries with fully implemented Maritime Single Windows and Port Community Systems do show meaningfully higher liner shipping connectivity scores than those without, and UNCTAD’s own modelling suggests that lifting transport-sector investment from the bottom quintile of spending levels toward the middle of the distribution could cut maritime transport costs by high single digits. None of that is in dispute, and it is exactly the kind of unglamorous, compounding investment that pays off over a decade.
But 2026 has exposed the limit of what these tools can do against the specific shocks that actually happened this year. A Maritime Single Window speeds the paperwork around a port call; it does nothing to restore war-risk insurance once underwriters have priced a strait as uninsurable, which is the actual mechanism by which Hormuz transits collapsed by more than 90 percent in the early weeks of the crisis — the ships were physically able to sail, but nobody would underwrite them, and no amount of digital customs coordination changes an insurer’s risk appetite. Port Community Systems improve coordination and cargo visibility at the terminal; they do not add a drop of water to Gatún Lake when El Niño suppresses rainfall across the Panama watershed, nor do they change the physical draft restriction that follows from a lower reservoir. These are real limitations, not arguments against digitalisation, but they suggest that a resilience strategy built primarily around digital coordination and general infrastructure spending is optimised for reducing friction in a functioning system, not for the specific failure modes — war-risk insurance withdrawal, hydrological scarcity, prolonged low-intensity conflict — that have actually driven this year’s disruptions.
What 2026 argues for instead is resilience investment aimed more precisely at those failure modes: sovereign or regional war-risk insurance pools that can keep essential cargo — food, fertiliser, medical supplies — moving through contested waters when commercial underwriters withdraw, the way several Gulf-dependent economies have had to improvise on an ad hoc basis this year; strategic petroleum and fertiliser reserves sized against months rather than weeks of disruption, given that the Hormuz crisis has now outlasted most countries’ typical buffer-stock assumptions; and diversified routing agreements negotiated before a crisis rather than during one, so that a Panama Canal capacity cut does not collide with a Hormuz-driven demand surge for exactly the same alternative route.
The compounding cost for the countries least able to absorb it
The distributional picture that concerns organisations like UNCTAD has not improved this year; if anything, the simultaneity of 2026’s disruptions has sharpened it. Small island developing states, whose liner shipping connectivity already runs at a fraction of larger economies’ and which have far fewer alternative routes to switch toward when one closes, are being asked to absorb the effects of overlapping shocks rather than sequential ones. Landlocked developing countries, already paying transit costs some 85 percent above the global average because they depend on transit through neighbouring states, have even less room to reroute around a contested strait or a rationed canal. And economies that rely heavily on Gulf-origin fertiliser shipments — Sudan, Tanzania, Somalia and Kenya prominent among them — are exposed to a natural-gas price channel that has moved sharply this year: Dutch TTF gas prices, which are a reasonable proxy for the ammonia and urea costs that flow into nitrogenous fertiliser, spiked amid the Hormuz disruption in ways that will show up in planting-season input costs for farmers who have no say in any of the geopolitics driving the price.
Layered on top of this is a sovereign-debt picture that had already deteriorated before 2026’s disruptions began. Developing-country interest payments rose far faster than revenues over the decade to 2024, and a large share of least-developed and small island states were already spending more on debt service than on health or education. External borrowing costs for African and developing Asian sovereigns spiked further after the Hormuz war began, precisely when many of these same governments needed fiscal room to cushion higher food and fuel import bills. That combination — a compounding trio of maritime shocks landing on economies with the least fiscal space to absorb them — is the real policy problem 2026 has surfaced, and it is one that digital trade platforms and general infrastructure spending, however useful, were not designed to solve on their own.
What resilience should mean going forward
None of this argues against the recommendations that emerge from the UNCTAD-style analysis of these events — completing digital trade platforms, integrating chokepoint monitoring into contingency planning, and targeting infrastructure spending at demonstrated bottlenecks all remain sound, necessary steps. But a year in which a war-driven closure, a resumed insurgent campaign and a weather-driven capacity cut have overlapped across three different chokepoints argues for adding a further layer: contingency planning that assumes simultaneous, not sequential, disruption, insurance and reserve mechanisms built for shocks measured in months rather than weeks, and — for the most exposed developing economies — dedicated international financing that treats chokepoint disruption as a recurring fiscal risk to be pre-funded, not a one-off emergency to be responded to after the fact.
There is also a planning assumption worth retiring outright: that the world’s major shipping corridors are independent risks that can be modelled separately and added together. The Panama Canal’s drought exposure and the Strait of Hormuz’s geopolitical exposure have no obvious causal link, yet both landed on global energy shipping in the same window this year, and a Red Sea route that shippers had begun cautiously trusting again was pulled back into the same conflict that closed the strait. Corridors that look statistically independent on paper can become correlated in practice the moment a single regional war widens far enough to touch two of them at once, which is exactly what happened between February and September 2026. Contingency planning built on the assumption of independent chokepoint risk will systematically understate how bad a bad year can get; planning built on the assumption that a serious regional conflict can plausibly touch two or three corridors simultaneously would have been far closer to what actually happened this year, and it is the more realistic baseline for the next one.
The 2023-24 disruptions taught the shipping industry and its regulators a great deal about rerouting around a single blocked corridor. 2026 has taught a harder lesson: that the corridors themselves cannot always be counted on to fail one at a time, and that the next resilience strategy needs to be built for the year that just happened rather than the one that came before it.
