The shipping crisis

s the world watched the large container block the vital shipping artery of the Suez Canal, I thought back to my own trips through the canal as a U.S. Navy captain and admiral. There is a fundamental lesson to be relearned here about the criticality of a handful of so-called choke points around the world upon which global shipping depends. These are spots where traffic patterns collide and the tens of thousands of ships under way on the world’s oceans at any given moment come together in tightly managed traffic schemes. They represent critical nodes that make navigation faster and easier and allow container and cargo ships to make faster journeys. The key ones are the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz. The other canal, of course, is the Panama Canal.