The Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra — one of only two sea lanes linking the Indian Ocean to the Pacific — receives much attention in war simulations. When the Suez Canal was blocked for six days by a massive container ship, the Ever Given, in 2021, the disruption reverberated across supply chains for months. The Panama Canal raises similar risks.
Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and a quarter of its fertiliser passes, has highlighted a well-known vulnerability of our complex networked global economy: a single point of failure can create massive and costly disruptions. Yet such points of failure have been proliferating for decades.
Global trade flows through a number of other critical passages, which could also become disruptive bottlenecks.
