Narrow Passages How a Few Straits and Canals Hold the World Together

Four hundred meters of steel, lying crosswise in a channel barely wider than the ship itself. That was the Ever Given, a container ship about 1,300 feet from bow to stern, wedged between the two banks of the Suez Canal. High winds and a sandstorm had pushed it off course as it entered the canal, and one of the largest vessels afloat simply stopped moving. Behind it, ships queued up in both directions. Around the world, people who had never heard of the Suez Canal started to feel it. Furniture, car parts, and fuel all sat on the water, waiting.

It took about six days to free the ship. Researchers later tried to put a price on the delay, and their estimates ran to billions of dollars of trade held up for each day of the blockage. One vessel, one bad afternoon, and the whole machinery of global commerce coughed.

The odd thing is that this was not a freak event in a freak place. It was a reminder of how the world is plumbed. A small number of narrow passages, straits and canals that analysts call maritime chokepoints, carry a startling share of the planet's oil, grain, and manufactured goods. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly a fifth of global oil. The Suez Canal moves something like a tenth of world trade. The Panama Canal stitches two oceans together. Add the Strait of Malacca, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Bosporus, and the Dardanelles, and you have a short list of places where geography still has the final word.

This is the story of how those places came to matter, who fought over them, who rebuilt them, and what happens now that the climate itself is starting to redraw the map.