Something about the pattern is too sharp, too sudden to pin on economics alone. Container ships don’t abandon a century-old chokepoint overnight because demand is a little soft or factories are running a bit slower. The Suez decline followed a different rhythm — one that matches missile trajectories over the Red Sea far more than macroeconomic curves on a spreadsheet. By late 2023, when the Houthi attacks escalated into a sustained campaign, shipping companies were already pulling vessels out of the danger zone quietly and quickly. That’s the moment the graph breaks: November–December 2023. Traffic that had been stable all year suddenly thinned, and by early 2024 the canal was seeing its steepest decline in decades, with container-ship transits collapsing by more than half.
The magnitude tells its own story. Global trade cycles can weaken demand, yes, but they rarely produce a 50–70% route-specific drop within a couple of months. That kind of crash needs a shock, and the Red Sea security crisis gave carriers exactly that. Insurance premiums spiked, war-risk surcharges piled up, and AI-driven risk assessments started flagging the Bab el-Mandeb as a statistically unacceptable gamble. It became cheaper, safer, and more predictable to spend ten extra days rounding Africa than to shave distance through a live fire corridor. The decision wasn’t ideological; it was actuarial. Shippers voted with their hulls, and the Suez Canal felt the emptiness almost immediately.
Economic weakness plays a role, but a smaller, slower one. The global freight market in 2024–2025 isn’t exactly booming — consumer demand is uneven, manufacturing pulses instead of hums, and inventories are still normalizing from post-pandemic distortions. But those forces create gentle depressions, not cliffs. They reduce traffic everywhere, not specifically in Suez. The timing doesn’t align either: global softness is gradual; the Suez drop was instantaneous. What we’re seeing in 2025 — the still-low daily average of around five container ships per day mid-year — is the lingering effect of a rerouting culture that calcified during the security crisis. Once carriers rewrite schedules, they don’t revert casually.
So when weighing cause and effect, one factor clearly dominates. The Suez downturn is primarily a security-driven rerouting phenomenon, shaped by a year of Houthi attacks and the structure of modern maritime risk. Global economic softness is a background influence, but not the engine of the decline. The canal’s emptiness tells the story plainly: ships left because the corridor became too dangerous to trust — and despite minor recoveries, they haven’t fully come back.