Searching for signs of intelligent symbolism in the Suez Canal

Searching for signs of intelligent symbolism in the Suez Canal

By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

March 29, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Let my Evergreen memes go

The cargo ship MV Ever Given is seen stuck in the Suez Canal on Sunday. (Maxar Technologies/AP)

You read Spoiler Alerts, which means, you are someone who likes to stay abreast of the news. This means you are probably aware that the container ship Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal last week and, as of this writing, is still wedged there despite the best efforts of social media to proffer solutions.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will get to the real-world effects of this blockage a few paragraphs from now, but first we should all acknowledge the yeoman work done to meme the heck out of this incident:

It’s that last one that is worth focusing on a bit, because I confess that the take industry’s take on the Ever Given is leaving me grumpy.

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Why? Because everyone and their mother is desperate to read it as a sign of … something. According to the New York Times, the stuck ship is a “Warning About Excessive Globalization.” The precise warning? “The perils of its heavy reliance on global supply chains … international commerce confronted a monumental traffic jam with potentially grave consequences.”

The Financial Times tells a similar story, “The Suez accident … has drawn attention to the inherent fragility of tightly stretched global supply chains at the very moment when they are already being buffeted by a pandemic and in an era when the philosophical underpinnings of global trade are being challenged.”

Meh.

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The global economy is a lot of things in 2021, but fragile is not one of them. Over the past decade, global value chains have had to cope with a slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, a follow-on euro-zone crisis, Fukushima, the Arab Spring, Brexit, rising levels of economic and political migration, a wave of populist nationalism stretching from the United States to the Philippines, a Sino-American trade war and a global coronavirus pandemic. Many of these were predicted to be the end of global supply chains, and yet those darn networks keep persisting.

So we are now supposed to believe that a ship getting stuck in the Suez is the symbol to end all symbols for the state of the global economy? I get that there has been a decade of disasters, but this might be catastrophizing the state of globalization just a bit.

To be clear, this is not a good thing for the global economy. Slate’s Joshua Keating notes that approximately 9 percent of all global trade passes through the Suez. Time’s Joseph Hincks points out that the obstruction will cost the global economy several billion dollars per day the vessel is stuck there. The longer the ship stays stuck, the more shipping rates will rise and the volume of shipping will shrink.

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Still, one of the reasons that so many commentators are warning about short-term effects is that global (or, at least, American) demand has recovered from the covid-19 doldrums. And it is also worth remembering that in modern history, the Suez Canal has been closed for a lot longer than a week — it was closed between 1967 and 1975. That also had malignant effects on economies that were dependent on Suez trade, but those effects should not be exaggerated either.

The Suez Canal makes the global economy run more efficiently. But there are other ways to get goods from Asia to Europe and vice versa. They are less productive than using the Suez, but that does not mean they lack viability. This is not an all-or-nothing crisis, but rather one in which prices react to real-world shocks and private-sector actors will respond to shifting incentives.

If commentators want to use the 21st-century Suez crisis as yet another warning about just-in-time manufacturing and the dangers of minimizing inventories, hey, go to town. But that warning has been going out for a while now, and I doubt the Suez traffic jam will be the tipping point that the pandemic or the Sino-American trade war was not.

The Ever Given is not a symbol of faltering globalization — if anything, the opposite is true. It serves as a refresher course about the value that globalization still provides to the world economy. If even the likes of Tucker Carlson sound ham-handedly concerned about blocked shipping lanes, maybe economic globalization should not be viewed as the bygone relic of a previous generation.