Weaponized trade routes are no longer a worst-case scenario; they’re a repeating geopolitical playbook. In the past three years alone, two major global shipping corridors have been deliberately disrupted as political leverage. The companies that will remain competitive in this environment aren’t defined by how fast they recover from a single but how they approach multiple simultaneous crises as a normal operating state.
That shift in thinking is the difference between resilience as a buzzword and resilience as a capability.
How trade lanes became geopolitical weapons
The pattern started with the Suez Canal and Red Sea corridor. Beginning in late 2023, Houthi attacks on commercial vessels forced thousands of ships to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to transit times and hundreds of millions in fuel costs across the global shipping industry. At the time, most supply chain teams responded as they would to any disruption: find the alternative, absorb the cost, move on.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis has been harder to absorb. Through 2026, the U.S.-Iran conflict has squeezed tanker traffic through the strait, driving tanker rates on Middle East routes up approximately 500% year-over-year, according to Breakwave’s September 2026 tanker report. Houthi rebels seized Yemen’s key port of Mokha in September, closing off the primary alternative to the Persian Gulf, while Saudi Arabia shut down its East-West crude oil pipeline as a precaution against drone attacks from Iraq. Air freight rates climbed 18.1% year-over-year in August, per the Baltic Air Freight Index, as shippers scrambled for alternatives across every mode.
“This is twice in the past three years either governments or groups have weaponized trade routes for geopolitical gain,” Eric Fullerton, VP of Communications and Evangelism at project44, told CNBC in September 2026. “We have never seen that before.”
What the data shows
project44 monitors disruptions at the network level, giving a view that individual carrier relationships can’t provide. Before the Iran conflict escalated, average geopolitical shipping disruptions across the network ran at roughly 1,000 per week. At the peak of the Hormuz crisis, that figure surpassed 9,000 in a single week.
As of September 2026, disruption levels remain more than twice their pre-war baseline. The crisis has settled into the new operating floor.
The stacking problem your operating model wasn’t built for
Single-event disruptions are manageable. You reroute, find capacity, and push delay notices downstream. What’s happening now is categorically different.
“A company managing tariff exposure through nearshoring is also managing freight cost volatility from Hormuz, is also exposed to the next port labor dispute,” Fullerton said. “That stacking is the actual story, not any single event.”
Stacking means that the responses to one disruption create vulnerabilities to the next. A manufacturer that shifted production from China to Eastern Europe to reduce tariff exposure now faces a longer ocean leg into European ports, which carry their own congestion risk. A retailer that diversified its carrier mix for resilience now finds those carriers prioritizing the highest bidder as vessel capacity tightens. The decisions made to manage one crisis become the source of exposure in the next.
Most supply chain operating models and technology stacks were designed around single-event scenarios: one alert, one response, one resolution. That model breaks when five alerts arrive simultaneously across five trade lanes, modes, and carrier relationships, and every response to one compounds the pressure on another.
Visibility alone doesn’t close this gap. Knowing where your shipments are tells you the scope of the problem but it doesn’t tell you which of nine simultaneous exceptions to resolve first, which alternative routing options exist across the network right now, or which decisions can be automated vs. which require immediate human escalation.
What Decision Intelligence changes
Decision Intelligence is the operational capability to turn fragmented, real-time logistics data into specific, actionable decisions.
When five disruptions hit simultaneously, the problem isn’t awareness, it’s prioritization. Your team knows something is wrong. What they can’t determine, fast enough to matter, is which of the 9,000 weekly disruptions affect their specific portfolio, which alternatives are still viable, and which exceptions can be resolved automatically vs. which require immediate human judgment.
That’s what network-level context changes. project44 connects over 1.5 billion shipments annually across every major mode and trade lane. When a crisis hits, supply chain teams can see not just their own affected shipments, but how the broader network is responding, where capacity exists, which alternatives are disappearing, and which decisions can’t wait.
The AI Disruption Navigator filters that signal into the specific exceptions that require action from your team. Multi-Agent Orchestration coordinates AI agents working simultaneously across modes, carriers, and lanes, automating routine exception handling so human attention goes where it actually matters. The goal isn’t faster reporting on disruptions. It’s fewer decisions that require a human in the first place.
Expect this to continue
Fullerton’s view on where this trajectory leads is direct: “These are very strategic negotiation tactics for these groups and countries, so the fear is that governments and groups will continue to target the supply chain to increase their negotiating power for geopolitical events.”
The relief timeline is long. Even under optimistic assumptions, it could take one to two years before shipping conditions approach anything resembling pre-crisis norms. That projection assumes no further escalation, no additional weather events at major ports, and no labor disputes layering onto an already-strained network.
The companies that will operate effectively in this environment share one thing: they’ve stopped treating each crisis as an exception to be managed and started building the operational intelligence to treat multiple simultaneous disruptions as normal operating conditions.
