The Suez is being progressively widened and doubled. Previous blockages have been due to war, this type of blocking I think is the first since 1869. The powder keg of Israel is hardly new (indeed that's often been the cause of previous Suez blocking), collapsing south american countries isnt new either - Pinnochet? Peron?
Conflict was here long before globalisation, it has nothing to do with just in time delivery and smoothly running supply chain. Taiwan is a problem, because of chips. The world economy is stronger than some south american country. The "western world" is pretty much ok until someone decides to bomb us. Europe will switch from eating rice to more bread, and everybody is satiated. And the rest wasnt doing any better 50 years ago than is doing now. Except for obvious war zones, which pains me very much that in this age of abundance we have to deal with shitty psycho leaders and tribal mentality warriors.
Essentially they have one more shot at a quick fix: todays high tide. And if that doesn't do the trick they will have to come up with another solution but those will likely be much slower to put into effect, 224,000 tons (!) is a lot of mass to try to move, especially when stuck.
We haven’t even hit government mandated rations for things and that was a matter of course several times throughout the 1900s.
The Suez Canal is a cost and time optimizer. There is an alternate path around South Africa that all of these mega ships are more than capable doing. Transport costs for some stuff and delays will go up, but that’s it. That won’t even impact people in the US in any meaningful way.
Barely. I mean... just look at what is going on in the Suez Canal, which is at the moment blocked by a mega freighter which had crashed into the walls and run aground: millions of dollars of damage and delays risking cascade effects in the harbors. Or how car factories all over the world are having issues because TSMC can't keep up with chip demands (and the car manufacturers having slashed orders during 'rona).
What makes it worse is that there are a number of conflicts that could escalate into open wars: the whole situation with China's aggressive imperialism (not just Taiwan), the powder keg Iran/Turkey/Syria/Israel, many countries in South America slowly or openly collapsing... at least some of these can drag the entire world's economy with them, one way or the other.