Every carrier network designed for 2026 just hit the same wall

When Gemini returned its ME11 service to Suez routing on 3 February, the alliance staked its 2026 network design on a bet that the strait was safe enough to justify shorter transits. The assumptions behind that bet were invalidated within days. By late February, with the Hormuz crisis deepening and escort reliability deteriorating, Gemini reversed course — pulling ME11 back to the Cape and conceding that its flagship reliability gains of 19 days westbound and seven days eastbound were no longer deliverable. What followed was not one carrier’s miscalculation but a cascade of network adjustments that reveals how fragile every 2026 schedule had become.

CMA CGM’s response was the most operationally revealing. Its booking suspension for Persian Gulf ports drew the line precisely where you would expect a carrier parsing risk at maximum resolution: at the Strait of Hormuz itself. Ports inside the Strait — Jebel Ali, Abu Dhabi, Dammam, Sohar, Hamad — were suspended. Ports reachable without transiting the chokepoint — Fujairah and Khor Fakkan on the Gulf of Oman side, plus specific terminals in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar — remained open. That geographical partition tells you CMA CGM is not withdrawing from the Middle East. It is treating the Strait as a binary risk threshold and serving everything it can reach without crossing it. The follow-on question is whether the war-risk insurance market forces a broader withdrawal regardless of the carrier’s own appetite.

Since March 1, the rest of the industry has converged toward the same conclusion by blunter means. MSC suspended all cargo bookings to the Middle East and ordered vessels in the Gulf region to designated safe shelter areas. COSCO issued a navigation advisory and halted Gulf operations. Where CMA CGM partitioned, these carriers withdrew wholesale — a difference in operational granularity, but not in strategic direction.