The honest answer is that container traffic is further gone than tanker traffic, and for reasons that have almost nothing to do with how the war ends. Crude can move on a shadow fleet with the transponders off. A 19,000 TEU boxship on a fixed weekly rotation cannot. What is being lost is not the waterway. It is Jebel Ali’s position as the default first port of call for the Middle East.

A cruise ship at a commercial berth looks like a nice piece of civic branding. Passengers on deck, cranes in the background, the whole port working at once. What the picture does not show is that for the length of that call, a container terminal has been operating with one hand tied behind its back. Most mid-size ports that handle both passengers and boxes never built a separate cruise facility. The cruise business arrived later, or seasonally, or as a political initiative, and it got slotted into whatever quay had the depth and the road frontage.

The clearest price signal in the Iran war is not coming from crude. It is coming from box rates on a trade lane that runs nowhere near the Persian Gulf. Spot rates from the Far East to the U.S. West Coast now sit 276% above where they were at the end of February, before the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. East Coast rates are up 232% over the same window.

U.S. container imports rose 8.2% year-over-year in June, according to supply chain technology provider Descartes Systems Group, as importers rushed goods into the country ahead of potential new tariffs and rising transportation costs linked to the war in Iran. U.S. seaports processed 2,400,627 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) during the month. The headline number looks like strength, but the first-half data tells a different story. For the first six months of 2026, imports were actually down 0.

Container capacity on the two biggest East-West trade lanes has largely recovered from the disruption caused by the Iran war, yet spot rates are still running well above pre-crisis norms. That combination — normalized sailings alongside stubbornly elevated pricing — is the clearest sign that this year’s rate strength has shifted from a pure supply shock to a demand-and-surcharge story. The Numbers Right Now On the transpacific, Shanghai to New York spot rates climbed 11% week-on-week to $7,902 per 40ft container, while Shanghai to Los Angeles rose 10% to $6,349.

Container spot freight rates jumped again this week, pushing global benchmarks to their highest levels since the pandemic-era peak of 2022. Drewry’s World Container Index rose 9% week-on-week to $4,530 per 40ft container, with gains concentrated on the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades. S&P Global’s Platts Container Index corroborated the move, climbing 80% over the 30 days to June 24 to its highest reading since April 2022. The transpacific is leading the surge.