Maersk and CMA CGM are signaling a return to Suez transits from December 2025. The headline is "back to normal." The reality is more complicated.

Yes, Cape diversions have been a tax. Roughly 10–14 extra days per round voyage and thousands of nautical miles of scenic detour. Remove that and you instantly "create" capacity without building a single new ship. That's the part everyone claps for.

Then the clap dies.

Sea-Intelligence puts a full snap-back to Suez at roughly 2.1 million TEU of effective capacity returning to the market. That's about 6.5% of the global fleet. Not a gentle adjustment. A capacity tsunami landing on a market that already has too many ships, too little scrapping, and an orderbook that keeps delivering regardless.

So what happens to rates? SCFI has been telling you the story all year. Pressure down, spot fragile. Current Asia–North Europe sits around $2,000–2,700/FEU, Asia–Med around $2,200–3,000/FEU. Add a sudden capacity release and the base case isn't "a bit softer." It's a violent correction. Plausible Q1–Q2 2026 range: $1,200–1,800/FEU. That's flirting with breakeven and daring carriers to blink first.

Carriers will reach for the usual toolkit: blank sailings, "capacity discipline," short-notice GRIs, and whatever surcharges they can justify this quarter. But here's the catch: if everyone has more slack in the network, discipline becomes a prisoner's dilemma. Whoever cuts first loses share. Whoever holds capacity loses money. Everyone suffers. Game theory working exactly as designed.

Now the operational punchline: Suez reopening doesn't magically unjam Europe. Northern Europe terminals are already congested. When transit times compress, vessel arrivals bunch. You don't get smooth flow. You get a wave. The same ship that saved 12 sailing days can happily donate 5–8 days back to anchorage waiting, plus missed windows, rolled bookings, and a spike in exceptions that make your ops team reconsider their career choices.

And inland is still inland. Europe is short an estimated 426,000 truck drivers. Containers don't evaporate at the gate. If boxes can't evacuate, dwell time rises, yards clog, equipment wanders off to die somewhere in a depot, and demurrage/detention becomes the industry's favorite passive-aggressive revenue stream.

Call it what it is: Suez normalization is not a fix. It's a market reset lever. Shorter routes, more capacity, more price pressure, and a higher probability of operational chaos concentrated exactly where it hurts most. Ports and inland nodes.

The only sane posture: flexibility in routing and carriers, contracts that assume volatility, and zero reliance on "normal" as a planning input.

Normal was never coming back. It just changed costumes.