Dayton, OH Correspondent — We just ran the experiment and it wasn’t the one anybody designed.

Four years of arguing about diversifying away from a single adversarial source, and the thing that actually stopped global supply this year was a strait nobody had reshored anything through.

That’s the finding. We hardened one dependency and the failure came through a chokepoint we’d known about for fifty years and treated as somebody else’s problem.

Vulnerability falls only where redundancy actually rises, and redundancy has to include routes rather than only suppliers.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — Diversification lowers risk only if it changes the underlying concentration.

The 2026 lesson is that we had been measuring the wrong concentration. Firms spent three years counting how many countries their suppliers sat in and almost none of them counted how many waterways the goods crossed.

A supply chain with four qualified suppliers and one strait is a single point of failure with extra paperwork. That’s what a great many companies discovered in March.

Novi, MI Correspondent — Supply chains are less vulnerable when the second source is qualified and can take volume.

That test still holds and we’ve added a second one. The second source also has to be reachable.

We had components qualified in three countries this spring and two of them shipped through the same water. Qualification is necessary and it is not sufficient, and I’d say most industrial risk models still stop at the supplier.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — For smaller economies, diversification is only real when it creates independent options, and we have long experience of dependence being renamed partnership.

This year gave the argument a demonstration that should interest everybody.

Diversification of suppliers does not help when the disruption is at a chokepoint every supplier uses. My region buys refined product from several countries and it all crosses the same water at some point, so the resilience we were told we had was an accounting resilience.

American vulnerability will fall where the new pattern creates separate production, processing and logistics. Logistics is the word that was doing the least work in that sentence until February.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Less if the realignment is a second valve you own. More if it’s a speech and a new flag on the same processing step.

I’ve been making the valve argument here for years and I’d amend it now.

The valve I was worried about was a refinery or a magnet plant in a hostile country. The valve that actually closed was a shipping lane, and the answer to that one isn’t a slab. It’s hulls and escorts and an energy position at home, and we had the third and were short the first two.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Ports can show you whether a trade pattern is real, and this year they showed something else.

Rerouting works until the reroute is also constrained. We spent 2024 and 2025 routing around one problem and then met a second one in the same ocean.

The durable answer is redundancy in routes as well as in sources — capacity through more than one waterway, and a merchant fleet and escort capability that can protect a lane rather than only observing that it’s closed.

That’s an expensive answer and it’s the one the year argues for.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — Two sources on the part that stops a grid: less vulnerable.

Two sources that ship through one strait: same vulnerability, more paperwork.

Count the water.

Knoxville, TN Correspondent — Controllers taught the class in 2021 and the strait taught the second half of it this year.

If processing moves, vulnerability drops. If the processing moved and the route didn’t, you bought half a solution and reported a whole one.

I want the processing and I want somebody counting the miles of water between it and the plant.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — I’d offer the allied version, which is that resilience is a coalition property or it isn’t one.

We hold the minerals, you hold the demand, and the processing capacity everyone agreed to build is still mostly announced rather than operating. The reason remains what it was — a grant builds a plant and only an offtake contract keeps it running when the price is driven down.

This year added the transport dimension and made the case more urgent. If the material has to cross contested water either way, allied processing closer to the source is worth more than it was in January.

Clermont, FL Correspondent — Small businesses experienced all of this as a price and a delay, twice, in eighteen months.

Whatever the strategic accounting says, the operating reality is that the cost of moving anything has been volatile for three years running and firms have started carrying inventory again.

That’s a productivity cost the whole economy absorbs quietly, and it’s the real measure of vulnerability from where my clients sit.