A mid-size container ship with working bow thrusters, a competent master and a pilot on the bridge does not, on a calm afternoon, need two tugs to leave a harbour. It takes them anyway. The reason is not seamanship. It is that the port’s marine services regime priced a low-probability failure and decided the shipowner would pay for it on every movement, every day, whether the wind blows or not.

A port announces it handled ten million TEU last year. The natural reading is that ten million boxes crossed the quay. They didn’t. The real number was probably closer to six million, and depending on the port, a large share of those boxes never entered the country at all. TEU stands for twenty-foot equivalent unit. It is a normalising unit, invented so that ports and carriers with mixed box lengths could compare capacity on one scale.

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.

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.