I’ve been thinking this week about guardianship—about how fragile our civilizational achievements are, and how much it takes to protect them.
What I’m Thinking About
This week, Iranian cruise missiles struck two Emirati tankers in the southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz, in Omani waters. A seaman aboard the Mombasa was killed. The Iranian regime has declared the strait closed, and proclaimed itself the strait’s guardian; in response, American forces have been striking Iranian military targets night after night. Before the war, one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passed through that channel, but last week, crossings fell by half.
In 1609, Hugo Grotius made the argument—novel, and politically unpopular at the time—that the sea should be free. It doesn’t belong to any one nation, and no state or group may claim ownership of it. Eventually, the West made this argument a reality. The British Royal Navy went to war against pirates and slave traders, and the U.S. Navy has kept shipping lanes open since 1945. The free sea is not an inevitability, or the default state of affairs. It is a Western achievement, and it is a key condition for the economic prosperity and freedom of movement we enjoy in modernity. The state of my homeland is a cautionary tale about what happens when we fail to defend that freedom. Since the collapse of Somalia, the sea off its coast has filled with pirates, who take ships, kidnap crews, and hold them for ransom, sometimes for years.
Tehran has made it clear that among its conditions for ending this war is control of the Strait of Hormuz. The West must not grant this, not only because the Iranian regime is malignant and dangerous, but because it would mean officially abandoning freedom of the seas. No enemy has ever been handed control of a strait at the negotiating table. Hormuz must not be the first.
The free sea is not the default state of affairs, but a Western achievement.