WE’VE BEEN A MARITIME TRADING NATION SINCE BEFORE WE WERE A NATION: The US’ Waning Naval Dominance and China’s Surge Should Worry You.

The Houthis are sinking ships and killing sailors. China is waging a persistent campaign to make the South China Sea its own private lake. Russia is claiming international waters in the Arctic Ocean. The war in Ukraine has made the Black Sea a shooting gallery.

The flashpoints are scattered, but the fundamental crisis is the same. Freedom of navigation is a hallmark of America’s liberal international order; it is a pillar of the relative peace and tremendous prosperity humanity has achieved. And now, as its defenders grow weaker and its challengers become more assertive, it is being threatened in regions around the globe.

Like the dominance of democracy or the absence of great-power war, freedom of navigation is one of those features of the modern world that we often take for granted because we forget how exceptional it really is. For most of history, the seas were neither safe nor free. Pirates and privateers seized ships and stifled commerce. Nations protected their own commerce and no one else’s. In his famous treatise Mare Liberum, published in 1609, Hugo Grotius may have argued that no country owned the oceans. The behavior of a great many states suggested they thought otherwise.

This really changed only with the ascendancy of the Anglo-American sea powers from the 18th century onward. In wartime, Britain’s Royal Navy conducted blockades that were the terror of its enemies and the neutrals that traded with them — including the United States. In peacetime, Britain’s interest in securing trade routes that connected a far-flung empire made the seas safer for others as well. And when Britannia’s rule faltered, amid the global wars of the 20th century, Washington stepped in.

Read the whole thing.