Hal Brands
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.
The US originally built its navy in part to shield its vessels from piratical attacks. Depredations by German submarines helped bring America into both world wars. And since 1945, the US Navy has patrolled the oceans as part of its project to ensure a secure and prosperous America by promoting a secure and prosperous world. When freedom of navigation has been violently challenged, the US has fought sharp conflicts — against Iran in the 1980s, for example, and against the Houthis today — to make sure those challenges fail.
The results have been economically miraculous. Global gross domestic product rose from $10 trillion in 1950 to $126 trillion (in constant dollars) in 2020. This would not have happened amid pervasive oceanic plunder and predation, given that 80% of global merchandise trade by volume travels the seas. America’s commitment to free seas has had other benefits, too. The fact that the US protects other countries’ trade routes relieves them of the need to develop huge navies or conquer autarkic empires, and thereby fosters the great-power peace the world has long enjoyed.
Now, those achievements are in jeopardy. In the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the Houthis are using drones and missiles to carry out low-cost, high-impact attacks. During the first two months of 2024, trade through the Suez Canal was down 50% year-on-year. Insurance rates and shipping costs have spiked as vessels take longer routes around Africa.
Beijing has built artificial islands and military bases to stake its claim to nearly all of the South China Sea. That’s ominous, given that one-fifth of global trade passes through that waterway. Moscow, meanwhile, is arguing that it owns the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic Ocean, a route that only becomes more valuable as climate change does its warming work. The Russian Navy has also sought to blockade Ukrainian trade in the Black Sea since February 2022. Welcome to a post-freedom of navigation world, in which aggressive powers encroach on key waterways, and a slipping superpower struggles to beat them back.
The numbers tell the story. The US Navy had nearly 7,000 ships in 1945. It stood at 529 vessels at Cold War’s end. Today, the Navy has just 292 ships, not so many more than the 245 it possessed before World War I. That fleet is being run ragged by a never-ceasing global mission set. Ships aren’t the only problem: America is pulling its punches against the Houthis because hitting harder would drain its already insufficient stocks of precision-guided munitions and cruise missiles.
Other democratic navies are pitiable: Australia, an island nation dependent on seaborne trade, can’t join the scrap in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden because it possesses just three destroyers equal to the task. The balance of naval power is swinging toward some of the very nations challenging freedom of the seas: China now has the world’s largest navy by number of ships. Don’t expect this to lead anywhere good. As America’s hegemonic sea power has ebbed, the number of international maritime disputes has surged.
Freedom of navigation, with all the global blessings it has bestowed, has never sustained itself. The way things are going, America and allies may not be able to sustain it much longer either.
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