Global economy flourished when seas were free. Of course, this freedom has to be enforced. US did the job, until now. Consequences of abandoning that stand can be terrible
Once upon a time, Indian Ocean was famously called Mare Liberum, meaning a ‘Free Sea’ in Latin. It referred to a golden age of commercial freedom, when Indian Ocean was a true global commons. International trade was free, not governed by any state. Merchants of Arabia, Persia, India, and China rode the monsoon winds to form a cosmopolitan global economy. But one day in 1507, a Portuguese admiral named Afonso de Albuquerque, seized the tiny Strait of Hormuz with naval guns, and turned a free port into a toll paying gate. In search of ‘Christians and spices’, Portugal then muscled in to break a ‘system of natural liberty’ with its military, grabbing markets through murder and marauding, gaining monopoly control of Indian Ocean.
519 years later, an American president called Trump, practically seized the same strait and declared a naval blockade. During the past month-and-a-half’s war in West Asia, Strait of Hormuz has again become a classic global chokepoint, threatening one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and gas, raising crude prices and inflation across the world. It has jeopardised access to food for 100mn residents around Persian Gulf. And brutally exposed India’s daily kitchen life, which depends on the Gulf for half of its cooking gas, plus fertiliser for its farms.