The Sea Lanes That Shape History

Editor’s Introduction

In this edition of The Deeper Dive, Fair Game host Dr. Gary Kellner is joined for the first time by his longtime friend, historian Harold E. “Pete” Stark, whose lifelong study of naval and military history brings a rich historical perspective to one of today’s most important geopolitical questions. Together, they trace an unbroken line from Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Wars to the modern Strait of Hormuz, exploring why the world’s sea lanes have always mattered—not only to navies and governments, but to every nation whose prosperity depends upon free and open commerce. Their conversation reminds us that while technology changes, history often asks the same questions generation after generation. This article expands upon that discussion, adding historical context, primary sources, and the deeper perspective that history provides.

The Sea Lanes That Shape History

Why Jefferson Built a Navy—and Why the Strait of Hormuz Still Matters

The Deeper Dive

If you have ever driven across a toll bridge, you understand the arrangement.

Someone built the bridge. Someone maintains it. Someone owns it. If you want to cross, you pay.

Now imagine that the Atlantic Ocean suddenly has a toll booth.

Or the English Channel. Or the Panama Canal—except no nation had ever agreed that one country owned it.

Ridiculous?

That is precisely why the debate over the Strait of Hormuz matters.

In recent weeks, much of the discussion surrounding the latest Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran centered on ceasefires, missile strikes, nuclear facilities, and diplomacy. Those are important questions. But beneath them lies another issue—one that is far older, far less understood, and potentially far more significant.

Who controls the world’s commercial highways? Not who sails them.

Who controls them.

If one nation can decide who waits, who pays, or who is denied passage altogether, then the issue is no longer regional politics. It is world commerce.

That is exactly the problem Thomas Jefferson confronted more than two centuries ago.

America’s First Lesson in Maritime Extortion

Most Americans remember the Barbary Wars only because of a single line in the Marine Corps Hymn:

“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli…”

The lyric is familiar. The history behind it is not.

When the United States won its independence in 1783, it also lost something few Americans appreciated at the time: the protection of the Royal Navy.

For generations, British merchant ships crossed the Mediterranean under the watchful eye of the largest navy on earth. American merchants had enjoyed that protection because they were British citizens.

Then they weren’t.

The Mediterranean suddenly became a very dangerous place for vessels flying the new Stars and Stripes.

Operating along the coast of North Africa, the rulers of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—the so-called Barbary States—had spent centuries enriching themselves through piracy. Merchant ships were seized. Cargoes were confiscated. Crews were imprisoned, ransomed, or sold into slavery. European powers often found it cheaper to pay annual tribute than to wage endless naval campaigns.

The United States initially followed the same path. It paid. And paid again.

By the late eighteenth century, Congress had appropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars in tribute and ransom payments—a staggering sum for a young republic struggling to pay its own debts. In some years, nearly twenty percent of the federal government’s annual revenue went to paying off the Barbary States. It was protection money on an international scale.

Jefferson hated it.

As America’s minister to France during the 1780s, he had met with European diplomats who accepted tribute as simply the cost of doing business in the Western Mediterranean.  Jefferson saw something else. Every payment guaranteed another demand. Every ransom financed another pirate fleet. Every concession made the next concession more expensive.

He concluded that buying peace was not producing peace at all. It was merely renting it.

That realization would eventually change the course of American history—not simply because it led to war with Tripoli, but because it forced the United States to answer a question every rising power eventually faces:

If no one else will protect your commerce…Who will?

Jefferson’s Answer: Build a Navy

Thomas Jefferson did not invent the idea of an American navy.

George Washington did.

Even before Jefferson became president, Washington understood that independence had created a strategic vacuum. The Royal Navy no longer protected American shipping because American shipping was no longer British shipping.

The world had not suddenly become more dangerous. It had simply become indifferent.

In 1794, Congress passed the Naval Act, authorizing the construction of six frigates—the first ships of what would become the United States Navy. They were extraordinary vessels for their day. Joshua Humphreys, their designer, envisioned ships that would be faster than anything powerful enough to catch them and stronger than anything fast enough to challenge them. They were built of live oak, one of the hardest woods in North America, making them remarkably durable in combat.

Among them were names that would become legendary: USS Constitution, USS United States, USS President, USS Congress, USS Chesapeake, and USS Constellation.

The Constitution still floats in Boston Harbor today, the oldest commissioned warship afloat anywhere in the world. Nicknamed “Old Ironsides” after British cannonballs were seen bouncing harmlessly from her massive hull during the War of 1812, she remains a reminder that America’s navy was born not as an instrument of empire, but as a guardian of commerce.

That distinction matters.

When people think about naval power, they often picture great sea battles—Trafalgar, Midway, Leyte Gulf, or the hunt for the Bismarck. Those dramatic engagements capture the imagination, but they represent only a tiny fraction of what navies actually do.

Most of the time, a navy’s greatest victory is that nothing happens. Merchant ships arrive. Cargo is delivered. Markets remain supplied. Families never notice.

That quiet success is precisely the point.

Commerce Travels on Confidence

Economists sometimes speak about “confidence” as though it were an abstract idea.

For merchants, confidence is measurable. It appears on an insurance invoice. The moment shipping lanes become uncertain, insurance premiums rise. Shipowners begin calculating whether the voyage is worth the risk. Cargoes are delayed. Prices increase long before a single barrel of oil or shipping container disappears from the market.

The mathematics are brutally simple. More danger. Higher insurance. Higher transportation costs. Higher prices. Everyone pays.

The founders understood this.

Alexander Hamilton wrote that “a flourishing merchant marine” was indispensable to national prosperity. Commerce, he argued, could not exist without security. A nation unable to protect its trade would eventually find both its economy and its independence constrained by those who could.

Jefferson reached the same conclusion through experience.

When the Pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801 after demanding greater tribute, Jefferson refused another payment. Instead, he dispatched the newly created American Navy to the Mediterranean.

The First Barbary War lasted four difficult years.

It was expensive. It was politically controversial. And it established something far more valuable than a military victory. It established credibility. The United States had demonstrated that it would defend its commerce rather than endlessly purchase temporary peace.

Nelson Understood the Assignment

Dr. Gary Kellner’s guest on this week’s episode of Fair Game, highly regarded friend and historian Harold (Pete) Stark agreed.

The same lesson was being learned across the Mediterranean by another great naval commander.

Admiral Horatio Nelson.

History remembers Nelson for defeating Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, one of the decisive naval victories in history. Yet much of Nelson’s correspondence reveals a commander preoccupied not with glorious battles but with merchant convoys.

In one surviving letter to a subordinate, Nelson complained that a frigate had left convoy duty when commercial shipping urgently needed protection. His frustration had little to do with prestige.  Without escorts, merchant vessels became vulnerable. Without merchant vessels, commerce slowed. Without commerce, Britain’s economy—and ultimately Britain’s war effort—would suffer.

The world’s greatest admiral understood something that remains true today:

Navies do not merely fight wars. They keep the world’s economic circulatory system functioning.

Most people never think about that because, when the system works, it is almost invisible. The shelves stay stocked. Factories receive raw materials. Fuel reaches refineries. Food reaches grocery stores. The headlines appear only when the system breaks.

And that is precisely where the Strait of Hormuz enters the story.

The World’s Most Expensive Toll Booth

Imagine standing on the shoreline of the Strait of Hormuz.

At its narrowest point, the shipping channel is barely twenty-one miles wide. The designated traffic lanes—the actual “roads” used by commercial vessels—are only about two miles wide in each direction, separated by a two-mile buffer. Every day, supertankers carrying millions of barrels of crude oil thread their way through that narrow corridor alongside container ships, liquefied natural gas carriers, bulk freighters, naval vessels, and fishing boats.

There is no practical detour. No alternate interstate. No convenient exit ramp.

If the Strait of Hormuz closes, the effects are not confined to the Persian Gulf. They ripple through every economy connected to global trade.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption and about one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas exports pass through the Strait each year. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all depend on it. So do their customers in Europe, India, China, Japan, South Korea, and countless other nations. That is why the Strait is often described as the world’s most important maritime chokepoint.

It is also why the Barbary Pirates have suddenly become relevant again.

Who Owns the Road?

International law provides a surprisingly simple answer.

No one.

The modern law of the sea recognizes the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway. Ships of every nation enjoy what lawyers call the right of transit passage—the ability to move continuously and expeditiously through the strait without seeking permission from the nations bordering it. This principle was codified in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, although the idea itself is centuries older. In other words, the Strait is less like a privately owned bridge than an international highway.

The same principle applies here. Or at least, it is supposed to.

Iran has frequently argued that, because one side of the Strait borders its territory, it possesses authority to regulate or even close passage during periods of conflict. Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Tehran has periodically threatened to block the Strait whenever tensions with the West escalate.

Sometimes those threats have remained rhetorical. Sometimes they have not.

Commercial vessels have been harassed. Tankers have been seized. Naval mines have appeared in shipping lanes. Missiles and drones have targeted merchant shipping. Insurance companies have responded exactly as insurance companies always respond. Premiums rise. Risk becomes measurable. Consumers eventually pay the bill.

The issue of freedom of the seas has changed remarkably little since Jefferson’s day.

The Price of Uncertainty

Most Americans assume that if a tanker reaches Houston or New Orleans, the crisis has been avoided.

In reality, the economic damage begins much earlier.

Long before a ship is attacked, shipping companies begin asking uncomfortable questions. Should we delay departure? Should we reroute? How much additional insurance will underwriters require? Should we hire armed security? Should we wait for a naval escort?

Every one of those questions carries a price tag.

Lloyds of London—the insurance marketplace that has underwritten maritime commerce since the seventeenth century—understands this better than anyone. During periods of instability, underwriters may designate regions as high-risk war zones, dramatically increasing insurance costs for every vessel entering those waters. Sometimes the additional premium reaches hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single voyage.

That cost does not disappear. It becomes part of the price of gasoline. Part of the price of fertilizer. Part of the price of airline tickets. Part of the price of groceries.

Commerce rarely stops all at once. It simply becomes more expensive.

Jefferson understood that. Nelson understood that. Modern economists understand that.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

If the Navy Keeps the Route Open…

Suppose an American carrier strike group patrols the Strait twenty-four hours a day.

Suppose destroyers escort merchant ships. Suppose surveillance aircraft monitor every movement. Suppose Marines stand ready to respond to any attack.

The shipping lanes remain open. The tankers continue sailing. The world’s economy keeps moving.

Who, then, is keeping the road open?

Iran?

Or the United States Navy?

That question deserves more attention than it usually receives.

Because if international commerce can move only because one navy continuously guarantees safe passage, then that navy has become, in effect, the custodian of the world’s busiest shipping lane.

Not its owner. Its guardian.

That distinction matters enormously.

Owning a toll booth means deciding who pays. Guarding a highway means making certain no one else builds a toll booth.

The difference is the difference between freedom of navigation and maritime extortion.

Thomas Jefferson would have understood it immediately.

Jefferson’s Test

History has a way of asking the same question twice.

The first time, the answer is uncertain. The second time, there are no excuses.

Thomas Jefferson believed that paying tribute to the Barbary States invited further demands. Yet even after Congress authorized the construction of the Navy’s first six frigates, events would test whether the United States truly possessed the resolve to defend its commerce.

The test came unexpectedly.

On October 31, 1803, the American frigate USS Philadelphia, commanded by Captain William Bainbridge, pursued a Tripolitan corsair too aggressively into unfamiliar waters outside Tripoli harbor. The ship struck an uncharted reef and became hopelessly grounded. Bainbridge and more than three hundred officers and sailors fought desperately to lighten the vessel, throwing cannon, anchors, and supplies overboard in a frantic attempt to refloat her. Nothing worked. With enemy gunboats closing in and escape impossible, Bainbridge surrendered.

It was one of the darkest moments in the young history of the United States Navy.

The Tripolitans marched their prisoners into captivity. The Philadelphia herself was captured intact. Worse still, the Tripolitans floated the frigate free, repaired her, and anchored her beneath the guns of Tripoli’s harbor, where she now threatened to become a powerful weapon against the very nation that had built her.

Jefferson suddenly confronted a problem that every commander-in-chief fears. An American warship had become an enemy warship. The obvious solution was to recapture her. The practical solution was nearly impossible. Tripoli’s harbor was heavily fortified. Shore batteries overlooked every approach. Gunboats patrolled the entrance. Any conventional assault would almost certainly fail.

The task eventually fell to a young lieutenant named Stephen Decatur.

On the evening of February 16, 1804, Decatur sailed quietly into Tripoli harbor aboard a sma captured ketch that had been disguised as a harmless merchant vessel. Speaking Arabic and carrying forged papers, his crew approached the Philadelphia under the pretense of seeking temporary refuge after losing their anchors in a storm.

The deception worked.

Only when the vessels lay alongside one another did Decatur give the order.

American sailors stormed aboard with cutlasses and boarding pikes, overwhelmed the defenders in minutes, and prepared to tow the frigate out of the harbor. They quickly discovered that she could not be removed before enemy batteries opened fire.

Decatur made a decision that has echoed through naval history ever since. If America could not recover the ship, no one would.

His men spread combustibles throughout the vessel, set her ablaze, and escaped in the growing light of the fire as flames climbed the rigging and consumed one of the finest frigates in the Mediterranean. They rowed back through a harbor filled with enemy cannon while the burning Philadelphia illuminated the night sky behind them.

Not one American was killed.

News of the raid crossed the Atlantic with astonishing speed. Even Britain’s greatest naval commander, Admiral Horatio Nelson, praised it as “the most bold and daring act of the age.” Coming from the officer who would soon win immortal fame at Trafalgar, there could scarcely have been a greater compliment.

The raid transformed Stephen Decatur into America’s most popular naval hero. Cities and counties were named after him. More importantly, it demonstrated something that diplomacy alone never could. The United States had shown that it was prepared to accept significant risks to defend freedom of navigation and the security of its commerce.

The war ended the following year with the Treaty of Peace and Amity of Tripoli signed on June 4, 1805. American prisoners were released, tribute payments largely ceased, and the immediate crisis came to an end.

But history was not finished.

Less than a decade later, while the United States was preoccupied with the War of 1812, the Barbary rulers concluded that American attention had shifted elsewhere. Once again, they seized American merchant vessels. Once again, the Barbary pirates demanded tribute. Once again, the United States dispatched a naval squadron to the Mediterranean in 1815 under none other than Commodore Stephen Decatur.

The lesson was unmistakable.

Treaties can end wars. They do not end ambitions. That requires something else.

It requires the credible and continuing presence of power.

Jefferson learned that lesson in Tripoli more than two centuries ago. Every president since has inherited it.

The Memorandum and the Maritime Highway

It is tempting to think of the current confrontation with Iran as something entirely new—a uniquely modern conflict involving drones, satellite surveillance, cyber warfare, and precision-guided missiles. The technology is certainly different. The strategic question is not.

For more than two hundred years, nations have struggled over a remarkably simple proposition: Does any single country have the right to control a waterway upon which the rest of the world depends?

That question lies at the heart of Iran’s claims over the Strait of Hormuz.

Every day, thousands of mariners’ guide ships through one of the narrowest and most economically important passages on Earth. Oil dominates the headlines, but it tells only part of the story. Container ships carry machinery, automobiles, medical supplies, food products, electronics, and manufactured goods into the Gulf states. Other vessels carrying petroleum, liquefied natural gas, petrochemicals, aluminum, fertilizers, and countless products that feed industries around the globe. The Strait is not merely an energy corridor. It is a commercial artery. Restrict its flow, and the effects spread through international markets with remarkable speed.

That is why the recently announced Memorandum of Understanding deserves closer and more critical examination than the headlines have given it. Much of the public discussion has focused on whether the agreement reduces the immediate risk of military confrontation. That is an important question. It is not, however, the most significant one.

The larger question is whether the agreement settles the issue that matters most.

Who guarantees freedom of navigation?

International law has long recognized that straits used for international navigation cannot become the private property of the nations that border them. The principle reaches back centuries, but it was expressed most famously by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1609. In his landmark work Mare Liberum—The Free Sea—Grotius argued that the oceans could not be owned in the same way land could be owned. They were highways for all mankind. His ideas profoundly influenced maritime law and eventually became embedded in the modern doctrine of freedom of navigation.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has never fully embraced that interpretation.

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iranian leaders have repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz whenever relations with the West deteriorate. During the so-called “Tanker War” of the 1980s, commercial shipping became a frequent target. Between 1984 and 1988, more than 450 commercial vessels were attacked by Iraq and Iran during the closing years of the Iran-Iraq War. The United States ultimately launched Operation Earnest Will, reflagging Kuwaiti tankers with the American flag and escorting them through the Gulf under naval protection. It became the largest convoy operation conducted by the U.S. Navy since the Second World War.

That history is often forgotten.

It should not be.

The United States was not escorting only American ships. It was protecting the principle that international commerce should not depend upon the permission of any single regional power.

That distinction matters enormously.

When people hear the phrase “American naval presence,” they sometimes imagine an effort to project military dominance for its own sake. Yet throughout history, the permanent presence of naval forces has usually been justified on a different basis. Merchant shipping requires predictability. Investors require predictability. Insurance companies require predictability. Markets require predictability.

Commerce cannot flourish where uncertainty governs the sea.

Which brings us back to the image of the toll booth.

Suppose for the sake of argument, Iran were permitted to determine which vessels passed freely through the Strait, which ships were delayed, which nations paid additional fees, or which cargoes were denied passage altogether. The practical effect would be no different than erecting a toll plaza across the busiest commercial highway in the world. That is not how international waterways are supposed to function.

At the same time, another question deserves equal attention.

If merchant shipping moves safely only because American destroyers, cruisers, submarines, surveillance aircraft, and carrier strike groups remain on constant patrol, then who is actually keeping the highway open?

Certainly not the nation threatening to close it.

The answer is uncomfortable precisely because it reveals a paradox. The United States does not own the Strait of Hormuz. It claims no sovereignty over it and seeks no tolls from those who use it. Yet for decades, the burden of preserving open navigation has fallen disproportionately upon the United States Navy and our allies.

Perhaps that is simply the price of being the world’s leading maritime power. Or perhaps it raises another question.

If one nation must permanently station billions of dollars’ worth of ships and tens of thousands of sailors to prevent someone else from erecting an illegal toll booth, has the international community found a lasting solution—or merely an expensive way of postponing the problem?

That is the question Thomas Jefferson would recognize immediately. It is also the question every American president, regardless of party, eventually inherits.

The Long View

History has an annoying habit of refusing to stay in the past, as William Faulkner famously observed, “History is never dead, It’s not even past”

It is tempting to believe that the Barbary Wars belong to another age, fought by wooden sailing ships carrying smoothbore cannon under billowing canvas. Their officers navigated with sextants. Their crews climbed rigging by hand. Their messages crossed oceans at the speed of the wind.

Today, satellites track every ship at sea. Artificial intelligence helps identify targets. Missiles travel at several times the speed of sound. Drones can be launched from hundreds of miles away, while cyberattacks can disable ports without firing a single shot.

Everything has changed. Except the most important question.

Who keeps the sea lanes open?

For more than two thousand years, every civilization that depended upon maritime commerce has confronted that problem. The Athenians understood it when they built the fleet that transformed a small Greek city into the dominant commercial power of the eastern Mediterranean. Venice understood it when her merchant galleys sailed regularly between Europe and the Levant under naval escort. The Dutch Republic understood it during the seventeenth century, when its prosperity depended upon protecting merchant convoys stretching from the Baltic to the East Indies. The British Empire eventually built the largest navy in history for precisely the same reason.

It was not built simply to fight wars.

It was built so that wars would not interrupt commerce.

The Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century was not merely an era of British military superiority. It was an age in which shipping routes remained sufficiently secure that global commerce expanded at a pace the world had never before experienced. Steamships, submarine telegraph cables, international banking, and worldwide insurance markets all flourished because merchants generally believed that the oceans remained open.

Security produced confidence. Confidence produced investment. Investment produced prosperity. The formula has changed little.

The United States inherited much of that responsibility after the Second World War.

When the war ended in 1945, the American Navy did something extraordinary. Rather than limiting its protection to American merchant vessels, it became the principal guarantor of freedom of navigation for virtually every nation willing to trade peacefully. Japanese ships benefited. German ships benefited. South Korean ships benefited. Nations that had been enemies only months before found themselves sailing under a maritime order largely guaranteed by the United States Navy. It was one of the least appreciated strategic decisions of the twentieth century.

The United States deliberately chose not to charge the world a toll.

Instead, it underwrote an international trading system from which nearly everyone benefited. Critics have often argued that the arrangement is expensive.

They are correct.

Maintaining eleven carrier strike groups, hundreds of warships, overseas bases, logistics ships, satellite systems, intelligence networks, and more than 330,000 active-duty sailors costs hundreds of billions of dollars every year. American taxpayers bear a disproportionate share of that burden.

The alternative would cost even more.

Economists often speak of globalization as though it emerged naturally, almost inevitably, from advances in technology. History suggests otherwise. Globalization is not self-executing. Container ships do not sail because satellites exist. They sail because captains believe they will safely reach their destinations.

Banks finance cargoes because they believe ships will arrive. Manufacturers build factories because they believe raw materials will continue to flow. Confidence—not technology—is the foundation of international commerce. Destroy confidence, and globalization begins to unravel.

That is why what happens in the Strait of Hormuz cannot be viewed in isolation and the United States cannot, under any circumstances, cave in to Iranian demands.

President Xi of China is watching. So is Vladimir Putin. So are shipping companies in Singapore. So are insurance underwriters in London. So are manufacturers in Germany, automobile plants in Japan, semiconductor companies in Taiwan, and financial markets in New York. Every one of them is asking essentially the same question. Will the rules still be enforced?

China presents perhaps the clearest example.

Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea extend hundreds of miles from its mainland and overlap the territorial claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan. Over the past decade, China has transformed reefs into artificial islands, constructed military airfields, deployed anti-ship missiles, and asserted authority over waters through which trillions of dollars in commerce pass each year. An international tribunal at The Hague ruled in 2016 that China’s sweeping “nine-dash line” claims had no legal basis under international law. Beijing simply rejected the ruling.

That response should sound familiar. International law has value only when nations choose to respect it—or when other nations insist that they do.

The same principle applies to Taiwan.

The Taiwan Strait carries nearly half the world’s container fleet each year. More importantly, Taiwan produces approximately 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips through companies such as TSMC. Those tiny silicon wafers power everything from smartphones and automobiles to hospitals, satellites, military aircraft, banking systems, and artificial intelligence.

The next great struggle over freedom of navigation may not begin with oil.

It may begin with microchips.

That is why events in the Persian Gulf cannot be dismissed as regional politics.

Nations learn from one another. Aggressors study precedents.

If the international community accepts the proposition that strategic waterways may be controlled through intimidation and blackmail, other governments will inevitably ask why they should not attempt the same thing.

Jefferson would have recognized the pattern immediately. So would George Washington. So would Lord Nelson.

The names change. The geography changes. The technology changes. Human nature does not.

Which brings us back to the toll booth.

No one seriously argues that the United States should own the Strait of Hormuz. No one argues that American warships should collect a fee from every tanker that passes.

The purpose of US naval power is precisely the opposite. Its purpose is to ensure that no one else does. That may be the most misunderstood mission of the United States Navy. The sailor standing watch aboard a destroyer in the Persian Gulf is not merely defending an American ship. He is defending the principle that international commerce should remain free and unimpeded.

Thomas Jefferson understood that before the United States possessed a navy capable of enforcing it. George Washington understood it before a single American frigate was launched. Horatio Nelson understood it while escorting merchant convoys across the Mediterranean.

The question has never really been whether nations will compete for influence. They always have.

The real question is whether the world’s commercial highways remain open to everyone—or whether, from time to time, someone decides to build a toll booth.

History has already rendered its verdict. Nations are free to ignore it.

They are never free to escape its consequences.