Where It's Always 1895

What JVL Wrote

The Strait of Hormuz is governed by international law. Bertina Kudrin wrote an accessible primer for Lawfare on the relevant statutes early in the war. Here’s the short version:

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) codified free passage through narrow “international straits.”

The actual routing and traffic management of the strait is handled by the International Maritime Organization, an agency created by the U.N. The United States is a member of the IMO.

The U.S. Navy’s Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations confirms the status of the Strait of Hormuz as being governed by the UNCLOS definition of an international strait.1

Iran signed, but never ratified, UNCLOS and has always maintained that it held rights over transit passage in the strait. But Iran’s claim was overridden by the sheer weight of the countries that were pledged to international law.

The United States, which also never ratified UNCLOS, formally regards Iran’s claim over the Strait of Hormuz as an “excessive maritime claim” and insists that the strait is subject to “transit passage,” meaning that all ships enjoy the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea.

This is going to sound crazy, but Iran—Iran!—is at least going through the motions of respecting international law. Iran claims that it has always disputed the UNCLOS definition of Hormuz as an “international strait” and that it has the right to close it under the Hague Conventions and the U.N. charter’s right of self-defense, since Iran was attacked by the United States and Israel.

I want to be crystal clear here: Iran’s closure of the strait is a violation of international law. Iran’s claims are not on the level. But Iran’s claims are being made within the framework of international law—which is to say that you can look at Iran’s claims, look at international law, and come to a conclusion.

On the other hand, Trump’s “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait” regime is based on . . . nothing.

Literally nothing.

And later:

So let’s pretend that America’s “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait” plan was enacted. A Chinese-flagged cargo ship attempts to transit the strait and refuses to pay Trump’s 20 percent fee.

What next?

Does the U.S. Navy fire on the merchantman? Does it board the cargo ship? Take possession of it? We would have to, because if we didn’t, then no one would pay the toll. A toll without enforcement is a request for a donation.

So now we have the U.S. Navy committed to a regime of force against civilian shipping that has not consented to the transformation of the Hormuz from an “international strait” governed by transit passage to a territorial water of the United States, governed by—well, not governed by U.S. law, because no laws were passed. But governed by Donald Trump’s Truth Social account.

Here’s what I want you to focus on: A unilaterally imposed maritime toll regime is a blockade. They are the same thing.

And a naval blockade is an act of war. Not in the Truth Social sense, but in the actual, legal, international law sense.

So if you take Trump’s post yesterday seriously, then it was a threat of war against, well . . . against the entire rest of the world.

What It Means

As far as I know, and keeping in mind that #I’m Not A Lawyer, JVL’s summary of the law seems right here. Narrow international waterways aren’t the property of whatever country controls the coast, and they’re meant to be kept open without ships having to pay a tax or toll. It was illegal when Iran tried to do it, and bizarrely somehow even less legal when Trump pulled the same maneuver. Even just being no worse than the ayatollah isn’t a club I ever wanted to be a member of.

This is actually something of a leitmotif for Trump in this latest term. Something is bad when done to him, but instead of just calling it out he goes on to do it to other people. When the Democrats investigated him that was a horrible invasion of his privacy, so what do you expect him to do, not investigate the people around him? For him, it’s much worse to be weak and a sucker than to do something bad. And similarly with Iran laying claim to the Strait of Hormuz. The problem wasn’t that Iran was breaking the law, or that without free passage you’d be introducing unnecessary friction to the global system in a way that hurts everyone. No, it’s that he’s not the one doing the screwing.

JVL argues this is tantamount to declaring war on the whole world because a toll doesn’t mean anything if you’re not willing to enforce it and asks if a Chinese ship refused to pay and tried to pass anyway. But the reality is we almost certainly wouldn’t fire on a Chinese ship (*fingers crossed*), but I can very easily see us firing on a ship from Cambodia. Rules give the enforcer the right to enforce them, if the rule is legitimate, but they don’t actually compel enforcement if we don’t want to. The biggest, most important countries or those in big enough alliances we have to step around them collectively are likely to get a pass. Maybe they would pay the toll because it’s not worth the risk and bother of refusing; maybe they wouldn’t and we’d wave them through. More middling powers or even those Trump is feuding with at the moment are much less likely to get any better treatment than the law provides, and only that if Trump decides to play by his own rules.

As the oft-quoted line goes: for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

This is misunderstanding the true American superpower. Since World War II America had a reputation for fair rules everyone could depend on. The world’s elite could send their kids to American universities and know they’d get the same education with the same credentials at the end of it as any American. They could build businesses here and know their investment and work would be protected. There were courts that would treat them fairly if they behaved by rules everyone could know and understand in advance. That stability gave America a lot of soft power and privilege, and for a minimal investment in strong, fair institutions we were all better off.

Really, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what made America great to begin with: the stability, safety and fairness that provided the bones of a system others wanted to be part of and were willing to pay a premium for. That premium was often less obvious than a cut of the take. You could argue, too, that the cost America paid to enable the system wasn’t worth what we got out of it, or that it benefited the rich but not the rest of us. It was real, though, and Trump is still much too ready to toss all that away.

Related News

The New York Times: “A Modest Proposal for the Strait Dispute: A Shared Pact Among Gulf States” (PF)

Also The New York Times: “Trump’s Strait of Hormuz Fee Could Double the Cost of Shipping” (PF)

New York Magazine: “Trump Abandons Absurd Hormuz Fee in Less Than a Day” (PF)

The Atlantic: “Who Really Controls the Strait of Hormuz?” (PF)

The Conversation: “The ‘navalization’ of economic warfare sees trade routes become zones of force rather than rules” (PF)

In Lieu of a Musical Break

From Seyed Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian Foreign Minister:

Other Iran-Related News

Mark Hertling, The Bulwark: "Iran Showed Us the Future of Asymmetric Warfare"

The Washington Post: “18 U.S. service members have been killed during Iran war” (PF),  including four in two separate attacks since the MOU stalled.

The New York Times: “Pentagon Withheld Dozens of U.S. Military Injuries in Iran War” (PF)

Tom Nichols, The Atlantic: “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War” (PF)

Wired: “Intel Officials Predict the Pentagon’s Bill for the Iran War Will Exceed $100 Billion” (PF)

Le Monde: “Timothy Snyder, historian: 'Trump's war against Iran shows that evil and folly can march hand in hand'” (PF)

The Fulcrum: “NATO Has an Article 5. It Doesn't Have an Iran Policy” (PF)

Foreign Policy: “How to Isolate Tehran” (PF)

New York Magazine: “Trump Is Finding Out About Forever War” (PF)

Musical Break

More Stories on ICE Enforcement and Detention

Adrian Carrasquillo, The Bulwark: “ICE’s New Permanent Family Separation: Killing Latino Fathers”

Terry Moran: “The House He Built” About Lorenzo Salgo Araujo

The Verge: “ICE are heavily armed killers. They’re also huge losers” (PF)

Mother Jones: “ICE Keeps Using The Same Justification For Killing Drivers” (PF)

New York Times: “Mullin Says ICE Training Going Back to ‘Regular Standards’” (PF) It was previously reduced to 47 days because of the Trump connection and to get bodies on the street more quickly.

Salon: “New ICE boss, same old lies” (PF)

The New Yorker: “Inside ICE’s Largest Detention Center” (PF) Truly horrific details about the conditions and treatment of detained immigrants at the Camp East Montana facility in Texas.

The New York Times: “Mexico to File Criminal Complaints in U.S. Over Immigrant Deaths” (PF)

The Fulcrum: “Trump’s Defense of ICE Traffic Stops Shows a President Willing to Risk Lives for Politics” (PF) Sec. Mullins had announced plans to pause most vehicle stops (PF), but Trump quickly cancelled the change. (PF)

What David French Wrote

On the scandals around Graham Platner and people choosing him anyway:

Let’s be charitable for a moment. I believe in redemption and forgiveness. A person can absolutely go through an extended period of darkness and despair before finding his or her way out. I don’t think that we should define people by their worst moments.

At the same time, however, I don’t want to put people in the U.S. Senate who recently struggled and who recently sported an SS tattoo, and I definitely don’t want to do it because the base is angry and the base wants nothing more than a fighter to take on the hated political foe.

I know exactly where this process leads. For the past 10 years and counting, I’ve had a front-row seat at the festival of rationalization that’s turned the Republican Party into a Trump cult of personality.

The slide begins when you tell yourself that the stakes are just too high for normal politics. Of course I wouldn’t support this candidate in better times. But now? American democracy is at stake.

Millions of Republicans justified their votes for Trump in precisely those apocalyptic terms. To quote an influential essay by Michael Anton, a right-wing author and a former official in Trump’s State Department, “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die.”

If history teaches us anything, it’s that difficult times call for politicians to demonstrate a higher degree of character. Character is never a luxury, but it becomes an urgent necessity in the face of conflict and adversity.

What Sarah Longwell Wrote

On the DNC’s response to Platner winning the nomination:

The circular firing squad did its usual thing, and I confess to having contributed to it. That’s because the Democrats are still a mostly healthy, good-faith political party made up of people who care about things like objective truth, and who are uncomfortable at the prospect of supporting someone who evinces immoral or unethical behavior of the kind Platner has been accused of.

You know who doesn’t care one whit about any of that? Republicans. During the same time period, they’ve rallied around Ken Paxton—a cartoonishly corrupt scumbag and adulterous, election-denying MAGA fanatic—as their Senate nominee in Texas. There was no hand-wringing. There were no institutional Republicans grappling with their consciences. No one bothered themselves with the fact that Paxton attempted to disenfranchise millions of voters and overturn the 2020 presidential election. There was just the now-typical rush to get onside, no matter how despicable of a person Paxton happens to be.

Paxton was indicted on felony charges for securities fraud, was reported to the FBI by eight of his deputies for abusing his power to benefit a donor, is currently in proceedings for divorce from his wife on the grounds of adultery, and was impeached by the Texas House 121–23 (including 60 Republicans) for charges of bribery, abuse of office, obstruction, and bringing the office into “scandal and disrepute.” No matter. That’s the Republicans’ guy—and the right-wing press is lining up behind him.

Whereas many liberal and mainstream pundits are compelled to be intellectually consistent in their thinking, the conservative commentariat’s main incentive is to show religious devotion to the party line—and to win at all costs by doing so. In other words, there’s a “hack gap.”

[...]

Republican commentators stood by Trump after two dozen women came forward accusing Trump of various acts of sexual misconduct, including rape, after his insults against John McCain, the Access Hollywood tape, “very fine people,” the betrayal at Helsinki, the “perfect” phone call, the first impeachment, COVID, the January 6th insurrection, the second impeachment, the dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, the 34 felony counts, the sexual abuse adjudication, the January 6th pardons, DOGE, the Qatari jet, the January 6th slush fund. There’s not enough room on the internet to list all of his improprieties.

To the Republican commentators who now think they have standing to lecture the Democrats about the morality of their chosen Senate candidate: nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. A party that squandered its moral authority to support the most immoral president of our time as he undermines our entire governing system has no standing to give lectures about political ethics to everyone else.

What It Means

This is one of those conversations that’s really a whole family of somewhat-overlapping questions, and it becomes at least a little more intelligible if we untangle them from each other if we can. 

Starting with Sarah Longwell, it’s easy to read her essay as arguing that progressive voters shouldn’t care about character, or even that they didn’t. She’s actually making a more limited point: that the voters she’s listened to are not at all interested in having MAGA people lecture them on character, precisely because those people have long since shown they hold no similar scruples with their own candidates. In a way it’s similar to gerrymandering: however much you might want character to count across the board, just accepting that limitation for your side while the other side continues getting away with whatever it can is giving them a structural advantage. You can’t disarm (or re-arm perhaps) unilaterally. And it’s certainly annoying as all get-out to be lectured at by people who transparently don’t care a whit about their leader’s character themselves.

I’ve listened to Sarah discuss this issue in enough contexts, I think I can fairly say she’s analyzing voters’ priorities, not presenting what she wishes for in her heart of hearts. If anything, she probably wishes more voters cared more about character than she’s observing. It’s not that kind of piece.

David French, again at first glance seems to be making the case that voters shouldn’t jettison concerns over character particularly when the stakes seem so apocalyptic. He comes even closer to urging voters to give more weight to character when making their choices. Based on other conversations I really do think he’d prefer that. But here, again, the point he’s making in this piece is a little more limited. He sees a rather unsettling parallel between Platner supporters willingness to excuse bad character and how MAGA did the same thing with Trump; and he wants us to look at the roadmap and see where this is likely to end up. One MAGA is bad enough; pair that with a progressive wing built on that same need for an effective fighter who can bloody the other guy up, whether or not he’s actually good, could (would) be disastrous.

All of this is circling like so many buzzards around the question that really matters, not just whether character counts but how much we’d be willing to sacrifice for it. I can hardly blame them; that’s a big question to tackle in 1,500 words, and I’m struggling to land the plane myself. But to give it the old college try: Would we (would I) accept someone we knew raped a woman, “just” one woman, if it let us hold Trump and his ilk accountable? If it meant millions others could access healthcare or didn’t have to worry about how they’d afford food to feed their kids? Even if you knew somehow that getting Graham Platner elected meant all those policy preferences would magick themselves into existence? 

The utilitarian logic is almost inescapable. But it’s still dangerous, and I’d argue logically faulty, territory for all the reasons David French points out. When the dangers seem existential it’s human nature to give up more than we should to beat back the beast. But we should take a pause and ask ourselves why we should have to choose at all? If a particular policy is important enough that it’s worth electing a dirtbag because it’s the policy not the person that matters, you could also get there with a decent enough candidate. There should be at least one decent person willing to make the progressive’s, or centrist’s, or conservative’s, or libertarian’s, or whatever other kind of case in any particular race; the trick is finding them and getting them to run before people have to make a hard choice between all bad options.

If only there were these stable sets of dispositions and habits that lead us to consistently choose well, whatever the situation is.. But there I suspect my Aristotelian roots are showing.

Musical Break

More News on Graham Platner and Progressives

G. Elliot Morris: “What’s up with people who disapprove of Trump but won’t vote for Democrats?”

Tim Miller, The Bulwark: "The Democrats Who Can Win Red America"

The New York Review of Books: “The DNC Against Itself” (PF)

The Conversation: “Democratic socialists aren’t the only young, progressive Democrats dividing the party” (PF)

Slate: “Candidates Need More Than Vibes. Graham Platner Proves It.” (PF)

Salon: “Democrats say they want a fighter. Does it have to be a White man?” (PF)

Salon: “Platner’s campaign implosion highlights the hollowness of America’s political parties” (PF)

New York Magazine: “What Women Saw in Graham Platner” (PF)

Commonweal Magazine: “A Different Kind of Populist” (PF) (on James Talarico)

The New York Times: “Can Democrats Win Rural Voters Turning Away From Trump? It’s a Tough Sell.” (PF)

& on Character and Morality Generally

Terry Moran: “The Worse Angels” (On the Trump era and permission structures to give in to our worst impulses)

Rachel Janfaza, The Bulwark: “Gen Z is Ready for Hope and Change”

The New York Times: “Liberals Are Preaching Moral Values. What Took Them So Long?” (PF)

The New Yorker: “Why Have Liberals Abandoned a Moral Reading of the Constitution?” (PF)

Vox: “Rubén Gallego on why he defended Eric Swalwell — and why he regrets it now” (PF)

The Atlantic: “The Strange History of the Word Equal” (PF)

ARC Magazine: “How Babel Thrives” (PF) (On religious communities in Queens and what they can teach us about community and diversity.)

The Conversation: “Reading for pleasure builds empathy in children, but fewer kids are picking up books just for the fun of it” (PF)

Terry Moran: “The Worse Angels” (On the Trump era and permission structures to give in to our worst impulses)

Rachel Janfaza, The Bulwark: “Gen Z is Ready for Hope and Change”

The New York Times: “Liberals Are Preaching Moral Values. What Took Them So Long?” (PF)

The New Yorker: “Why Have Liberals Abandoned a Moral Reading of the Constitution?” (PF)

Vox: “Rubén Gallego on why he defended Eric Swalwell — and why he regrets it now” (PF)

The Atlantic: “The Strange History of the Word Equal” (PF)

ARC Magazine: “How Babel Thrives” (PF) (On religious communities in Queens and what they can teach us about community and diversity.)

The Conversation: “Reading for pleasure builds empathy in children, but fewer kids are picking up books just for the fun of it” (PF)

Musical Break

More News on China

Paul Krugman: "Why Did Trump Take Elon Musk to China?"

Financial Times: “Nvidia halves Asia buyer list in China chip crackdown” (PF)

Noe Magazine: “China’s Open AI Models Are Advancing Its Global Soft Power” (PF)

Foreign Policy: “The End of Chinese Growth” (PF)

Financial Times: “Chinese companies use rare earths ban to squeeze out foreign rivals” (PF)

The New York Times: “Trump’s Sharp Turn on China: Embracing It as a Peer Power” (PF)

Foreign Policy: “Xi’s Flurry of Post-Trump Diplomacy” (PF)

Fortune: “Both U.S. and Chinese AI firms are setting up shop in Singapore. Can the country become Asia’s neutral AI hub?” (PF)

Financial Times: “The risks of borrowing from China’s economic playbook” (PF)