Free seas matter and only the United States can protect them for the world

Is it worth it to the United States to enforce freedom of navigation on the seas?That question was a subplot in the Trump administration’s instantly famous leaked Signal chat over an operation to hit Houthi targets in Yemen. Vice President JD Vance expressed skepticism, pointing out that more European than US trade passes through the Suez Canal.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, on the other hand, were strongly in favor.Hegseth, correctly, called freedom of navigation “a core national interest.”Open sea lanes are necessary to US commercial shipping and trade (80% of all global trade is carried by ocean), as well as to lines of communication with our allies and US bases overseas.As a strategy document from US Joint Forces Command put it a few years ago, “The crucial enabler for America’s ability to project its military power for the past six decades has been its almost complete control over the global commons.” The fact is, President Trump’s decision to hit the Houthis toward the goal of fully freeing the Red Sea to shipping again was fundamentally American.We’ve long recognized the wisdom of the great 17th Century English adventurer Walter Raleigh when he said, “For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”We’ve acted on that insight from the beginning of our existence as a nation. We fought the Quasi War with France beginning in 1798 during the John Adams administration over French privateers seizing our shipping in the Caribbean. A few years later, President Thomas Jefferson reacted similarly to the Barbary states harassing European and American shipping in the Mediterranean.He ordered US ships to go after the corsairs hammer and tongs, urging our commander to “chastise their insolence — by sinking, burning or destroying their ships & vessels wherever you shall find them.”...