Bombing the Trade Winds: The Gulf Strikes and the Poverty of Glory

The scene is quickly sketched. A military command announces that it has struck some 140 targets: missile and drone launch sites, ammunition dumps, communications equipment and the like. Another power replies that it has hit a base in Jordan. Missiles are launched toward a strategically important island in the Gulf; shrapnel wounds three people, including a child, in Qatar. A Cyprus‑flagged vessel is, in the phrase of one report, “blatantly attacked,” its crew forced into a lifeboat. Amid this exchange, one leader boasts that his side “bombed the hell” out of the other. No one boasts of the interrupted voyage, the abandoned ship, or the frightened child.

When I wrote of the division of labour in the pin‑workhouse in The Wealth of Nations, I observed that the prodigious increase in productivity depended on the extent of the market. Pins multiplied because roads were safe, carriage was cheap, and merchants could reckon on their goods arriving much as they were sent. The Strait of Hormuz is not a lane for pins, but a great artery through which flows the annual produce of the land and labour of many nations. To turn such a passage into a shooting‑gallery is not merely to endanger ships; it is to narrow the market, and thereby to diminish, though slowly and invisibly, the wages of the labouring poor.

The immediate actors will plead a different calculus. Each state alleges defence: retaliation for an earlier attack, deterrence of a future one, vindication of some violated agreement. Thus one side cites missiles and drones from Iran; the other claims a “first phase” of retaliation against a base with its own command centre and machines of destruction. I have never denied that the first duty of the sovereign is defence, nor that, in a world of imperfect virtue, force must sometimes be opposed by force. But when defence is conducted in a manner that renders the chief commercial highway of a region a lottery of explosions, the line between necessary protection and ruinous bravado has been quietly crossed.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I proposed that we judge our own conduct as if viewed by an impartial spectator, well informed and uninvolved. Let that spectator gaze upon this spectacle. He sees governments who hurl missiles across borders, who strike ships and bases and islands, while repeating that navigation remains open. He hears of families in Jordan awakened by distant impacts, of a navy officer killed, of crews abandoning a damaged vessel, of a child wounded by shrapnel. He also sees no corresponding enlargement of security for ordinary people, only a heightened chance that tomorrow’s quarrel will be fought with more instruments and on a wider stage. His verdict would not be doubtful.

In such a strait, even the shadow of control is itself a weapon. We are told that a powerful guard insists ships must follow its proposed route through this narrow passage, and that when vessels disregard such warnings they are attacked. Now, when I described in The Wealth of Nations how merchants are tempted to form a “conspiracy against the public,” I had in mind combinations to raise prices; yet the logic is the same when the commodity is safe passage rather than pins. To compel all ships onto a chosen path is to acquire, at little cost, the power of toll‑keeper, if not in money then in influence; it is to substitute arbitrary permission for the ordinary higgling and bargaining of the market.

Nor are the temptations confined to those who command the shores. Those who command distant fleets may discover that a little well‑advertised peril in the Gulf justifies new expenditures, new bases, new devices that fly without pilots. Every rocket launched is paid for, not by the orator who speaks of resolve, but by taxpayers who must surrender some part of their earnings, and by consumers who will pay a trifle more for every article conveyed along disturbed routes. Benefits are visible and loudly claimed; costs are dispersed and silently borne. It is the ancient maxim of the masters of mankind—“all for ourselves, and nothing for other people”—translated into the dialect of strategic necessity.

I am conscious that from a distance, and with information confessedly imperfect, one cannot apportion exact blame or trace every consequence. Yet one conclusion requires no further documents: when a handful of states turn a vital maritime corridor into a theatre for demonstrating their power, they do not merely endanger each other, they tax the world. The wealth of nations consists in what their people, especially their labouring poor, can afford calmly to consume. Every abandoned ship and terrified child in this story is a reminder that opulence grows from peaceable cooperation, and that whenever we bomb the trade winds, they blow, in time, against us all.