Closing Hormuz: How to Make the Poor Pay for Other People’s Glory

The Strait of Hormuz is, by the accounts placed before me, a kind of narrow neck through which a great part of the world’s energy must pass. Shipping data now record that, since Iran first closed this passage in early March following US‑Israeli strikes on Tehran, traffic has fallen from fifty vessels in a few days to thirty‑three in the like interval. The closure has already triggered what is called a global energy crisis. In my own time, I observed a pin‑factory and drew from it the doctrine that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market; here we see the same principle, not in a toy of wire, but in the arteries of world commerce.

When the market is so violently pinched at its narrowest channel, the whole system of division of labour contracts. If fewer ships pass, less oil reaches its distant consumers; when less oil arrives, every subsequent industry that depends upon cheap and steady power must retrench. The baker with a dearer oven, the carrier with a dearer cart, the labourer who pays more for the light and heat by which he lives and works, all feel at a distance what was decided in a moment by men who will never visit their streets. As I argued in the *Wealth of Nations*, the wealth of any country is the annual produce of its land and labour consumed by the people; a war that diminishes that produce, or diverts it from the many to the few, attacks wealth at its root.

In such affairs the benefits are visible and concentrated, the costs invisible and dispersed. The state that first closes the strait, and then agrees with a neighbour upon new coordinates for shipping routes, enjoys at once a sense of political leverage and the prospect of tolls or exclusions that favour its own partners. The naval power that proclaims a blockade, avowedly to starve another of oil and trade revenue, enjoys the applause of those who love to see firmness in their councils. But the resulting rise in petrol prices, and in all the prices that follow them, is not celebrated on any platform; it is merely paid, week after week, by consumers who had no vote in the quarrel. The invisible loser is always the person furthest from the proclamation and nearest to the marketplace.

Nor are the authors of these schemes merely merchants in uniform; they are often what, in my moral work, I described as men of system. One promises that the war on Iran is nearing an end and that petrol prices will fall when the conflict ceases; earlier he had threatened, in astonishingly theatrical phrase, that a whole civilisation would die if the strait were not opened. Another accuses him, in a modern pamphlet of social media, of theatre diplomacy. Such language reveals rulers who play upon the great chess‑board of human society as if the pieces had no principle of motion of their own. They imagine that a blockade here and a threat there will, by some simple geometry, produce peace, cheap fuel, and renewed honour, all at once. The impartial spectator, who sees how many independent agents are in motion, would judge this confidence with some severity.

In *The Theory of Moral Sentiments* I distinguished praise from praise‑worthiness. To seek an end to war and a fall in prices is praise‑worthy; to promise them as if they lay at the command of a single will, while the guns still fire and the blockade still bites, is something rather different. The same spectator, contemplating the labouring poor who pay more for every journey to work and every morsel of food transported to their table, would feel a deep uneasiness at the ease with which their sacrifices are assumed. There is an old deception in human affairs by which men in high station fancy that the splendour of their measures must correspond to the happiness they procure. The poor man’s son, whom I once described toiling his whole life for imagined grandeur, has here his counterpart in whole nations enlisted into the service of other people’s glory.

We must also regard, with the most suspicious attention, those commercial and political interests that clothe their particular aims in the garb of universal principles. I am told that tolls upon international waterways are said to violate the freedom of navigation, and that naval blockades are justified as guardians of that same freedom. Yet people of the same trade, I once observed, seldom meet without contriving a conspiracy against the public. When statesmen, admirals, and great energy interests meet to regulate who may pass a strait, on what terms, and with what exemptions for friends and exclusions for enemies, we may safely presume that competition is to be narrowed and some class interest advanced at the public expense. The banner may read liberty; the schedule of fees and exemptions often spells monopoly.

What, then, is left to recommend? Not a romantic trust in some automatic harmony, but a modest regard for the actual principles of motion in human affairs. Blockades, threats of civilisational ruin, and grand bargains struck under the roar of guns treat nations as if they were counters in a game, not multitudes of traders, labourers, and families pursuing their own quiet ends. The recent attempt by Iran and Oman to agree upon coordinates for shipping routes suggests another spirit: gradual reopening, rules that traders can anticipate, an extension rather than a fragmentation of the market. Such arrangements, if framed with justice and enforced with self‑command, allow that invisible hand which orders voluntary exchange to operate, and make it more likely that the world’s wealth will grow in the only way that finally matters: in the improved condition of the labouring poor.