Denmark Reports Russian Flares Fired Near Helicopter in Baltic Sea
A Flare in the Baltic and the Boundaries of Legitimate Power
When a warship fires at a lawful aircraft in international waters, the question is not seamanship but sovereignty: who gave this ship the right to endanger another’s life and call it defence?
I begin where the sea does, with the simple fact that a Danish military helicopter flew in international waters off Gedser, on what is described as a routine photographic operation of a Russian frigate. No one claims the air or water there as private property. No one pretends the Danish crew boarded the ship, damaged its instruments, or obstructed its course. They looked and took images, as men may lawfully do in that wide common God has given to all. In the state of nature, before treaties and flags, such observation would injure no one’s life, liberty, or estate; any government that now forbids it must show how the trust of its people extends so far.
Against this, the Russian warship fired two emergency flares, one passing, by Denmark’s account, within a matter of metres of the aircraft. I am no engineer of these modern contrivances, yet I understand enough to know that fire near a flying machine risks lives, health, and property. It is not a mere signal light on a distant horizon. It is force projected into another’s immediate vicinity, without his leave, in a place where neither party has jurisdiction over the other. Call it warning, call it intimidation, the thing remains: a calculated hazard imposed on men who had not first assailed.
In the Second Treatise I defined political power, in paraphrase, as the right of making laws with penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in that execution, only for the public good. This definition does not halt at the shore of any kingdom; it follows every ship that bears a government’s commission. If the flares were discharged by public authority, then some law and some public good must be shown, else the act stands as naked force. If they were a private frolic of the ship’s officers, then we have the yet worse sight of instruments of war left to arbitrary discretion, like pistols in a madman’s hand.
The Russian ambassador speaks of “provocative actions” and earlier “dangerous maneuvers” by Danish helicopters, as if prior displeasure licensed present endangerment. Here the old temptation returns, to make oneself judge in one’s own case. I read of no impartial tribunal, no standing rule agreed among nations that sets how close one may fly, how often one may photograph, and what remedies exist when such rules are broken. Instead, one party announces itself aggrieved and, upon its own reckoning, inflicts a perilous chastisement. That is not law; it is the very condition men leave when they form commonwealths, the state of nature sliding toward a state of war.
Under the law of nature, which is but reason to any who will consult it, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. To fire combustibles near a crewed aircraft in flight is to risk just such harm. The burden therefore rests, not on Denmark to prove innocence, but on those who loosed the flares to prove necessity. Were they under immediate attack? Was there no milder course that would secure their safety? I see only talk of annoyance, proximity, and pride. These may trouble men’s tempers; they do not justify exposing others to death.
Yet I must distinguish degrees of mischief. When in the Second Treatise I described a people absolved from obedience by a long train of abuses, I meant a settled design to destroy their properties and enslave them under arbitrary power. One incident in the Baltic Sea, however rash, does not yet show such a design against the Danish people, nor against all who use those international waters. Here, therefore, I do not counsel recourse to that last appeal, which is to heaven and to arms, but to the earlier remedies of patient inquiry, open evidence, and the firm renewing of common rules among states, that commanders at sea may know their bounds.
Still, a single act may be a small thing and yet a clear thing. If the facts stand as reported, this discharge of flares was an unjustified exercise of power, exceeding any trust that free and equal persons could be supposed to grant for their protection. It treats the lives of foreign airmen as counters in a game of signalling and bravado. It shifts the burden from the hand that fires to the eye that looks, and invites the world to accept that soldiers afloat may decide for themselves when curiosity becomes provocation, and when provocation deserves peril. That is a boundary no free people should quietly watch being moved.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.