Tensions Persist in Strait of Hormuz After US Rejects Iran's Proposal
Rejecting the Strait of Hormuz Deal Is Not Strength but Breach of Trust
When a ruler spurns negotiation over a vital waterway and violence follows, he ceases to be a guardian of rights and begins to look like a man using power for his own will.
I begin not in the Strait of Hormuz, but in the condition all men are born into. By nature, as I argued in the Second Treatise, they are free, equal, and independent, subject only to the law of reason, which forbids each to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. They quit this state, and submit to governors, only that their rights may be better secured. Political power is thus not a natural dominion of some over others, but a trust laid in their hands by those who might otherwise have gone on without it. Whoever exercises that power must answer, at every turn, whether he truly protects those lives, liberties, and estates, or hazards them.
Against this measure, consider what is here reported. Iran, through its foreign minister, offers a diplomatic solution to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a passage through which immense quantities of oil and other goods must travel, and so on which the subsistence and property of multitudes depend. The President of the United States publicly rejects this proposal. Hours after that rejection, explosions are heard in the waterway. I know not who caused them or by what instruments they were brought about; but I do know this: in a place so essential to mankind’s commerce, the failure of negotiation that is followed by violence is a grave failure in the very business for which governments exist.
In the Second Treatise I defined political power as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good. That definition is not a flourish; it is a limit. When a ruler, especially one commanding great military force, rejects a path of negotiation proposed through mediators and offers no clear, known rule by which his refusal secures the public good, he does not stand in the calm majesty of law, but rather in the dangerous liberty of prerogative. Prerogative, I once allowed, is a power to act for the public advantage without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it, when pressing necessity leaves no time to consult. But that same power is held on trust, and is revocable the minute it ceases to be plainly for the people’s benefit.
Here, the claim from Tehran is that only negotiation can end the conflict, and that Iran had raised reopening the strait and ending hostilities in talks around a great assembly of nations. The counter-claim reported from the American side is that these are but “half measures” and “illusory deals,” designed for appearance and not effect. I cannot, from so scant a record, judge the terms. Yet this very ignorance proves a point. If rulers will expose a vital passage, on which the property and security of many nations depends, to continued danger by rejecting terms, they are bound to satisfy those who must bear the cost that such refusal is necessary to prevent greater harm. The burden of proof lies always on power, never on liberty.
When, instead, the world hears only that a diplomatic solution was offered, then rejected, and soon after explosions shake the waterway, subjects are left to conjecture whether their lives and estates are but counters in a game of reputation. In such a case, the ruler begins to look like a man who would be judge in his own case: he decides both the injury and the remedy, both the necessity of force and the futility of negotiation, with no impartial judge to appeal to and no standing rule laid down beforehand. That is the very pattern of arbitrary power, which I have long held to be worse than the state of nature it pretends to cure, because in nature no man has the right to command another’s obedience at pleasure.
I do not say that every refusal of a proposed agreement is tyranny, nor that every explosion following upon it convicts the magistrate of blood. Men charged with the conduct of war and peace may, through honest mistake, misjudge an offer, underestimate a danger, or overvalue a supposed advantage. One act of ill‑considered prerogative may be a fault, not a usurpation. The people are not called by reason to dissolve their government for every single misstep, but only when a long train of abuses shows a settled design to sacrifice their rights to another’s will. Yet this is the point: if such refusals of negotiation, such preference of force over accommodation, become habitual, and are every time wrapped in secrecy and pride, then what was once prerogative for the public good hardens into a standing claim of absolute discretion.
In that event, men and nations so governed may justly say that the trust is broken. The dissolution of a particular administration of power is not the dissolution of society; peoples can, without falling into chaos, demand new counsellors, new rules, and a new course that prefers dialogue over explosions in a strait upon which the world depends. They owe their rulers obedience only so long as those rulers plainly seek to preserve, and not needlessly endanger, their lives, liberties, and estates. If those who command fleets and bombers will not be bound by that condition, they leave mankind no recourse but an appeal to heaven—and they, not their subjects, are the first rebels against the ends of government.
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 — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.