Fireside Friday, January 12, 2024

Fireside this week! The semester has started up in earnest and I am pushing hard to try to finish a draft of something I have promised by the end of the month (so this may not be the only Fireside this month). That said, it seemed like a good time to discuss trade, the sea and great powers, both given current events but also that this semester I’m teaching U.S. Naval History again and so we’re discussing things like ‘what is seapower?’ and ‘what are navies for?’ And I had planned to muse on this before the United States began airstrikes in Yemen, but given that I was going to argue that history suggests such strikes were almost certainly imminent…well, here we are.

Ollie has seen your turkey sandwich. He would very much like your turkey sandwich. Also the fact that Ollie’s slight overbite gives him the cat version of vampire fangs remains very funny to me.

The sea is, militarily speaking, an odd place. Almost none of the resources that people fight over are actually in the sea. Relatively few wars – not no wars, mind you – have been fought over fishing rights, much less things like off-shore oil resources. Humans have been using the sea for warfare for at least 3450 years;⁶⁸³ the exploitation of maritime resources beyond fish is a lot younger than that. Instead, as A.T. Mahan famously pointed out, the value of the sea is as a conveyance.

And my goodness, what value it has. Roughly 80% of all goods move by sea; sea-freight is thus larger by share of tonnes-per-kilometer than every other method of conveyance combined. Of course, for anything too bulky to profitably transport by air, the sea is the only way to move something from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas or Oceania, but even a lot of bulk transport that could happen by land goes by sea because it is cheaper. Shipping a cargo container by truck from Boston to Los Angeles might cost around $9,000 (I don’t have exact figures, but rail-freight is around half that). For the same cost or less, you can ship a cargo container full of stuff anywhere in the world.

Transport by sea is so much cheaper and thus so valuable that we (as a species) sawed an entire continent in half to make it easier. Twice.

And it is important, in order to understand why countries act the way they do about the sea, to understand the practical impacts of those low costs and our systems built on them. Without cheap sea-freight, humanity is much poorer; poorer in ways that are real. For folks in wealthy countries, those pressures express themselves as inflation: things that were cheap get more expensive because of disrupted supply chains. We’ve all now experienced such a disruption with COVID and the absolute havoc it caused as countries closed up and locked down. But for poor countries, the situation can be far more dire as the rising cost of imports can do things like spike the prices of basic necessities out of reach of much of the population or cause food shortages. A 50% increase in the price of basic foods is an inconvenience in the developed world, but a life-threatening catastrophe in the developing world.

Unsurprisingly, then, keeping the seas clear and open for business has long been a major priority of many states. Piracy suppression was a major priority for the Romans, for instance. Roman military successes in the second century removed the other major Mediterranean naval powers, leading to an increase in piracy, to which the Romans responded with an escalating series of anti-piracy operations, culminating in the passage of the Lex Gabinia to give Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) extraordinary powers to suppress piracy. Even after the Romans dominated the entire Mediterranean littoral, they ended up maintaining two permanent fleets – despite a total lack of enemy naval powers – in part for piracy suppression.

As international maritime law emerged, the disruption of the sea lanes by private groups – that is, pirates – was already understood to fall under the legal term of art hostes humani generis. ”Enemies of all human-kind.” The consequence of that was that it was understood to be the obligation of all states to suppress piracy (as distinct from privateering – the chartering of ships during war by one country to prey on the shipping of an enemy country) and that individuals or groups engaged in piracy enjoyed effectively no legal protection if found guilty.

That sort of thing, I suspect, sounds to most of you like the kind of thing that probably went out of fashion sometime in the 1800s, so you may be surprised to learn that is still the state of international law. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sets out international law related to piracy (defining it as any illegal act of violence or detention committed for private ends by the crew of a private ship or aircraft) and establishes universal jurisdiction, both allowing any state to seize pirate ships on the high seas and to prosecute those pirates by whatever laws they may have, regardless of the nationality of the pirates involved.

All of which brings us around to Ansar Allah, commonly called the Houthis (I’m going to say ‘the Houthis’ here because that’s the most common usage), and their actions in the Red Sea. I want to dispense with issue really quickly, which is the notion that what the Houthis are doing is actually a ‘blockade,’ ostensibly of Israel. The thing is, blockades are also governed by international law. A blockade is generally an act of war (though war is not always declared) directed at a specific country;⁶⁸⁴ international law requires the blockading power to stop ships for inspection and turn around ships that contain contraband goods. It does not allow a country to just shoot randomly at ships passing by under any flag headed to any destination; it certainly does not allow them to do so in international waters or in the territorial waters of non-belligerents. The notion then, which I have seen advanced, that Houthi action could be understood as some legal act of war or blockade direct at Israel is nonsense. If the Houthis are non-state actors, they’re engaged in piracy and hostes humani generis. If they’re state actors, they’re committing acts of war against quite a few different countries and no one ought to be terribly shocked at the result that produces. In particular, Houthi attacks have not been even remotely limited to ships with connections (of any sort!) to Israel; they’re attacking ships indiscriminately. I have also seen quite a lot of skepticism in the security policy space that an end to the conflict in Gaza would lead to an end to the attacks in the Red Sea; in any case, only one country can end the conflict in Gaza⁶⁸⁵ and it is a country that is not particularly impacted by the Red Sea crisis.

And now here is where I was going to note that given the history of the last few centuries, the consequence of continued disruption of trade in the Red Sea was almost certain: an escalating military response against the Houthis. But those strikes are now occurring. 

Which is not surprising. For much of the last couple of centuries, it was broadly understood that the leading great powers, at least during peace time, kept the world’s seas open for business and that the rest of the world’s powers largely let them do so because it was in their interest as well to have access to the seas.  For much of the 1800s, that job was accomplished by the British Royal Navy; after World War II, much of the responsibility shifted to the United States Navy (though note how involved the Royal Navy has been in this current crisis). And this fundamentally hasn’t changed.

At the same time, as I’ve noted before, airstrikes alone are often a weak lever when it comes to achieving strategic objectives. But 12% of all global trade moves through the Red Sea, which makes this crisis a major strategic interest for not just the United States but many other countries as well. As a result, while the Biden administration has made pretty clear that it does not want to escalate in the region, the United States and its partners are almost certain to keep escalating until trade flows return, while the broad global interest in freedom of navigation means that while many countries won’t rush to get involved in the expensive work of making the Houthis stop, there is unlikely to be any international coalition to mitigate the amount of force the United States and its partners use.

So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas.

Onward to Recommendations:

For those looking at a more focused take on the recent strikes in Yemen and the Red Sea crisis generally, I thought this explanatory essay by Mick Ryan is informative and gives a good sense of where things might go from here. Unfortunately, I think the answer is – as Ryan does – ‘nowhere good.’ The Houthis aren’t backing down but the United States is unlikely to tolerate a closed Red Sea either; incompatible demands of this sort generally lead to escalation.

Meanwhile, for those who missed it, I had a Twitter thread go somewhat viral discussing Latin and Roman values and in particular the claim that the Romans treated virilitas (‘manliness’ in the sense of “high testosterone”) as a core value. For those who’d rather not visit Twitter, you can read the thread on Threadreader. The whole episode makes me think that actually tackling how the Romans did self-perceive themselves and what their core values (virtus, disciplina, honos, sapientia, religio, pietas, constantia, fides and so on) were might be a good blog project for later this year. Roman values do not map neatly onto modern values (or traditional Christian ones, much less “traditional” Christian ones), so it might make for an interesting discussion.

I thought this video by (alleged) YouTuber Rosencreutz (who is also on Twitter), ruminating on the nature of player agency in strategy games – particularly in reference to Victoria II and Victoria III – was quite interesting. As he notes, Victoria II was willing, particularly in the internal political model, to actively dis-empower the player, to limit ‘player autocracy’ as part of its mechanics. And players really disliked that, but as Rosencreutz notes, it also gave some of the game’s systems very strong feedback in a way that Victoria III cannot, because it is much less willing to dis-empower the player. My own view, and Rosencreutz touches on this too, is that this hits at the conflict between game design and historical simulation design. In real history, there are things that are very difficult for rulers to control, but when we play games, we want a lot of agency. Striking the balance between those aims is, understandably, hard.

For this week’s book recommendation, I’m excited to finally get to recommend F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera. The book is the long-awaited translation of the Spanish original, F. Quesada Sanz Armas de la antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010). For once, I think the English translation of a title may actually be an improvement because while the book extensively covers arms and armor, it also discusses warfare in pre-Roman more generally. On these topics, Quesada Sanz is the world’s foremost authority, so having a general for-the-lay-audience treatment of the topic by him now available in English is a huge boon.

The book at hand is a quite direct translation (even keeping the original pagination of the Spanish volume), so none of Quesada Sanz’ arguments or information is lost. I’m not qualified to really assess how well Quesada Sanz’ prose flows in Spanish; the English translation follows the original very closely, but reads well – there is a bit of clunkiness in the English, but I certainly prefer the decision to hold tight to the original Spanish rather than twist it to make the prose flow. In any event, it is by no means bad; the volume is eminently readable. The book presents for a lay-audience both the evidence we have for warfare in pre-Roman Iberia beginning around 1000 BC and running to the end of the Roman context in the reign of Augustus. The approach is not fully descriptive: Quesada Sanz has arguments to make here (which he has made in scholarly venues in more depth); for instance he is at pains to show that these armies could and did engage in regular pitched battles in contrast to the sense in older scholarship that fighting in Iberia against the Romans was mostly irregular or ‘guerilla.’ Quesada Sanz is, I think, clearly right on this point and the evidence supports him. And so it goes: the vision of warfare in Iberia that Quesada Sanz presents is the culmination of his decades of work on the topic; this is a primer from the master.

The book is also illustrated and oh my goodness is it illustrated. The original combined astoundingly lavish and well-produced reconstruction artwork with archaeological line-drawings and photographs of surviving artifacts as well as some very clear and handy charts and figures. These the new volume has reproduced entirely (one oddity; the chronological development charts are translated, except for the dates, which are given as a.C., antes de Cristo, the Spanish equivalent of BC). Here I will register my one complaint with this English version: the original’s pages were 29.5cm x 21cm, whereas the English volume, published by Pen & Sword⁶⁸⁶ is smaller, 24.4cm by 16.5cm. Consequently, some of the fantastic illustrations are slightly smaller. Still, if this is the compromise to bring the book – in hardcover! – below $50 it was a good compromise to make. I admit, I am rather shocked (pleasantly) but how affordable this book is for how well produced it is, especially coming from Pen & Sword, where quality is not always the watchword. 

Finally, in the original Spanish volume, Quesada Sanz made a point of including a lengthy bibliography as well as ‘further reading’ blocks at the end of each chapter (which point to full entries in the bibliography), specifically to give the lay-reader somewhere to go to read further. And, very happily, that choice is retained in the current volume. Consequently, this is one of the easiest book recommendations to make: if you have any interest in the warfare of Iberia before or during the Roman conquest, this book is a must-have.