Cooperation, Coercion, and Navalism

Recently I have been reading two online debates about the role of naval force in the 21st century. Over on his blog, Australian economist John Quiggin has been chatting about the Australian navy with commentators like MarkL since 2008. That debate brought up a helpful reading list on strategic theory. Over on his blog, Bret Devereaux has been talking naval power and global trade with people such as Yard. He also got a lively response. I have decided to expand one of my comments to his blog with yet more amateur thoughts.

Why aren’t there pirates on Lake Ontario?

For 300 years after Europeans sailed into the St Lawrence, the limit of navigation was the Lachine Rapids at Montreal. Lake Ontario was further cut off from the upper lakes by Niagra Falls. As settlers pushed inland, they launched a few sloops, brigs, and schooners on the lakes. Then the War of 1812 broke out, and by 1814 five of the most heavily armed ships on earth were floating or ready to launch on Lake Ontario. The logic was just as brutal as any other arms race: if I build a bigger navy and sink yours, you can’t build a new one and I get complete control, so you are motivated to expand your own navy, which threatens mine. Ships on the Great Lakes could not even be redeployed to new missions around the world, and building major warships and delivering heavy guns to Upper Canada and upstate New York was terribly expensive. And so in 1817 and 1818, Britain and the United States signed the Rush-Bagot Agreement not to launch more than one warship with one gun on Lake Ontario and two ships on the Upper Lakes. Ever since that agreement has held.

Piracy did not break out because the North Shore of Lake Ontario was ruled by peace, order, and good government and the South Shore by the State of New York. It does not take much state capacity to keep people from going a roving from your own harbours. Full-sized warships are much too expensive to deal with smuggling and timber piracy and wrecking. Assyrian smugglers in the Bronze Age already used back roads to avoid tolls, and Chaucer’s predatory Shipman knew “every cryke in Britaigne and in Spayne.” Strabo knew pirates in the Black Sea who paddled around in dugout canoes, and I expect they were used to using creeks, beaches, and shallow bays to evade the triremes of the Black Sea ports.

If you establish functional government around the shores, and let all those governments enjoy the benefits of trade, piracy dries up like a rock pool on a sunny day. You don’t need much force, a Coast Guard (the Naval Reserve in Canada) and a militarized police force will do.

Whereas arms races are lose-lose, free trade is a win-win. While there is a lot of talk about Canada paying most of the costs for the new Gordie Howe Bridge, opening a seaway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of St. Lawrence is such a good idea that Canada started to build the necessary canals in the 1820s. Just as with the Gordie Howe Bridge, Canada often had to move first and pay most of the costs when the United States Congress was balky. They were still in the national interest. If it should become necessary for us to close them to ships sailing to foreign ports, the only military way to make us reopen them would be to occupy large parts of Ontario and Quebec. A month of that would cost more than all the Great Lakes trade put together.

Patrolling someone else’s shores to stop pirates is a last resort, and the ships which are best for that work are not major warships. For 200 years, it has been much more effective to establish functional government along the shore and offer the benefits of trade if they keep order in their own house. The pirate crisis of the first century BCE emerged because the Romans had smashed the old Macedonian kingdoms but not allowed a new order to emerge, and it ended as they set up a system of client states with strict instructions not to allow so much disorder that it was talked about in Rome. The Imperial Roman navy consisted of riverboats and triremes, not the giant polyremes which they had used to fight Carthage and Egypt. Rome controlled the shores of the Mediterranean and most of the Black Sea, so only had to worry about the ships that a small town or isolated village could build.

How do we cut countries off from trade today?

Another argument for naval power is that it lets you cut other countries off from global trade. This argument is often very traditional and brings up names like Alfred Thayer Mahan (d. 1914). In Mahan’s world, almost all the earth was part of a few big empires. If you wanted to cut off Britain off from Indian cotton and Jamaican rum, the only way was to sink or capture ships at sea, or make their owners so afraid of losing their ships that they did not leave port. Under colonialism and mercantilism the colonies had no choice of who to trade with, any more than the western regions of China or Brazil had a choice about whether to trade with Beijing and Rio de Janeiro. When Britain turned against the global slave trade, it could only shut it down by placing ships on patrol in the Red Sea and off West Africa with orders to stop and inspect any vessel which seemed like it might have human cargo. The Ottoman Empire, the Brazilians. and the little principalities of Arabia were not eager to end slavery and Britain could not offer them a carrot worth the loss of all that free labour.

Most of the old empires broke up and the world today is divided into roughly 200 independent countries. In theory, each can chose who it wants to trade with. In practice, the United States has a whole arsenal of ways to prevent two countries from trading with one another, from sanctions, to threatening to stop selling them arms, to using its power over payment rails and the banking system. It successfully uses these methods to obstruct trade in things which many people really want to consume, like oil, cocaine, and smutty art (as well as acquired tastes like private email from an anti-fascist collective in Italy).

These systems were very well developed under Bush II and Obama. When the EU wanted to make a nuclear deal with Iran, and the US congress did not, they simply refused to remove US sanctions and allow companies like Visa and Mastercard to deal with Iran, and the EU was not able to fulfill its obligations, so eventually Iran stopped fulfilling its side. So if the United States want to stop two countries from trading with one another, it has many options before it orders the US navy to board suspicious bulk carriers. These options have gotten more effective as improvements in missiles and drones and the proliferation of satellites have made it riskier to operate within 300 km of an enemy shoreline.

Countries outside this network of global trade tend to be countries without the wealth and sophistication to operate a modern navy. North Korea or Cuba are never going to roam the high seas sinking Mexican tankers and Malaysian container ships until the rest of the world drops sanctions. Making sure that they don’t requires some naval forces, but probably not much more than the world already has. As a character in the Australian comedy show Utopia put it, Australia does not need a $30 billion a year shipbuilding program to stop China from cutting off their trade with China (the scene is available on YouTube). Australia could cut off that trade with a single decree. The last time a country was forced at gunpoint to open itself to trade was probably Korea in 1876 and Korea in 1876 did not have anti-shipping missiles guided by satellites and drone surveillance with a 300 km range. So I am not sure that there is a serious threat of sanctioned countries launching their own counter-blockades on the high seas.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war

After both of the blog posts at the beginning of this essay, people replied that the authors had overlooked foundational facts and theory. We live in a time where many people see decisionmakers who seem not to know the kinds of things you learn in highschool or a first-year class, but nobody can agree what counts as foundational knowledge and what as a popular misconception. The world is changing quickly, as it has since Fort Victoria was founded. However, the solution is what it always has been: free and open discussions where people explain what evidence and research lies behind their views, and work to understand the best arguments for other perspectives.

It seems to me that Quiggin is right that piracy is a government and policing problem, and that airstrikes and marine raids are not a long-term solution. I don’t think ground troops have landed on a hostile beach since 1975 or 1991, so the good old days of landing in Arabia to burn a slave ship are likely to remain in stories (although in this authoritarian and xenophobic age we may see a return of the summary execution of pirates). Naval power can be used to cut other countries off from trade, but the United States now has many ways to do this other than stationing frigates offshore with orders to board any ship that might be headed to the wrong port.

I agree with General Sir Rupert Smith that force has a utility. But I think that navies have been losing budget debates because their utility is less clear than it was fifty years ago. During the Cold War it was imaginable that troopships might have to cross the Atlantic dodging Soviet submarines, and governments could pivot back and forth between the capitalist and communist blocs if they annoyed one set of trade partners (at the time the Royal Canadian Navy specialized in antisubmarine warfare). The United States could blockade Cuba but it could not force the USSR to stop trading with it. An aircraft-carrier task force could suddenly appear offshore and overwhelm most local militaries. None of these things is true any more. If you want to make a case for naval budgets today, you have to make a case that they can do something else and do it better than the alternatives. MarkL pointed to some of those alternatives but exploring them would be another post.

As long as people support this site through Patreon and elsewhere, I guarantee that my people will not hijack any ships passing the Strait of Georgia to and from the Port of Seattle. If the money dries up, I can’t answer for the consequences!

Further Reading

If I ever explore this topic further, I think the book from MarkL’s reading list to start with is John P. Hill’s Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers (first edition 1986, second edition 2021). Quiggin tells me that a lot of language like middle power and rules-based international order was developed in Australia in hopes of making their biggest ally a bit more lawful and faithful. Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force is newer but more focused on land power.

(scheduled 5 September 2026)