The Sea Belongs to No One

This week’s historical episode traced the improvised Dutch Republic and closed on the jurist Hugo Grotius, whose Mare Liberum (1609) gave the commercial republic its charter on the seas: the argument that the ocean is common to all nations and can be owned by none. This contemporary-application episode holds that principle against a summer in which two of the world’s critical maritime chokepoints — the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab — were choked by force within a single month, Hormuz nearly closed by Iran and Bab al-Mandab placed under a declared Houthi embargo on Saudi-linked shipping that sharply disrupted but did not halt traffic. Grotius grounded the free sea on a first axiom of the law of nations; the ringing English phrase “self-evident and immutable” belongs to the 1916 Magoffin translation rather than to Grotius’s Latin, so the episode claims intellectual kinship with the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths (through the shared natural-law tradition), not a direct verbal lineage. The episode uses the free-sea principle to reach its central question, which extends Episode 6B’s abdication thesis from the lawmaking power to the war power: when the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution places the power to declare war in Congress. In the 2026 Iran war — sustained airstrikes, a US naval blockade of Iranian ports, hundreds of servicemembers in harm’s way — Congress has enacted no authorization; on July 10, 2026, the President signed a letter reporting that military action had recommenced, which the administration’s position led lawmakers and reporters to read as a claimed reset of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock (a reading members of both parties disputed). Congress has voted repeatedly — the House twice passing non-binding measures to end the war, the Senate falling short on binding ones — but none has become binding law, which is the abdication in its subtlest form. The Honest Reckoning confronts that Grotius wrote as a VOC-commissioned advocate defending the seizure of a rival’s ship, and turns the same scrutiny on American conduct: the July 13-14 proposal and withdrawal of a 20% Hormuz cargo toll, and the US blockade, which prevent casting Washington as the clean guardian of the free sea. The Skeptic’s Case stacks two full-strength objections: that the free sea has always been sustained by a great naval power’s force, so a president acting to reopen a strait upholds rather than betrays the Grotian order; and that the President following the WPR’s 60-day clock is obeying a law Congress passed. The rebuttal to the second corrects the statute’s meaning: the WPR (§1541, §1547) does not grant war-making authority but restrains it, and the clock is a termination backstop misread as a license. The Liberty Test reframes the whole around the war power: no individual may take his neighbors to war, no office manufactures that power, and no 60-day clock conjures a delegation the people never made — set against the Dutch warning that a liberty-protecting division of power “will not hold itself.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com