The institution designed to prevent this was maritime law’s long-accustomed separation between freedom of navigation and political alignment - a principle that, when it worked, made the Strait of Hormuz not a geopolitical choke point but a neutral corridor. It failed because the very act of closing it to Western shipping, while purporting to remain open to non-aligned states, conflates political affiliation with legal nationality, and in doing so, dissolves the distinction between law and decree. The question is not whether Iran has the military capacity to interdict shipping - many nations do - but whether any institutional framework remains capable of checking such an act when it is dressed as sovereignty and not aggression.

The separation of powers, as I have long argued, is not merely a domestic arrangement; it is the architecture of international restraint. When power is concentrated - when a single actor can declare who counts as “Western,” who counts as “non-aligned,” and what constitutes a legitimate passage - then law yields to fiat. The Strait, as it has functioned since the Congress of Vienna and more consistently since the 19th-century Anglo-Persian treaties, depended on a quiet division: naval enforcement was separated from political adjudication, commercial passage from diplomatic sanction. The United Kingdom and the United States, for all their power, did not unilaterally define who may pass; they operated within a shared understanding that the waterway itself was neutral ground, policed by custom, not decree.

Compare this to the Ottoman practice in the Dardanelles, where the Sultan retained formal control but delegated operational authority to neutral consuls - foreign judges, in effect - whose role was to certify that no belligerent act was being conducted aboard a vessel. This was not democracy, but it was institutional separation: the power to declare a vessel suspect was not held by the sovereign, nor by his admirals, but by a third party with no stake in the conflict. The result was not perfect fairness, but predictable fairness - and predictability, as I have often said, is the closest thing to stability that international life can afford.

What Iran has done this time is not merely assert sovereignty; it is to collapse three functions into one hand: the power to define (who is Western?), the power to exclude (who may pass?), and the power to punish (by cutting off access to global markets). In domestic terms, this would be the legislature passing a law, the executive enforcing it selectively, and the courts refusing to hear challenges - all without appeal. No constitutional scholar would call this a system of government. Yet in international affairs, we still treat such concentration as legitimate, so long as the actor calling it sovereignty is not yet a global hegemon.

The check that has been lost is not military deterrence - though that, too, is fraying - but the normative framework that treats maritime passage as a right, not a privilege granted at the discretion of the strongest party. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea attempts to preserve this, but it lacks a judicial arm with real authority: no international court can compel Iran to reopen the Strait, nor even declare its closure unlawful in a binding way. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has issued rulings, yes - but enforcement? That remains a matter of naval posture, not legal principle.

The American founders, who read me carefully, built their constitution on the assumption that even good men will be tempted when no institution stands between them and power. They did not trust elections alone; they built layers - bicameralism, judicial review, federalism - so that no single decision could be final without contest. In the international sphere, we have none of that. There is no legislative body to revise Iran’s decree, no executive to appeal it, no judiciary to review it. Only navies, and only the willingness to use them.

So the real crisis is not oil prices or supply chains - it is the quiet abandonment of institutional design in world affairs. We treat the balance of power as sufficient, forgetting that balance is not stability; it is merely the temporary outcome of competing claims. What we need is not more navies, but more checks - a way for the claim “this passage is illegal” to be contested, reviewed, and, if necessary, overruled by an authority whose legitimacy rests not on force, but on procedure.

The check does not exist. And the moment we stop asking why not, we have already forgotten what liberty requires.