The Straits Are Not OK

At time of writing, U.S. President Donald Trump's haphazard attacks on Iran have killed 18 U.S. service members, an unknown number of Iranian civilians and military personnel, and cost tens of billions of dollars. Most importantly for everyone else on Earth, it has closed the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

Approximately 90 percent of traded goods are shipped by sea. Disruptions caused by a war over vitally important naval choke points are not new, nor are their calamitous economic effects. Trump's war has catalyzed a reversion to a period before Great Britain and the United States enforced the neutrality of major global waterways in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a deliberately manufactured situation that modern Americans inherited without remembering or understanding that it was artificial, and like everything artificial, needed to be maintained.