The Slow Death of the Global Commons

On Oct. 31, 1803, the frigate USS Philadelphia hit a reef and ran aground chasing Barbary pirates near Tripoli, Libya. All 307 members of its crew were captured and held hostage by the Barbary states. Rather than pay tribute to the pirates, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson sent U.S. frigates to intervene and free the hostages. The first of two wars against the Barbary pirates, the scourge of shipping for decades, hastened the building of the U.S. Navy and began a long tradition of enforcing freedom of navigation—keeping the seas open to all commercial traffic—that has been a vital interest and core principle of U.S. foreign policy. Until now. Two hundred and twenty-three years later, Iran’s attempted monetization of the Strait of Hormuz, implicitly endorsed by the United States in the initi