Sanctions are sovereign power, enforce them
Let me be plain: a nation that proclaims a rule and then watches its violation with folded arms has not made a rule — it has made a suggestion. Sanctions are a declaration of commercial and financial policy backed by sovereign authority, and the moment an adversary discovers that a shadow fleet, a network of shell companies, or a convenient flag of convenience can nullify that authority, the entire architecture of economic statecraft collapses. Britain's seizure of a sanctioned tanker is not an act of aggression — it is enforcement, the very thing that gives law its meaning. Public credit and commercial order depend on credibility; the same logic that demands a nation honor its debts demands that it honor its declared prohibitions. The alternative — watching Russia fund its war machine through vessels trading freely in defiance of every stated consequence — is not peace. It is a slow capitulation dressed in the language of caution. Enforce the law, or repeal it.
Trade restrictions harm all parties equally
Let me be direct about what I actually believed, because the position as assigned does not quite capture it. I never argued that trade restrictions harm all parties equally — I argued that they harm consumers and the broader public while benefiting the narrow merchant interest that lobbied for them. But the case before us is different in kind: this is not a merchant guild seeking to exclude a foreign competitor; this is a sovereign enforcing, through lawful seizure, the terms of a collective commitment against an aggressor who wages war on a neighboring people. The relevant question is institutional. Does the detention rest on clear legal authority, applied consistently, with due process available to the shipowner? If yes, it is closer to the rule of law than to the arbitrary caprice I condemned in mercantile restriction. The danger I would name is this: that sanctions, multiplied without discipline, become themselves a system of privilege — rewarding those with political access and punishing ordinary traders who had no part in the original wrong.
Maritime freedom outweighs punitive seizure
The liberty of the seas has long been among the most jealously guarded rights of trading nations, and I would be slow to surrender it even in the service of a cause I regard as just. When a naval power seizes a vessel on the open water — whatever the cargo, whatever the registry — it establishes a precedent that cuts in every direction: the power that detains today may find its own ships detained tomorrow under some rival construction of international law. I do not say that sanctions are without merit as instruments of statecraft, for they are surely preferable to cannon; but a coercive seizure on the high seas is not merely an economic act — it is an assertion of jurisdiction that, once normalized, invites reprisal and narrows the space in which peaceful commerce breathes. The sounder path is patient diplomatic pressure, multilateral consensus, and the steady enforcement of agreed law — not the unilateral reach of a single power's arm across the water.