When the sovereign contradicts itself

The New York Times reports that President Trump has proposed a 20 percent toll on cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz — and that his own administration's legal position holds such a fee to be a violation of international law. I confess I knew nothing of this particular waterway in my own time, but the shape of the civic question is one I recognize entirely: what does a nation forfeit when it publicly contradicts the very rules it has endorsed?

I counseled, in the years I was permitted to speak on such matters, that the credit of a republic — its word among nations — is among its most durable and most fragile possessions. Public credit, once squandered, is slowly and painfully restored. That counsel applied to bonds and currency; it applies with equal force to treaty obligations, to the customary law of the sea, and to any compact by which civilized nations agree to keep common passages open. A nation that imposes a toll it has itself declared unlawful is not collecting revenue — it is spending reputation.

There is also the question of precedent. I was known for my concern that the acts of early governance set habits that outlast the men who perform them. If the executive branch may levy charges that its own legal officers classify as prohibited, what principle restrains the next administration, or the one after? The argument is not about the fee itself — twenty percent, ten percent, or none at all — but about whether the law means what it says, and whether those who govern are bound by it as fully as those who are governed.

On the matter of foreign posture, I long argued against permanent entanglements and against the habit of treating any single foreign relationship as so indispensable that we would bend our own character to preserve it. But I argued with equal force against the opposite error: the assumption that American strength is so unchallengeable that we may disregard the frameworks that give that strength its moral legitimacy. Unilateral tolls on international straits are a declaration that we rely on force of position rather than force of principle — and nations that rely solely on position find it erodes.

I am told — inferring from what the Times has published — that the announcement has generated alarm among allied trading nations and legal scholars alike. I would urge no verdict on the precise diplomatic consequences, for those depend on facts I cannot know. But I will offer this counsel: before the administration proceeds, it ought to resolve the contradiction at its center. Either the fee is lawful, in which case let the legal reasoning be made plain and public; or it is not, in which case the Republic's integrity demands that a different instrument be sought. To act while the contradiction stands unresolved is to teach the world — and our own citizens — that the law is a costume the powerful wear only when it flatters them.