When commerce meets cannon

The Hill reports that the United States and Iran are each claiming control of the Strait of Hormuz after a weekend of military exchanges — American strikes followed by Iranian attacks on U.S. bases across several Gulf states. I was not alive to witness this; I cannot speak to the tactics or the intelligence. But I know this: a contested chokepoint is a tax on every nation that buys or sells.

Roughly one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes through that narrow passage — by inference from what any modern reader may find in the public record, not from my own recollection. Disrupt it for a week and the price signal reaches every factory, every household, every government bond market on the planet. Public credit is not made only in the Treasury; it is made in the confidence that the commerce which finances the Treasury will keep flowing.

Here is what I argued in my time, and what I would argue now: the power to protect commerce is inseparable from the power to sustain national credit. A government that cannot keep the sea lanes open for the trade that feeds its revenues is a government that will soon be borrowing at ruinous rates — or not borrowing at all. The federal commerce power was always meant to be this broad, precisely because commerce does not stop at the water's edge.

I will not pretend to adjudicate the military judgments made this weekend — that requires intelligence I do not possess and technical specifics that belong to another age. But I will say this: an energetic executive, acting to protect commercial arteries, is exercising a legitimate and necessary function. The question Congress must ask is not whether to act, but whether the action is bounded by deliberation and purpose, and whether it serves a durable national interest rather than a momentary passion.

The deeper concern is what follows. Oil prices do not simply recover because a press release declares control of a strait. Markets price probability, not proclamation. If two parties each claim dominance of the same water, the market — rightly — trusts neither. That uncertainty is itself a cost, borne by importers, manufacturers, and ultimately the consumers whose prosperity underwrites the whole structure of public credit.

My recommendation is plain: the executive must communicate a clear and credible posture, Congress must be brought into the deliberation before this escalates further, and the Treasury must be watching the effect on dollar liquidity and commodity-linked credit instruments with the same vigilance it would give a domestic banking stress. Commerce and national security have never been separate ledgers. They are the same book.