When the sovereign must strike

The BBC reports that the United States has launched what it describes as heavy strikes on Iran, following an attempted attack on American troops — and that both sides, after a brief pause in hostilities, have now restarted missile exchanges. I confess that the engineering of modern missiles lies entirely beyond my ken. But the institutional question at the heart of this news is one I spent a great deal of my life considering: what is the first and irreducible duty of the sovereign, and why does commerce depend upon it?

I argued plainly in The Wealth of Nations that defense is the first obligation of the state — prior, in urgency, to justice, prior to public works, prior certainly to any scheme of mercantile protection. The reason is not merely military pride. It is that all exchange presupposes a framework of security. The merchant who ships goods across the ocean, the workman who brings his labor to a distant employer, the consumer who relies on a supply chain stretching across continents — each of them is, without knowing it, a beneficiary of the sovereign's ability to keep sea-lanes open and treaty obligations credible. Remove that foundation and the edifice of specialization and trade collapses with it.

There is a second point that follows from the first, and it concerns the cost of insecurity to ordinary people. A conflict in a major oil-producing region does not injure heads of state; it injures the consumer at the pump, the small manufacturer who buys feedstocks, the family whose heating bill rises before winter. Mercantile writers of my own era celebrated war as an instrument of trade advantage — I thought them profoundly wrong. War is a tax, and it falls, as most taxes do, most heavily on those least able to bear it. The inference I draw — and I mark it as inference, not recollection of modern events — is that any escalation between large powers in an energy-rich region will be paid for, first and foremost, by working people who had no voice in the decision.

I must also raise the institutional question that I believe modern commentators too often skip past: what framework governs the decision to strike? In my time I was wary of standing armies precisely because military power, once assembled, tends to find employment. The sovereign who commands overwhelming force is tempted to use it before exhausting the slower instruments of treaty and commerce. I do not say the strikes reported by the BBC were wrong — I have no access to the intelligence or the provocation, and humility requires me to say so plainly. What I do say is that the legitimacy of sovereign force depends on its being exercised within a framework of law, declared purpose, and public accountability. A sovereign who strikes without those constraints does not defend the rule of law; he undermines it.

Finally, let us not forget that trade itself is, in the long run, the most powerful pacifier of nations that human ingenuity has devised. Not because merchants are morally superior to soldiers, but because interdependence raises the cost of conflict for everyone. Where supply chains cross borders, where capital is jointly held, where the gains from exchange are visible and distributed, the incentive to destroy is reduced. The institutional lesson is an old one: the best long-run defense against war is the slow, patient construction of the very commercial and legal ties that war tears apart. Every missile fired is, among other things, a bill presented to prosperity.