U.S. and U.K. forces have spent the last month attacking Houthi installations in Yemen, in the name of protecting the “freedom of navigation.” As one senior Biden Administration official explained: “The United States has carried a special and historic obligation to help protect and defend these arteries of global trade and commerce. And this action falls directly in line with that tradition.”
Such claims portray the U.S. as the guardian of free seas and defender of the liberal international order. But history complicates this narrative. Since World War II, American policymakers have subscribed to a definition of freedom of the seas that emphasizes U.S. military dominance and access to the world’s oceans for the U.S. fleet. In this militarized view of the concept, U.S. naval power not only depends on freedom of the seas, it’s deployed to defend it too.
This understanding has had consequences. Rather than protecting the world’s oceans, American deployments abroad, in the name of freedom of the seas, have often escalated conflicts. And, instead of consistently advocating for a neutral and lofty principle, the U.S. has often defended it selectively. Nowhere is this clearer than Yemen. While the U.S. is risking escalation to eliminate a Yemeni blockade in the Red Sea, it supported a Saudi Arabian-led naval and economic blockade of Yemen beginning in 2015, with catastrophic consequences.
Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, U.S. officials understood freedom of the seas quite differently — as a concept protecting the movement of U.S. shipping in wartime. This definition expanded after World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson began to interpret freedom of the seas as a building block of a new liberal international order that would ensure access to global markets and bring about world peace. He envisioned the League of Nations as a potential collective security force keeping the world’s oceans free for commerce, with the U.S. as an increasingly important beneficiary.
But American ideas soon shifted about who should enforce this freedom. Journalist Henry Luce contended in 1941 that the U.S. should serve as “the principal guarantor” of open seas because protecting free navigation was key to unleashing an expansion of world trade that could produce “such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination.” Later that year President Franklin D. Roosevelt went even further, arguing that all other freedoms depended on protecting free seas, making this principle a core facet of the postwar U.S.-led international liberal order.