How America Lost Command of the Commons: And Why the Open Seas May Soon Be Tolled

[Excerpt from Isaac Kardon, Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order.] Iran’s shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States’ failure to restore the free flow of maritime traffic, has put a spotlight on just how much the global economy depends on ships’ ability to pass unencumbered through key waterways—and how fragile that right is. But well before the strait’s closure