(Dr Sal Mercagliano): We're already seeing deployment of ships from Japan, for example, which are heading that way; the Chinese have a squadron stationed right there in Djibouti... if Yemen starts to hit vessels which have connections with other nations, not just the United States but other states can get involved.
by framersqool:
One thing that regular viewing of Sal Mercagliano's Youtube channel, What Is Going On With Shipping? has revealed to me is that international shipping on the high seas is as crucial to global trade in this twenty-first-century model of 'globalization' as whale oil and lumber were in the eighteenth century, railroads and steam power in the nineteenth, or the internal combustion engine and the jet airplane in the twentieth.
Like it or not, the living standards we count on today and have long since regarded (in complacent oblivion and willful ignorance, if the 'end of history' mythology is any indicator...) as reliable and immune from substantial disruption grant us a life of consumerism. Goods and services that arrive anywhere in the world are sourced from nations and corporations based all over the world, maintaining interests and undertakings across vast complexes of industries, infrastructures, and international agreements that integrally rely on each other to be successfully delivered.
Try to track down the original sources for every component of your cell phone, for instance, not to mention its trusty lithium-ion battery. You'll have to undergo a survey of modern international trade relations on every continent to make any sense of what you find. And its components would not have arrived as a finished retail item all in a single package for you to enjoy the capabilities of one device at will, using trucks, trains, or planes, unless first the raw materials and individual pieces and parts made with them had not been able to tour the world multiple times in multiple unfinished forms, on ships navigating the world's overseas trade routes.
Add in the blunt reality that every nation on earth has a vital stake in the continuing viability of international maritime shipping, whether a given state has any access to oceanic waters itself or not, and that literally NO government on earth has a meaningful backup plan for how to sustain a modern standard of living based primarily on the opportunities and incentives built into a consumer economy without it.
Comparatively straightforward moral conundra as to which side to take, such as the current wars in Ukraine or the Middle East, afford the relative luxury of assuming that one may position oneself based on the behavior of one or another body politic's methods or motivations for pursuing such wars.
But when it comes to what side to take in a rapidly developing perfect storm of worldwide impediments to freedom of the high seas and the sustaining of peaceful navigation on them, where does one even start? The sad truth is that such sentiments may come to be stoked primarily, as with so many times in the past, upon whether or not goods are available to the consumer, irrespective of anyone's politics, religion, preferred partisan allegiances, or ideological daydreaming of how a country or the world ought to run itself.
The Panama Canal is running at severely diminished capacity owing to drought and low water levels in the freshwater lake that feeds it, the Red Sea and Suez Canal experiencing near-daily attacks on ships combined with navigation errors resulting in blocked ship channels, the coastal routes between Taiwan and the Malay peninsula under continual strain owing to multiple international disputes, the Black Sea has become an outright war zone and the Baltic a permanent item of aggressive envy by the Kremlin. This is all given a tragicomic context by the rising superstition distributed by climate-alarmists that someday very soon all ships on the high seas must be powered by batteries (or whatever, so long as it isn't diesel). From where I sit I find it safe to assume that in some near future, the consumer abundance we have known all our lives may be very quickly becoming a thing of the past.
And then, whose side do we take? When the objective is no longer about territorial integrity or national sovereignty, or such posh-intellectual croquet-match abstractions as 'liberal democracy' versus 'traditional values,' and is instead based on the question of whether or not one's own country can survive the chaos and anarchy which inevitably follow drastic shortages and runaway inflation, the question of who any state on earth ends up forming ad-hoc alliances with, in seeking to keep shipping routes open all over the planet, is very much an open one.
These answers will most assuredly be established by what Ayn Rand derisively labeled 'the expediency of the moment,' more than anyone at this moment seems prepared to discuss.
framersqool
thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
Thanks to our host Clayton for posting this item, only one of an ongoing stream of semi-extemporaneous writings I send to him and others on a fairly regular basis.
One thing anyone who reads these must have noticed by now is how often I use the terms 'fashion' and 'superstition' in my discussions of what I find to be the motivations behind one form of 21st century human behavior or another. This is because I have maintained a certain skepticism about the viability of our modern living standards for pretty much my entire life. Considerations such as the latest Kardashian scandal or the outcome of some 'first-round draft pick', or just about any other currently headlining item which gets treated as so very important each day (until something else comes along and distracts out attention from them), just never seemed for me to have much actual importance.
I often feel as though I have shared a planet for a lifetime with silly creatures whose fleeting attention spans are continually diverted this way and that, from one absolutely trivial and meaningless consideration to another, depending only on what the fashions and superstitions currently being distributed by mass media might be from one day to the next. What I find so dangerous about all this is the continuing sense I get that few really concern themselves with how a life of consumerism really works on a planetary scale, or with how vulnerable we all are to anything which might someday make a life of having what we want when we want it only because we want it, impossible to sustain.
Then what?
I can't say I have ever truly wanted to know what the answer to that question might be. But we may be all on a course to finding out, whether we want to know or not.
Good luck, humanity. I think we're all gonna need it. I truly do hope that maybe luck alone will serve us better, than all the fashions and superstitions of consumerism which have brought us here ever have.