The US military campaign to protect merchant shipping from Iranian attacks by asserting direct maritime control in the strait of Hormuz is not an idea unique to Donald Trump’s administration. Almost exactly 200 years ago, in the period 1825-27, a powerful US naval squadron led by Commodore John Rodgers was sent to the Mediterranean to defend American ships from the depredations of Greek corsairs and pirates.

For all the new-minted republic’s brave talk of liberty, the US squadron did not assist Greece’s ongoing “regime change” struggle for independence from the Ottoman empire. Its sole, self-serving purpose was to defend US trade, markets and business interests. After abandoning his call for a people’s revolution in Tehran, this, too, is what Trump’s reckless war with Iran has now boiled down to.

Although the US has not ratified the 1982 UN convention on the law of the sea, which establishes a legal right of freedom of passage without interference by littoral states, it has historically upheld the principle of freedom of navigation or mare liberum (the free sea) developed by Hugo Grotius, a 17th-century Dutch jurist. Rejecting Iran’s claims, Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, declared in June that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway”.

Yet Trump has since suggested the US itself may yet do exactly that and impose tolls. Although he later rowed back, last month’s “memorandum of understanding” with Iran accepts that it has a right, with Oman, to monetise transit through the strait of Hormuz. Despite the resumption of US attacks and Trump’s increasingly hysterical threats, the MOU currently remains the only basis for a future peace deal.

Two-faced Trump’s equivocal stance reflects a wider breakdown in the “free sea” consensus underpinning maritime law – and hastens the overall degradation of the........

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