FREEDOM of navigation is under threat.

That message has been heard loud and clear over recent weeks everywhere from the UN Security Council to Lloyd’s List’s own industry forums across Asia.

The problem is there doesn’t seem to be a consensus view on how to tackle the problem.

Freedom seems to be increasingly subjective and expensive.

‘Maritime Freedom Construct’ is the US-branded vision of what an international coalition should look like. The details being pushed around potential partner countries remain generic and inevitably divisive. But it will take more than shared intelligence and enforcement agreements to establish a genuinely sustainable new normal for maritime trade to once again be free.

A dedicated legal treaty for the Strait of Hormuz is not without merit, and we would not be starting from scratch.

Historical agreements regulating straits, such as the Copenhagen Convention and the Montreux Convention could serve as templates. Another option is to draw lessons from another strategic waterway, and rely on the procedures of the Cooperative Mechanism for the Straits of Malacca and Singapore established under UNCLOS.

The real test is not whether shipping can return, but whether the international community can build a framework that keeps the strait open in the long term.

The bigger question, however, lies well beyond the Strait of Hormuz, or Malacca for that matter.

There is an underlying problem here in that acronym soup of agencies and stakeholders involved in maritime security and the wider maritime economies — from the subsea operations below the waves to the satellite-based monitoring from space — don’t really understand each other.

The increased scale and growing complexity of the current threats have revealed that there remains something of a gulf in understanding among the widening array of interested parties and stakeholders over what can and what needs to be done. And this has been playing out in the latest events.

The building-blocks for future crisis prevention and management require a more integrated conversation about co-operative naval protection and under what frameworks and what auspices the safety and protection of waterways can be delivered. 

An international coalition for Hormuz would only be papering over the cracks, even if it does prove possible.

A more strategic, comprehensive and integrated approach to the threats that are unfolding would be a good first step. But it is time for a more holistic approach to the evolving scale and complexity of the threats to global chokepoints and good order at sea that is now needed.

Richard Meade,
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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