“He who controls the sea controls everything,” so said the master tactician Themistocles to his fellow Athenians in support of his bold shipbuilding program that would eventually prove decisive against the Persian invasion of Greece.

Twenty-five hundred years later, triremes and galleys have made way for guided-missile cruisers and ballistic submarines, but the principle remains the same: seaway denial remains a potent weapon of economic and diplomatic blackmail.

Countless generations of American political and military leaders have recognized the strategic importance of global waterways and actively resisted any attempts by any one power to monopolize them—even if it meant using military force.

At the height of the Cold War, U.S. Navy patrols engaged in tense standoffs with Soviet coastal defense forces, having entered U.S.S.R. territorial waters to test the limits of Moscow’s adherence to international law.

Likewise, when Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi declared the Gulf of Sidra to be sovereign waters in 1973 and drew a “line of death” beyond which unauthorized shipping would be destroyed, U.S. naval forces moved in and neutralized the Libyan military’s maritime denial capabilities for good.

During the Reagan administration, this policy of confrontation in defense of international law received a name: freedom of navigation.

Every subsequent administration has adhered closely to these principles. When China acted upon its claimed “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea and began to militarize the sea’s atolls in 2015, President Barack Obama deployed American carrier battle groups to challenge China’s claim and reaffirm the United States’ commitment to protecting the international status of key marine corridors. America’s leading role in challenging emerging Chinese hegemony was also key to strengthening U.S.-Southeast Asia relations, showing that freedom of navigation also has important geopolitical implications.

A US Navy warship partakes in a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea (Credit: US Navy)

However, this decades-long consensus was abruptly shattered last November with the nomination of Dixie Speaker Chris Frost as U.S. Secretary of Defense.

In his Senate confirmation hearings, the veteran state lawmaker dropped the bombshell revelation that he regarded many of the waters as Canadian-owned, a seeming departure from longstanding U.S. policy which views the entire Northwest Passage as an international strait, not subject to Canadian jurisdiction.

The Northwest Passage, the part of the Arctic Ocean that links the Pacific and Atlantic through Canada’s northerly Arctic Archipelago, has historically been claimed by Ottawa as internal waters, subject under international law to full sovereignty and control. Foreign nations, led by the United States, have long disputed this claim on account of its key strategic importance.

The latter countries consider the Passage to be an international strait, where Canada has no authority to prevent foreign ships from moving through the waterway—a principle known in international law as innocent passage. This dispute has long cast a pall over otherwise friendly relations between the global North countries of the Arctic Circle.

When pressed to elaborate on this startling declaration, the Secretary sidestepped the question and instead attacked the propriety of asserting the longstanding American claim against a neighbor and ally.

Whether or not he truly meant his words, the damage was done.

In Ottawa, members of the Canadian Parliament began to demand a more aggressive policy to take advantage of temporary US indecision, while the House of Representatives moved swiftly to attempt to remedy the damage by reaffirming the status quo.

Satellite imagery of the Northwest Passage in the summer. In recent years, enough Arctic sea ice has melted where the Passage has become consistently navigable to shipping for the first time in recorded history, increasing its strategic value dramatically.

In the end, presidential intervention secured a state visit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resolve this rapidly-escalating crisis. However, while President Gunnz made a valiant attempt to restore normalcy, his remarks raised more questions than answers after he declared that “the two nations could use [the Passage] for defense against hostile nations in the future.”

This statement seemed to be in direct contradiction to the doctrine of freedom of navigation, which stands in direct opposition to the weaponization of waterway access. The state visit, far from putting the question to rest, has further muddled the waters of America’s stance on international waters, which has always existed in a strange limbo on account of the United States’ leading role in enforcing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea despite not being a signatory to the treaty.

Although the Northwest Passage issue has since faded into the background, many questions on the current administration’s freedom of navigation policy remain unanswered. With increasingly aggressive Russian and Chinese manoeuvres to secure their nearby shipping corridors, Washington’s continued commitment to innocent passage may soon be put to trial by fire.