# The Sea Belongs to No One

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/the-sea-belongs-to-no-one
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/the-sea-belongs-to-no-one.md
Podcast: [Consequential Actions Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158)
Published: 2026-07-27T18:52:13+00:00
Episode link: https://jeffkellick.substack.com/p/the-sea-belongs-to-no-one
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/208724721/5e9e0af757f8ae9517e0b14d0a08553f.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/episodes/the-sea-belongs-to-no-one
Duration seconds: 2416

## Resource

This week’s historical episode traced the improvised Dutch Republic and closed on the jurist Hugo Grotius, whose Mare Liberum (1609) gave the commercial republic its charter on the seas: the argument that the ocean is common to all nations and can be owned by none. This contemporary-application episode holds that principle against a summer in which two of the world’s critical maritime chokepoints — the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab — were choked by force within a single month, Hormuz nearly closed by Iran and Bab al-Mandab placed under a declared Houthi embargo on Saudi-linked shipping that sharply disrupted but did not halt traffic. Grotius grounded the free sea on a first axiom of the law of nations; the ringing English phrase “self-evident and immutable” belongs to the 1916 Magoffin translation rather than to Grotius’s Latin, so the episode claims intellectual kinship with the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths (through the shared natural-law tradition), not a direct verbal lineage. The episode uses the free-sea principle to reach its central question, which extends Episode 6B’s abdication thesis from the lawmaking power to the war power: when the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution places the power to declare war in Congress. In the 2026 Iran war — sustained airstrikes, a US naval blockade of Iranian ports, hundreds of servicemembers in harm’s way — Congress has enacted no authorization; on July 10, 2026, the President signed a letter reporting that military action had recommenced, which the administration’s position led lawmakers and reporters to read as a claimed reset of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock (a reading members of both parties disputed). Congress has voted repeated…

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## Transcript

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