Grotius, the Free Sea & the War Powers Debate: Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab & Article I
- Jeff Kellick
- Jul 28
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 16
Contemporary Application to Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7B
Who Decides When America Goes to War? The Constitution Has a Plain Answer
In a single month this summer, two of the narrow seas on which the world's commerce depends were choked by force from two directions — the Strait of Hormuz nearly silenced, and the Bab al-Mandab under a declared embargo. Four hundred years ago, a young Dutch lawyer wrote down the principle those blockades strain against, and he wrote it not as a preference but as a law of nature: the sea belongs to no one. His name was Hugo Grotius, and in Mare Liberum (1609) he called the freedom to cross and trade across the open sea a first axiom of the law of nations — a phrase his 1916 English translator would render as "self-evident and immutable." The words came through a translator, but the mode of argument came down the same long river that reached Philadelphia.
This is the contemporary-application episode for Week 7 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and it takes Grotius off the page and holds him against our own moment — then follows the free-sea question to a harder one, closer to home. When the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution begins with a plain answer: Article I, Section 8 gives the power to declare war to Congress, not the President. This hour measures our own moment against that text.
It is the direct extension of Episode 6B's abdication thesis. There, the argument was that Congress handed away the power to make law. Here, the argument is that Congress has surrendered the power to make war — reduced, in a July 2026 war-powers notification, to receiving a letter about a war it never declared. The episode is scrupulously neutral on whether that war is wise or on any party's conduct: the target is the structural question of who decides, a question that binds presidents of both parties in exactly the same way. The Honest Reckoning turns that same standard on Grotius himself — a paid advocate for a ruthless trading company — and on American conduct at the straits.
This week's standing question runs underneath all of it: did this leave people more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 The Closing of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al Mandab
01:41 Hugo Grotius and the Principle of the Free Sea
02:52 Introduction: Episode 7, Part B — The Sea Belongs to No One
04:00 Political Transparency and the Episode's True Target
06:11 The Santa Catarina and the Birth of Mare Liberum
10:08 The 2026 Hormuz Conflict and the U.S. Response
12:25 The Houthi Blockade of the Bab al Mandab
14:22 Article I, Section 8 and the Constitutional Power to Make War
16:15 War Without Declaration and the 60-Day Clock
18:20 Congressional Abdication and Non-Binding Votes
22:13 The Reckoning: Commercial Motives and American Hypocrisy
25:23 Objection 1: Sea Power and Repelling Sudden Attacks
27:04 Objection 2: The War Powers Resolution of 1973
28:00 Refuting the Objections: A Leash Read as a License
32:01 The Liberty Test: The War Power and the Single Hand
33:42 The Dutch Warning: The Drift Toward Centralized Power
35:47 Preview of Thursday's Interview with Jamie Frost Remmey
37:12 Closing Thoughts: Political Parties vs. Ideologies
📚 Companion article — Article 7, "The Dutch Experiment," and its A-episode on Grotius and the improvised Dutch Republic: [article URL]
🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7B, Contemporary Application | Consequential Actions
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