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Maybe the worst possible call you can get if you run a big global shipping company would go something like this. Unfortunately, the Picardy has been attacked. There is a fire on board and I will ring you back after I have more details. John Wovensmith got exactly that call last month.
The Bacardi is a cargo ship owned by John's company, Genco, and it was in one of the most dangerous places for a ship to be right now. Off the coast of Yemen, where a militant group called the Houthis has been attacking ships for months now. To protest Israel's war in Gaza, they say. For weeks before the Bacardi was attacked, John had been preparing to get the ship out of the Red Sea. Right, and so before the ship started its journey, they made a plan.
The Picardy would turn off its tracking signal. John would get a status update from the captain every 30 minutes. They doubled their security detail to six ex-military people with rifles. And the crew knew if things went bad, they would head to this place on board. Apparently, it's called the Citadel. If the ship is under attack, you get in that Citadel and you lock that door. It's like a safe room. That's exactly what it is. And the other thing they did was contact the U.S. Navy.
Of course they did. For a long time, there's been this global understanding that commercial ships can freely travel the seas. And the U.S. Navy has been the unofficial enforcer of that. Were they saying, we'll shoot down any missiles that get shot at you? No, they don't give any of those guarantees, that is for sure. Did they offer to give you escort? So, um...
Not in the sense of true escort, but there are hotlines. As in, if you get in trouble, call us. So the crew was ready, and John gave the go-ahead. Send the ship through. And then, yeah, he got the call. The one telling him the ship had been attacked. That's one of the longest hours I can remember that I've had, ever.
There was nothing that John could do but wait for more news. His biggest worry was his crew getting taken hostage. But finally, he got the captain on the phone. The first thing I heard was the crew was safe. The second thing I heard was the fire is out. The third thing that I heard was it was minimal damage. Okay. A sigh of relief each time. A sigh of relief each time.
The big one is the crew. John learns the ship had been attacked by a kind of low-grade missile, which had hit a gangway and lit the paint on fire. But the crew had managed to put the fire out and called that hotline. Pretty soon, the Indian Navy pulled up in a big warship and got the Picardy out of the area.
Later that evening, the U.S. Navy fired Tomahawk missiles at what they said were Houthi missile launch sites. Did you get the impression that the U.S. did the attack in retaliation for the Houthis hitting your vessel and other vessels? I think, I think it, is it specific to our vessel? I don't, I don't know. My opinion would be yes, but I don't know that for sure. They haven't confirmed that. They haven't, you know, they wouldn't tell us that.
I think what the U.S. Navy is doing is trying to protect those shipping lanes in general. Now, John is an American, but his ship, the Picardy, it is not an American ship. It doesn't pay U.S. taxes. His crew, they're not U.S. nationals. Their cargo wasn't going to or from the U.S. And yet the U.S. is out there shooting missiles, seemingly to make sure that John's ship and all the other ships that help drive the global economy can sail smoothly.
And I guess the question is, how did it get to be like this? How did it come to be that that is a problem for the U.S. military?
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain. And I'm Alex Mayasi. The Houthis' attacks on ships are threatening global commerce. Something like 15% of global trade usually travels through the Red Sea. But now, much of that has been rerouted all the way around the tip of South Africa. It's a big problem. But still, how did the safe passage of cargo ships in the Red Sea come to be a problem for the U.S. military?
Today on the show, the history of an idea. An idea that centuries ago started off as a kind of abstract pipe dream and then became one of the pillars of the global economy. We call it freedom of the seas.
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The global economy today is built on maritime trade. Today, something like 80% of global trade travels on ships, travels on the open ocean. Raw materials, but also stoves and cars and fruit and you name it. If you are buying it, it is likely to have come to you on a ship.
And that just seems totally normal to us. But this free movement of ships all over the world is not the way it worked for most of history. For a long time, like centuries, freedom of the seas was just a kind of lofty idea. The phrase itself was first coined in the 1600s. This is the time when there are all these world empires, you know, Spain and France and Portugal and Britain. And they are all going around saying things like, only we can sail there and you can't trade here.
And at this time, there is this lawyer for the Dutch East India Company who's trying to argue, of course he would, that Dutch ships should be able to go everywhere, all over the world.
But he makes his argument in this kind of grandiose way. He says the seas should be like the air, available to all. But the way the seas actually worked back then was chaotic. If you were a sailor, you didn't just have to worry about, like, scurvy and big storms. You also had to worry about pirates. Who were much more organized back then than you might think. Like, a lot of pirates were actually state-sponsored.
They were called privateers. Privateers are hired by a government to attack enemy ships. They're kind of nautical mercenaries. This is historian Richard Sachs. And Richard says these privateers, when they looted a ship, they'd actually give a kickback to the government. It's mixing patriotism and profit.
Richard has written a bunch about this time and a lot about pirates, so much so that he's gotten a certain reputation as a pirate guy, but do not ask him to speak like one. I was once offered like five grand to speak and talk like a pirate day, and I turned it down, believe it or not. So no pirate accents, please. We went to Richard because the first chapter of the story on how the U.S. winds up defending freedom of navigation on the open seas is a story Richard loves telling.
It's about America's first war on foreign soil, which it turns out was about pirates. A sailor in the 1800s is most afraid, well, ultimately of getting captured by Barbary pirates, but he would have to be on the Mediterranean. The Barbary pirates, as Americans called them, were privateers from these powerful states in North Africa. And they were
And they'd capture American ships as they carried goods like tobacco and sugar and rum to the Mediterranean. And if you were a government at the time, the way you deal with this piracy is to strike a deal with the leaders behind the pirates. You agree to pay them a tribute. The tribute that they wanted, amazingly, was often gold and jewels and jeweled daggers and
I mean, one person talked about oil of roses to perfume the pirate's beard. I mean, they were very elaborate presents. France and Britain and many other countries were paying tribute. And after the U.S. gained independence, they had to start paying tribute, too, because American ships were no longer covered by Britain's tribute.
Enter President Thomas Jefferson, who hates these tribute payments. For one, no one likes to be extorted. And also, the U.S. is a young country. It's dealing with a lot of debt from fighting that big war of independence. And these tribute payments are really expensive. Jefferson knew that America could not survive without trade. And...
He was pretty sure that it would be cheaper to just send a handful of ships from the small U.S. Navy to defend America's trade ships rather than paying more and more in tribute.
So Jefferson dispatches a squadron to the Mediterranean. And this is a big moment for freedom of the seas. It's the American military defending trade and defending that ideal. But pretty soon, this becomes a true international and domestic crisis because Tripoli, one of the North African states, declares war. And one of the Navy ships declares
gets captured. Thomas Jefferson had 307 American sailors, you know, suddenly made slaves on the coast of Barbary. I mean, it was just an incredible disaster. And as this hostage crisis is going on, Jefferson's out at this party at the Senate when he gets cornered by basically the one person in America who hates the tribute payments even more than him, a former diplomat named William Eaton.
Eaton is 5'8", ramrod straight, and a bulldog of a man. And he also had very piercing blue eyes. He apparently could really unsettle people by staring at them. Eaton is singularly obsessed with ending these tribute payments. He's out of his mind. He will do anything. He said he would die for this cause.
Eaton lays out a plan for Jefferson, one that is pretty out there. I'd say so. He says he's going to oust the leader of Tripoli. And he's going to do that by somehow finding that leader's exiled brother who Eaton thinks is in Egypt. And he's going to march that brother and an army he hopes to raise more than 500 miles across the desert in North Africa.
Eaton is essentially pitching Jefferson, let's do America's first coup. And Eaton tells Jefferson that if the coup works, not only will the installed leader of Tripoli free the U.S. sailors... He will guarantee we will never pay tribute, there will never be ransom, and he will be a friend of the United States forever. So Jefferson says...
We'll try it. But you can kind of read between the lines that he did not think this plan was really going to work. Yeah, because he gives Eaton basically no money. And so when Eaton goes to North Africa, it is a very ragtag operation. He's in civilian clothes. He has no official orders for money, ammunitions, weaponry, anything. He has no commitment from the Navy to help him. And nothing.
I love this detail. On the way to North Africa, he just has someone make him a uniform and tells people, hey, call me general. You know what they say, dress for the job you want. But you know what? It kind of works. Eaton doesn't go full coup, but he does find the exiled brother, stand up an army, and take the second largest city in Tripoli. And after that, the leader of Tripoli makes a deal. He releases the captured U.S. sailors for a price.
When Eaton comes home, he is a war hero. He goes on this nationwide tour where everybody buys him drinks. And Eaton's, you know, foreign policy tactic of being aggressive, of basically showing up and telling people, do not mess with American ships, that sticks. Ten years later, the Navy is bigger, and the U.S. sails back to the Barbary Coast and makes a huge show of force and ends these tribute payments once and for all.
The lesson seems to be from the Barbary pirate era that you couldn't ultimately negotiate with them. You couldn't trick them. You couldn't con them. It finally took force to end the problem. Yeah. What the U.S. learns here is that if you want free movement on the seas, you got to be willing to enforce it. And this is like a first big step towards freedom of the seas as it exists today.
Not yet freedom of navigation for all ships on the open seas. More like freedom for ships that happen to come from countries with navies powerful enough to protect them. And to help us tell this next chapter, where we went from freedom of the seas for me to freedom of the seas for all of thee, we brought in someone who has spent a lot of time on the open ocean.
Jerry Hendricks, H-E-N-D-R-I-X, retired Navy captain. In his last years in the Navy, Jerry wasn't on ships. He was a captain of history. I was the director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, but I was an echelon two. I reported directly to the four-star admiral. We asked Jerry to walk us through, how do we go from early American presidents fending off pirates to what
What we have now, a globally accepted norm of freedom of navigation, where commercial ships can go from port to port unassailed. A norm that is upheld by powerful navies and the threat of force. Jerry says most of America's wars have been about this ideal, to some extent. But a big motivation for protecting non-U.S. ships and their freedom to navigate was trade. In the late 1800s, the U.S. got really good at making stuff.
And exporting that stuff, it required a free sea. We have this great industrial power that's spinning up with the industrial revolution here in the United States. We're making all these goods at a very cheap price. So where are we going to sell them? We have to create these trade routes and the Navy sort of establishes them, protects them, and allows us to really expand our economy at the late 1800s and into the 1900s.
The U.S. wasn't alone in this project. By that time, Britain, with its incredibly powerful navy, had already given up many of their claims on ocean territory, including key trade routes. But Jerry says it's not until after World War II, when the U.S. and British navies are kind of the only big players on the sea, that the dream of freedom of navigation truly becomes a reality.
At that moment, the U.S. and Britain have enough military power to say, this is how it's going to be. And so after 1945, we in fact have a free sea where everyone can go where they want to go and trade, you know, buy items that they can buy in large numbers at a low cost someplace and transport those in the most efficient manner because there's nothing like shipping by ship.
to keep your costs down. And so essentially from 1935 going forward, we've existed in a world that's been defined by a free sea. Over time, the ability of ships to travel freely becomes essential to most countries' economies and eventually gets codified in this big UN agreement about the seas. Though we should note, the U.S. helped craft that treaty but never ratified it. Yeah, but freedom of navigation becomes so well established, it's such a norm, that it doesn't get violated very often.
And when it is, world powers step in pretty quickly. Coming up after the break, the Houthis and why the forceful response to their attacks on commercial ships does not seem to be working. This message comes from NPR sponsor Dell Technologies. During their back-to-school event, learn how Dell is helping underserved communities around the world. Make a difference with Dell and shop AI-ready PCs powered by Snapdragon X-series processors at dell.com slash deals.
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For the last 80 years, by and large, the U.S., in cooperation with other countries with big navies, has kept the world's shipping lanes free for global trade, with the threat of force and sometimes with actual force. So why does that seem to not be working right now? The U.S. and allies have been using force for a month now in Yemen, in response to the Houthis' attacks on commercial ships in and around the Red Sea. And yet, the Houthis do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is that? We brought this question to Yasmin Al-Eryani, a researcher at a think tank called the Sana'a Center. I grew up in Yemen. I finished high school in Yemen, in Sana'a. Have you been to this area, like seen the container ships go by? I mean, yeah, I've been to the west coast. The Houthis control a long section of that coastline, and it puts them right near a major choke point for shipping.
In normal times when there weren't attacks on ships, a lot of the stuff that gets bought and sold all around the world has to squeeze right by Houthi territory through a very narrow waterway. So they're at a pretty unique position. But still, why is the usual threat of force and actual missile strikes not working to stop these attacks?
Yasmeen told us there's something else about the Houthis, apart from their significant location, that is important to know. She says they thrive in wartime. For much of the past decade, they've actually been gaining ground in a brutal civil war against a much better equipped opponent. But recently, that war has slowed down, and they felt pressure to be less like fighters and more like bureaucrats. So there were more demands from the populations under their control to provide services and
And do basic governance. Are they good at governance? They're not good at all at governance. Right. Not good at governance. And because of this, the Houthis were starting to face signs of growing dissent at home. And so when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel attacked Gaza, it gave the Houthis a reason to go back to what they knew. War.
Plus, a big part of the Houthis' identity is supporting the Palestinian cause. That's a popular stance in Yemen, even among people who dislike the Houthis. By attacking ships, the Houthis position themselves as underdogs, fighting against big foreign powers. I think they saw an opportunity here. An opportunity? Yes. Are they in some weird way, like, hoping that the U.S. is going to bomb them? Yeah, and the U.S. did bomb, and that was...
their opportunity to say, look, now the US and the UK are bombing us and we continue to resist US imperialism and be the...
That underdog, I mean, their position in the world has changed completely. Who knew about the Houthis a couple of months ago? It's given them a higher profile in the region and a bit more leeway at home. They've been recruiting fighters and they've been able to raise taxes to pay them. Yasmeen says as long as the war in Gaza continues...
The missiles and the bombs, they are probably not going to stop the Houthi attacks or the problems they create for global trade. And a large part of that has to do with incentives, right? Freedom of navigation came about because countries around the world agreed that they would benefit from it, benefit from a modern-day economy that relies on the free movement of ships around the globe.
But the Houthis, they're an outlier to all of that. They are a militant group. Their goals are different. They're not worried about retaliation from the U.S. or British navies because they're in the global spotlight and getting more support at home. And this group, which wants to fight with the world's superpowers, it just so happens they're situated right next to one of the biggest choke points in global trade.
This episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler, edited by Molly Messick, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez, with help from Maggie Luthar. Special thanks to Sarah Phillips, David Bosco, Tessima Tessima, Jeffrey Jansen, Tom Bowman, Larry Kaplow, and Fatma Tanis. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Nick Fountain. I'm Alex Mayasi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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