The Free Sea: The American Fight for Freedom of Navigation

The Free Sea offers a unique, single-volume analysis of incidents that challenged U.S. freedom of navigation at sea. The book spans more than two hundred years, from the Quasi-War with France in 1798 to contemporary freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Since World War II, the struggle for freedom of navigation has pulled the United States to the brink of war with Vietnam during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, North Korea with the seizure of the USS Pueblo in 1968, and Cambodia with the capture of the SS Mayaguez. In the 1980s, Libya’s line of death across the Gulf of Sidra and Iran’s tanker war in the Persian Gulf drew the United States into conflicts. During the Cold War U.S. and Russian navies clashed over navigational rights in the Black Sea–and an incident that led to amicable agreement on the right of innocent passage. Today, China poses perhaps the greatest challenge to freedom of navigation since Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaigns as it seeks to regulate U.S. naval operations in the South China and East China Seas.

Freedom of the seas is the foundation of all sea power and a bedrock principle of international law and global order. Separated from the centers of power in Europe and Asia by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the United States has relied on the principles of freedom of navigation for economic prosperity and military security. James Kraska and Raul Pedrozo focus on the struggle to safeguard that freedom. Challenges to U.S. warships and maritime commerce have pushed, and continue to challenge, the United States to vindicate its rights through diplomatic, legal, and military means, underscoring the need for the strategic resolve to ensure freedom in the global maritime commons.