The US seizure of the shadow fleet tanker Bella1/Marinara on January 7 in the North Atlantic heralds the dawn of a new era. Hard power will be used far more, and the instruments of international law far less.
This is a salutary lesson for the UK and European nations, which can no longer put their faith in a legal order that has protected their interests for decades. It is not the only lesson. British forces joined the US operation to board the tanker between the UK and Iceland, in the strategically critical Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap, which Britain will need to protect from Russian submarines in wartime. But Britain’s currently underfunded forces struggle to mount this operation at short notice, despite the GIUK gap being in its backyard.
Conversely, the US would have found this operation much harder to mount without access to UK air bases and access to British patrol aircraft and support shipping. So while the operation to board Marinara was a statement of US capability to deliver hard power, it also exposed the US dependence on allies and the global network of bases they provide to exercise that power.
The tanker’s seizure and that of four other shadow fleet tankers by the US mark a major change in the application of maritime force. The US is now blockading Venezuela, a policy it says is having a major effect on shipping behavior. The UK has reportedly identified legislation that may be used to seize Russian shadow fleet vessels. Given the UK’s depleted forces, that is likely to mean action close to home as unflagged and uninsured tankers pass through the North Sea and English Channel.
Blockade is a hard power alternative to legal sanctions. This is the naval equivalent of a siege, and something the Royal Navy used extensively in the Victorian era to enforce Britain’s foreign policy — whether that was to confound the Napoleonic Continental System, enforce the abolition of the slave trade, or police the Monroe Doctrine on behalf of the United States (giving British trade unfettered access to South American markets).
The shadow fleet has been developed by nations like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela specifically to skirt sanctions. While using false-flagged vessels might circumvent legal niceties, they are no help against the hard power instrument of an intelligence-led blockade.
But blockade relies on a simple assumption — that the blockading power can overmatch any military attempt to break its stranglehold on shipping routes. That requires superiority in naval forces.
During the imperial era, the Royal Navy deployed more than 30% of its ships overseas on trade protection duties to maintain sufficient hard power to realize this assumption. Naval bases were needed at every choke point to ensure they could be cut off or held open as needed. The location of British possessions close to these choke points — Singapore, Hong Kong, Malta, Gibraltar, Aden, Cyprus, Bermuda, Newfoundland, the Falkland Islands, Freetown, Cape Town, Trincomalee — was not coincidental.
Since 1945, Britain has become less powerful and more reliant upon international law, and its permanent, veto-empowered seat at the high table on the United Nations Security Council, to enforce its foreign policy and protect its trade and economy. Collective action through the UN and NATO, and until 2016 the European Union, has sufficed to provide enough “over the horizon” military and economic superiority to enforce the legal precedents set by the UN Charter and articulated in topical Security Council resolutions on each emerging foreign policy crisis.
The complex web of alliances, legal instruments, and multilateral institutions that upheld Western hegemony and, by default, Britain’s foreign policy and economic interests, is unravelling fast. Britain’s participation in the US blockade of Venezuela, by aiding the boarding of Bella1/Marinera, was meant perhaps to demonstrate to the US that those alliances still have value in a multi-polar world, as does action against Russia, but they are also a sharp signal that Britain needs to “reacquaint itself with hard power” as the former Head of MI6, Alex Younger, put it daintily in a January BBC interview.
How long the Starmer government can choose to ignore such calls (and they are growing) is moot. It still seems to be looking longingly over its shoulders at a world that has now passed into history, hoping that somehow the current turmoil will go away of its own accord. Ministers appear incapable of adapting to the pace of change and the need for action it demands if Britain is to get back onto the front foot and protect its interests and citizens. It is little comfort that some of its European allies, like France, are likewise hamstrung by the same problems of indecision and empty coffers.
Delays and internal squabbles over increases to defense spending and the publication of key documents like the Strategic Defence Review and Defence Investment Plan send signals of weakness and vacillation to our competitors, allies, and adversaries.
Such an approach is precisely what leads to defeat in an era of hard power. The risk must be that one day soon, it will be British-flagged and British-owned vessels that are being boarded like Mariana. The sooner this government understands that, and acts accordingly, the better.
James Fennell MBE, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, is an international peace and security expert and was Director of the UK FCDO’s flagship stabilisation program in Ukraine from 2022-24. Since leaving the Royal Navy, he has spent 30 years as a senior executive and government adviser on conflict and security policy in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for FCDO and international organizations. In 2012, he was awarded an honorary research fellowship by the University of Birmingham in peace and security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
