Berlin and Hormuz: Two Conceptions of Power

The Berlin Airlift offers a noble counterpoint to what is happening today in the Gulf.

In 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to force the Western powers out of Berlin by cutting the city’s road, rail and water connections. Yet even at one of the tensest moments of the early Cold War, the supply aircraft themselves were not deliberately shot down. Soviet fighters buzzed them, searchlights harassed them and antiaircraft guns sometimes fired nearby, but the planes continued through the agreed air corridors. Moscow understood that destroying an American or British cargo aircraft would transform coercion into open war. (AF History)

The result was one of the noblest demonstrations of logistical power in modern history. Aircraft arrived carrying flour, coal, medicine and fuel not to conquer territory, but to sustain two million people trapped inside a political confrontation. More than 2.3 million tons of supplies were eventually delivered. The airlift demonstrated that the supply chain could stand above the struggle for political supremacy: it could become a protected artery of ordinary human life. (AF History)

The Gulf today presents almost the mirror image.

There, the arteries of economic life have themselves become the battlefield. Commercial vessels and their crews are being attacked; maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed on some days from roughly 130 vessels to fewer than ten; ports are blockaded; and energy, water and transportation infrastructure have become instruments and targets of political coercion. Sailors who have no part in the quarrel are being killed while carrying the fuel and goods upon which people thousands of miles away depend. (AP News)

Berlin showed political powers restraining themselves, however reluctantly, before the boundary separating geopolitical conflict from the material sustenance of civilian life. The contest remained political, while the cargo planes were permitted to carry on the substantive work of civilization.

In the Gulf, that boundary is disappearing. Governments no longer merely struggle with one another around the supply chain; they struggle through it. The tanker, the cargo ship, the port, the refinery, the power station and even the desalination plant become pieces on the political chessboard. (The Guardian)

That is the deeper contrast. The Berlin Airlift treated logistics as a means of rescuing human life from politics. The Gulf crisis treats logistics as a means by which politics may hold human life hostage.

The lesson of Berlin was that the highest use of power is to keep the channels of human cooperation open. The tragedy of Hormuz is that political power, unable to produce the extraordinary system of exchange on which the world depends, nevertheless claims the authority to interrupt, commandeer and destroy it.