The Tab
The benevolent villain in Hormuz
Louis C.K. had a bit about watching a man on a plane lose his mind the moment the in-flight Wi-Fi went out. The guy had been connected for just minutes. Before that, the technology didn’t exist on planes. And now he was furious, as if something had been taken from him. Louis’s line was something like: “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago.”
That’s the speed of it. The provision appears, becomes normal, becomes atmosphere, and then its absence becomes an outrage. Minutes. That’s all it takes for a miracle to become a minimum expectation.
I think about this every time something breaks that I didn’t know was working. The cell signal I notice only when it drops. The package tracking I check twelve times and then curse when it’s late. The flight itself, the metal tube hurtling six miles above the earth, which I ignore entirely, so I can be angry about the Wi-Fi or running out of snacks for my kid only 20% into the flight time. The provision is so seamless that it becomes invisible. And invisible provision does something dangerous to the person receiving it: it erases the awareness that anyone is providing at all.
For seventy-five years, the United States has been providing the Wi-Fi. Across the global commons: shipping lanes, energy corridors, dollar-denominated trade, the financial plumbing that makes international commerce function. The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet wasn’t a favor anyone asked for, at least not out loud. It was infrastructure. Background. The way shipping in the mideast lanes works.
The Strait of Hormuz was open the way water comes from a tap. You don’t think about the municipal system that delivers it until the pipe breaks.
Now the pipe has broken. And the sober objection needs to be stated right here: the United States broke it. In February 2026, joint U.S.-Israeli strikes hit Iran, killing its Supreme Leader. Iran retaliated by closing the Strait. Commercial traffic dropped 95% within weeks. Oil prices surged past $110 a barrel, up more than 60% in a month. And then Donald Trump told European and British leaders, in effect, to go handle it themselves. He posted on Truth Social: “Go get your own oil.” He told the UK to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”
Two versions of this story circulate, and both are correct. One says Trump started the fire and is now demanding that everyone else put it out. The other says the fire revealed that Europe has no fire department. If Europe had the capability to secure Hormuz independently, the question of who lit the match would be tactical (an argument about strategy). The question is existential because they can’t. Macron said forcibly opening the Strait was “unrealistic.” These are nations that ran down their hard-power capabilities for decades, secure in the assumption that American ships would always appear over the horizon.
The fire caught a house with no extinguisher, no alarm system, and no evacuation plan. Who struck the match matters. That the house had no sprinklers matters more.
Forgot, or Never Learned
The question worth sitting with is why the sprinklers were never installed.
Freedom is psychologically expensive. It demands you tolerate uncertainty, bear responsibility, build capacity you may never need. This is true for individuals. It is also true for nations. When someone else carries the weight of your security, you don’t just benefit from the arrangement. You stop perceiving the weight as weight. You mistake the absence of burden for the natural order of things. The guarantee becomes atmosphere. You breathe it without thinking.
And here’s what makes it worse: the better the guarantor, the deeper the sleep. A malevolent protector creates awareness. You feel the boot. You know you’re dependent because the dependency chafes every day. If Iran were providing Europe’s security, no European would mistake the arrangement for freedom. The coercion would be visible, and so would the chains. But a benevolent protector, a competent one, a generous one, produces something more dangerous than resentment. It produces oblivion. The provision is so reliable, so seamless, that it vanishes into the background of reality. You don’t notice the weight being carried because the carrier never complains and never drops it. Until they do.
This isn’t an argument that the United States should have been worse at the job. It’s an observation that doing the job well, for long enough, without asking anything in return, produces the same incapacity as coercion. Just without the awareness.
Erich Fromm identified this mechanism in 1941, watching Europe burn from American exile. His question wasn’t how dictators seize power. It was why populations hand it over. His answer: freedom creates anxiety. The burden of self-provision, of standing alone, of making choices no one else can validate, produces a discomfort that most people will do almost anything to escape. When someone else is providing, the anxiety never surfaces. The dependent party doesn’t feel dependent. They feel normal.
Alexis de Tocqueville saw the endpoint two centuries before Fromm named the mechanism. He described a power that “does not tyrannize, but compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Tocqueville was writing about soft despotism, the paternalistic state that infantilizes through comfort rather than coercion. But the mechanism works the same way with a paternalistic ally. Provide for every need long enough, and the recipient loses the capacity to provide for themselves. Not because they’re shortsighted. Because the muscle was never asked to flex.
Forgot implies institutional memory that can be recovered. Never learned means building from scratch under crisis conditions. The postwar European political class largely inherited the American guarantee at birth. They didn’t choose dependency. They were born into a world where someone else was already paying the tab. The anxiety Fromm described never had to surface. The safety net was always there. Childhood was the only condition they knew, and childhood feels like freedom until someone asks you to feed yourself.
The Outrage Is the Tell
Eric Hoffer spent his life on the docks of San Francisco, watching who joined movements and why. His uncomfortable conclusion: the content of the doctrine is almost irrelevant. What matters is what the movement offers the convert. Someone to blame. Something to be. The costume differs left and right; the function is identical.
Hoffer’s insight applies here in a way he might not have anticipated. The dependent party doesn’t just accept the dependency silently. They convert it into moral superiority. Europe didn’t merely free-ride on American naval power. It disdained that power while sheltering under it. Green posturing, anti-militarist rhetoric, multilateral virtue-signaling: all delivered from the safety of someone else’s security guarantee. The disdain is the tell. It functions the way Hoffer’s true believer relates to the society that sustains them: needing it, resenting it, performing the resentment as proof of moral purity.
And it’s happening inside America too.
On the left: the anti-capitalist organizer coordinating via iPhone, posting on a venture-backed platform, collecting speaking fees at universities whose endowments are invested in the markets they denounce. Noam Chomsky built his career at MIT, one of the Pentagon’s largest research partners, arguing that the military-industrial complex was America’s defining sin. I’m not saying the critique is wrong. I’m saying the critique was funded by the thing it critiqued, and nobody talked about that part. That silence suggests something closer to a power calculus than an honest reckoning.
On the right: seven or eight of the ten most federally dependent states (depending on the year measured) vote Republican. Three-quarters of FEMA disaster relief goes to red states. Cliven Bundy denied federal authority while ranching on federal land at a 93% discount to private market rates. He could not ranch without the system he rejected. The Ayn Rand Institute, devoted to laissez-faire capitalism, accepted $713,000 in forgivable government loans during Covid. They wrote a blog post explaining why it was fine.
(I’m aware I’m listing these with the detachment of someone who thinks he’s above the pattern. I’m not. I’ll get there.)
Neither side sees it. And this is the part I want to deliver: what’s operating here is self-deception. Hypocrisy would require knowing you’re doing it. The Bundy rancher genuinely does not experience himself as a federal beneficiary. The anti-military academic genuinely does not experience herself as sheltered by military power. The European diplomat genuinely does not experience his green-energy sermon as delivered from the deck of someone else’s diesel-powered destroyer, projecting power against adversaries who would willingly take or destroy the freedom he’s exercising to give the sermon in the first place.
Jean-Paul Sartre called this mauvaise foi. Bad faith. You deceive yourself about your own situation so completely that the deception disappears into the furniture of your worldview. You don’t see it because seeing it would require dismantling the story you tell about who you are.
It disturbs one’s identity.
The Fish Doesn’t Know It’s in Water
The tab at Hormuz is the visible line item. The bill underneath is larger.
The dependency isn’t just military. It’s the entire operating system. Dollar-denominated trade. Treasury recycling. Shipping insurance. Correspondent banking. The clearing mechanisms and compliance layers through which value moves across borders. The architecture that turns a handshake in Dubai into a settled transaction in Frankfurt. All of it runs on American infrastructure. The U.S. didn’t just protect the shipping lanes. It built the lanes. And the ports. And the currency everyone uses when they arrive.
F.A. Hayek called the underlying principle the knowledge problem: the information required to coordinate a complex system is so dispersed, so embedded in local circumstances and tacit practice, that no one can perceive it as a whole, let alone replicate it. Hayek was writing about economies and central planning. But the insight scales. The global operating system that American power underwrites is so distributed that most participants can’t see it as a product of anyone’s effort. It’s just how trade works. How shipping works. How money works.
Until it doesn’t. Iran has established a toll on Larak Island. The IRGC screens every vessel: IMO number, cargo manifest, destination, crew list, ownership details. All submitted to intermediaries linked to the Revolutionary Guard. Two million dollars per transit, payable in yuan or cryptocurrency. Some Chinese-linked vessels have been turned back even after paying. The distributed order that Hayek described (too complex and embedded in local practice for anyone to administer) is being replaced by somebody vetting paperwork in a harbor office on an island most people couldn’t find on a map. It is already failing. But the damage to the old system doesn’t require the new one to succeed.
Deutsche Bank strategist Mallika Sachdeva warned this could be “the catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance and the beginnings of the petroyuan.” Speculative, maybe. Except that sanctioned Iranian and Russian oil already accounts for roughly thirteen million barrels per day (about fourteen percent of global supply), and most of it has traded outside dollar rails for years. The alternative infrastructure already exists. Hormuz is testing whether a crisis can force it to scale.
The water is draining. And the fish are starting to notice what air feels like.
David McCullough spent decades reconstructing the American founding. The through-line of his work is contingency: nothing about the arrangement was inevitable. The fog over the East River that allowed Washington’s army to escape Brooklyn. The winter at Valley Forge that should have ended the Revolution but didn’t. Every institution, every alliance, every guarantee was a contingent choice that could have gone differently. The postwar generation inherited a world of American guarantees and treated them the way fish treat water. Not a gift. Not a decision someone made. Just the medium of existence.
In July 1969, Richard Nixon held an informal press briefing in Guam and told Asian allies they would need to provide their own ground forces. Australia heard the message and began rebuilding its defense posture around self-reliance. But the word “began” is doing a lot of work. The first articulated self-reliance policy didn’t appear until the 1976 Defence White Paper, seven years after Nixon’s announcement. The full doctrine wasn’t codified until the 1987 white paper. Eighteen years. Every Australian defence white paper since has debated the same unresolved question: how much weight for the alliance versus how much for self-reliance. Forty years on, they’re still calibrating. It worked because Australia had latent capacity, strong institutions, and nearly two decades of peace in which to build. The withdrawal was calibrated, not chaotic. The umbrella was pulled back slowly enough for the person underneath to find their own roof. That timeline matters for what follows.
When the U.S. left the Philippines in 1992, there was no calibration and no time. In February 1995, just over two years later, a Filipino navy patrol found a newly built octagonal structure on stilts flying a Chinese flag on a submerged reef, two hundred and forty kilometers off the island of Palawan. A Filipino fisherman had reported being taken captive by Chinese soldiers. Beijing said the structure was a shelter for its fishermen. It was equipped with a satellite dish linked to the Chinese mainland. Today Mischief Reef is a fully fledged Chinese military outpost: a three-thousand-meter airfield, radar arrays, and probable surface-to-air missile installations built on land reclaimed from the sea. The fisherman’s shelter became a forward operating base. By 1998, the Philippines signed the Visiting Forces Agreement to get American forces back. The dependent party didn’t build. The vacuum filled. And then the dependent party asked the provider to return.
And then there’s China. More than 40% of China’s oil imports transit the Strait of Hormuz. Belt and Road stretches across three continents. Artificial islands bristle with radar and runways in the South China Sea. This is a nation that has spent two decades signaling that it is ready to be a superpower.
Hormuz is the exam. And so far, China’s answer has been a toll booth on Larak Island: collect fees in yuan, wave ships through selectively, let the IRGC do the muscle work. A toll booth without a road crew. Even Chinese-linked vessels (the ships of the one major power paying in the preferred currency) have been turned back at the chokepoint. Someone has to dredge the mines, enforce the rules of engagement, absorb the casualties, manage the diplomatic overhead of being the power everyone resents. The US has done this for seventy-five years. China has watched. Watching and doing are different things, and the difference is measured in blood, treasure, and the willingness to be hated for showing up. The tab comes due for aspiring superpowers too.
Europe sits somewhere between these outcomes, and nobody knows which way it tips. France deployed ten warships to the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea, including the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle carrier group, retasked from operations near Sweden after an Iranian drone struck RAF Akrotiri on March 1. That means France chose the Middle East over the Baltic. Half the French surface fleet, deployed to a crisis zone, other commitments left exposed. France is preparing escort missions for merchant ships through Hormuz and has dedicated frigates to the EU’s Operation Aspides.
France can do this because France resisted. In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command to preserve French strategic autonomy. Against explicit American opposition. France kept independent nuclear capability and a blue-water navy when every incentive pointed toward letting Washington carry the weight. That tradition exists because one leader said no while the architecture of dependency was being built around him. Everyone else said yes. France is the only European nation that chose to keep a navy capable of projecting power at this scale.
The UK convened forty nations to discuss collectively reopening the Strait. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper chaired the meeting: representatives from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the UAE, Bahrain, Australia, and more than thirty others. Forty foreign ministers in a room, trying to build the fire department that should have existed decades ago. The next stage: military planners meeting to discuss mine-clearing operations and a reassurance force for commercial shipping. Not just diplomacy. Operational planning. The fire department is being designed in the middle of the fire.
The United States didn’t attend. Trump said it wasn’t America’s responsibility. The man who lit the match declined the invitation to discuss the fire. Whatever strategic logic you credit him with — and I’ve tried to be fair about the argument that the fire revealed a house with no sprinklers — refusing to show up when your allies are trying to respond is a stain on the strategy. You can argue that Europe needs to stand on its own. You can even argue that a crisis was the only thing that would force it. But you cannot start the crisis, demand others handle it, and then not show up when they try. That isn’t tough love. It’s abandonment dressed as doctrine.
The ReArm Europe plan envisions eight hundred billion euros in new defense investment. The number deserves scrutiny. Six hundred and fifty billion comes from suspended EU budget rules: permission for member states to reallocate spending they already have. Not new funding. The remaining hundred and fifty billion is a loan instrument called SAFE. And the plan was announced in March 2025, a full year before the Hormuz crisis. The reckoning was already underway before Trump lit the match. What Hormuz did was expose the gap between the plan’s timeline and reality. ReArm Europe targets four years. If Australia needed eighteen years after the Nixon Doctrine to fully articulate its self-reliance posture (with latent capacity, strong institutions, and no active crisis), four years is ambition dressed as strategy. The crisis operates on a timeline of weeks.
The honest position is that the dependency was real, the reckoning was overdue, and the outcome is genuinely unresolved. The person who lit the match and the person who never bought a fire extinguisher both have something to answer for. Assigning blame for the fire doesn’t rebuild the house.
But the honest position has a layer beneath it that makes both parties more uncomfortable than either wants to be.
Who Kept the Lights Off
The dependency was designed. Fromm’s anxiety mechanism explains part of it, but only part. For decades, American strategists understood something simpler: a Europe that depends on Washington for security is a Europe that follows Washington’s lead. When West Germany began military cooperation with France in the early 1960s, Kennedy threatened to pull every American soldier off the continent. An independent European defense posture would end what the United States called its “preponderant position” in the alliance. That was the real threat. Washington wanted the dependency. It kept the lights off on purpose.
This doesn’t excuse the dependency. Europe had agency and chose comfort. (Choosing comfort is still choosing.) But it reframes the outrage. When American voices now demand that Europe stand on its own, they are demanding something that American policy actively discouraged for sixty years. The house has no sprinklers partly because the fire department told them sprinklers weren’t necessary.
And yet. The world of 1985 no longer exists. The strategic calculus that made European dependency useful to Washington (containing the Soviet Union, maintaining NATO coherence, preventing the emergence of a rival European power center) dissolved with the Berlin Wall and hasn’t applied since. What served American interests during the Cold War is counterproductive in 2026. A Europe that can’t secure its own shipping lanes is a strategic liability. The architecture of dependency was designed for a world that vanished thirty-five years ago. The design is obsolete. The dependency it produced is not.
Both truths coexist. Neither cancels the other. And neither makes the reckoning optional.
There is a second force making the reckoning harder, and it doesn’t originate in any capital that claims to be an ally.
The realist argument has been losing ground for years: that Europe must build hard-power capacity, that dependency is dangerous, that the liberal order requires actual defense. All true.
Since at least 2014, Russian information operations have framed NATO as an instrument of American imperialism rather than a defensive alliance. The messaging is tailored for every audience. To the European far-left, Russia fights Western imperialism and colonial overreach. To the far-right, it offers nationalist sovereignty against Brussels technocrats. Different costumes, same function. Hoffer would recognize the structure instantly. The content of the doctrine is irrelevant. What matters is what it offers the convert: a reason to do nothing and feel righteous about it. A hundred and fifty suspected hybrid incidents linked to Russia were documented across the EU in 2025 alone. AI-generated content is making the next round cheaper by the day.
China’s approach is quieter but the structure is the same. Belt and Road builds ports and railways. It also builds a story: American-led order is declining, alternatives exist, “multipolarity” means freedom from Western dominance. (Whether it means submission to a different kind goes unmentioned.) Chinese strategists talk about winning the “three warfares” (public opinion, psychological pressure, legal positioning) long before any shooting starts. The goal is erosion. Convince enough people that American leadership is optional and the architecture starts to crumble whether anyone replaces it or not. The Larak Island toll booth is the physical version of this. The narrative is the psychological version.
The audience most susceptible is the population Fromm described: people exhausted by complexity, suspicious of institutions, hungry for someone to explain why the world feels broken. The anti-imperialist narrative, the anti-change narrative, the reflexive suspicion of any argument that says we need to build or defend or maintain anything at all. It offers what every escape mechanism offers: relief from the burden of seeing clearly. I’ve watched it work in my own feed. Someone shares a carefully sourced argument about European defense capacity waning and the first reply is something about imperialism or some other western shame. The conversation dies there. It was designed to die there. The platforms reward the reply because outrage travels faster than analysis, and the realist argument ends up sounding like warmongering to people who have never had to think about where their security comes from.
This is the same mechanism, running through one more channel. The provision was invisible. The dependency was invisible. And now the information environment designed to keep people from seeing the dependency is itself invisible — the most seamless provision of all.
I said I’d get to myself. Here.
Where in my own life have I mistaken someone else’s effort for the natural order of things? Where have I converted my dependence into a story about my own independence? I’d rather not answer that. Which is probably the answer. But an honest answer for most of us is somewhere in our relationship with our parents.
Me included. It is all too easy to look around in your teens and see others who have more, whether material or experience. The will to compare is intense. You’re actively trying to figure out not only who you are, but where you stand. In that fog of hormones and half-formed frontal lobes, you can misunderstand the nature of the water you swim in. Once you begin signing your own leases, taking your own risks, and being the backstop to others your whole perspective shifts. Moving to New York City meant my backstop was gone. Luckily, I had some stellar friends who helped elevate me. When they left, I did the same for others.
The Wi-Fi on the plane, the shipping lane at Hormuz, the invisible labor in every family where one person absorbs the cost while everyone else discusses fairness: the mechanism is the same at every scale. And the first sign that the reckoning has arrived is always the same. Not self-reflection. Not gratitude. Outrage. Because the provision was load-bearing, and acknowledging it means acknowledging what we can’t do alone, and what it actually costs to try.
The Wi-Fi has become atmosphere. We just never asked who was paying for it.
Sources and Inspiration
Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer