They are controlled by their respective governments, but realistically that power is limited, because they know that "Western" powers would wage war if necessary. So in reality there is a tacit understanding between corrupt local governments and foreign powers to keep access more or less free.
> because they know that "Western" powers would wage war if necessary.
Why do you feel the need go single out "the west"? I mean, where do you think the container ships crossing the Suez go to and come from? Do you think that the likes of China would be totally ok with their main trade routes being severed and instead having to go all the way around Africa?
You're framing things as if there's still a British empire syphoning the economies of their colonies all the way from Great Britain, with no one else involved or committed to any trade whatsoever.
That's only one of the topics in this thread, it's about western (colonial) involvement elsewhere in general. Just have a look at the line of parents of this comment; you were the only one who reduced it to the Brits. I was directly replying to "as if there's still a British empire syphoning the economies of their colonies all the way from Great Britain", and the French are another, similar, Western power that's still doing that; they are also being talked about in sibling threads. Finally, questions like yours derail the discourse much more than comments like mine.
What about them? The claim, or rather implication, was that Western powers would never allow equivalent protectionist policies, such as preventing the export of key industries and skills, to be enacted by other countries. Yet such protectionism is routine in China (and many other Asian countries), and "whole hell" did not break loose.
A few more than half century old examples don't change what we can all see is the case in the present day.
>The British, French, and Israelis literally went to war against Egypt over the Suez.
The British and the French were concerned about the Suez, but Israel was not dependent on the Suez and went to war over their navigation being blockaded by Egypt in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran, which was a violation by Egypt of maritime law. Aqaba is in the Sinai peninsula which is also bounded by the Suez.
I don't see how Egypt's claim against Israel was wrong.
The waters have been internal waters literally for three millennia (or more) until foreigners came in and built a canal connecting what is actually a very narrow gulf to the Mediterranean.
Foreigners come in, unilaterally build a canal and now the locals lose national sovereignty over their waters?
Also, why does Egypt have to agree to the freedom of navigation of a state it did not (at the time) recognize?
Furthermore, why must Egypt agree to the laws of freedom navigation it did not sign?
The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing as international law, or a "rules based order". There's only power makes might.
> The British, French and Israelis literally went to war against Egypt over the Suez.
> They only backed up when the US told the Brits and France they would tank their economies still on US life support.
But they did back off. The US was willing to stand up for Egyptian sovereignty even against their own allies. That isn't an example of non-western countries being unable to enact protectionist policies, it's an example of the opposite.
> The article is about Dutch, that is European, piracy under the pretense of sovereignty.
> My example is about European piracy under the pretense of that foreign ownership supersedes sovereignty.
The British and French did something wrong 70 years ago and the world called them out for it, therefore it's hypocritical for the Dutch to call out a similar wrong thing being done against them now? Nonsense.
It looks like that to do it, first, you need to have some atomic bombs.
But talking seriously, the OP didn't say that other countries never do it. Just that the powers have innumerable examples of coups to knock out governments that do this. A lot of them were democratic and popular governments.
Sure but can we just all drop the pretense that sovereignty and property rights mean anything. The only thing that really matters is power and how you get it. You can do protectionism if you are powerful, you can take whatever you want if you are powerful, etc etc.
"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" has been written down as geopolitical reality by Thucydides around ~400BC [1].
For some reason, over the past few decades the powerful countries from the West employed rhetoric to suggest that their actions are guided by principles and morals. That was most likely a reaction to a huge wave of anti-colonial revolutions and national liberation struggles that tore the Western empires apart. However, USA and Israel have taken off the mask over the past 2 years, and that weasly rhetoric is now over.
