An essay in the voice of contested waters
Prologue: A Strait Remembers
I am Hormuz. I have been squeezed between continents for millennia, watching empires dissolve into the saltwater that passes through me. Persians, Portuguese, British, Americans — they have all declared me essential, strategic, irreplaceable. They have built fleets around my narrowness and written their greatness into my tidal charts. I have outlasted every one of them.
Now I watch Panama. And I recognize the pattern.
I. The Waters of Ezekiel: Gog, Magog, and the Merchants of Tarshish
The prophet Ezekiel, writing in the sixth century BCE from the wreckage of Babylonian exile, saw something that no satellite image has yet disproved: that the great conflicts of history organize themselves around commerce, coastlines, and the control of passage. In Ezekiel 38, the coalition of Gog of Magog descends not for ideology alone but to “take a spoil” and “carry away silver and gold” — the language is explicitly mercantile. War, in Ezekiel’s vision, is the violent extension of trade rivalry.
The merchants of Tarshish — identified by scholars variously as Phoenicia, Iberia, or the distant maritime west — raise their protest not with armies but with a question: “Art thou come to take a spoil?” (Ezekiel 38:13). It is a merchant’s question. It is the question CK Hutchison’s lawyers are now drafting in considerably more elaborate language before international arbitration tribunals.
I, Hormuz, know Tarshish. Every great maritime strait knows its Tarshish — the distant commercial power whose prosperity depends on the freedom of passage that another power now threatens to control. In the present configuration, Singapore is Tarshish. It sits at the junction of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, as I sit between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and it has built an entire civilizational model on the premise that the waters must remain open and that no single empire shall govern the chokepoints.
Panama’s Balboa and Cristobal terminals are chokepoints. Their transfer — from a Hong Kong conglomerate to a consortium bearing the flags of Danish and Mediterranean shipping capital, blessed by American strategic pressure — is not merely a commercial transaction. It is an act of eschatological geography: the redrawing of which civilization’s hands rest upon the valves of global trade.
II. The Psalms of the Sea: Sovereignty, Lament, and the God Who Governs Waters
Psalm 107 is the great maritime psalm, and it understands something that neither Panama’s Supreme Court nor the Trump administration has yet acknowledged: that the sea does not belong to the sovereign who claims it. “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters — these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” (Psalm 107:23-24).
The psalmist’s sailors are not nationalists. They are merchants, navigators, people whose safety depends on powers larger than any concession contract. When the storm comes — and the psalm is explicit that it is God who raises the storm — “all their wisdom is swallowed up” (107:27). No investment-protection treaty has a clause for that.
What Psalm 107 illuminates about the Panama situation is the theological structure of hubris embedded in every state’s claim to control a waterway. Panama’s President Mulino insists this is “not an expropriation.” Washington insists it is the restoration of sovereignty. CK Hutchison insists it is unlawful confiscation. Each speaks the language of absolute right. The psalm suggests that such language, spoken beside deep water, is the prelude to being brought low and then, perhaps, restored.
But the psalm also contains a political economy. Verse 33-34 describes how God turns rivers into wildernesses and fruitful land into barrenness “for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.” The reversal of verse 35 — wilderness into standing water, dry ground into watersprings — is not random. It follows moral accountability. The concession that is built on exploitation eventually loses its water. The port that depends on political favor rather than legitimate contract eventually finds its quay empty.
Singapore has long understood this. Its entire port infrastructure is built on the opposite principle: that legitimacy of contract and neutrality of access are not merely ethical preferences but commercial necessities. The Port of Singapore Authority does not discriminate by the flag of the vessel. That is not idealism. That is the Psalm 107 economy working correctly.
III. Revelation’s Waters: Babylon the Great and the Merchants Who Weep
The Book of Revelation, chapters 17 and 18, contains the most sustained piece of ancient economic analysis in any sacred text. Babylon the Great is not primarily a theological abstraction — she is a trading empire, and her fall is mourned not by theologians but by merchants. “The merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more.” (Revelation 18:11).
The list of Babylon’s merchandise in Revelation 18:12-13 is a first-century CE commodity index: gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple silk, scarlet, thyine wood, ivory, brass, iron, marble, cinnamon, odours, ointments, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, beasts, sheep, horses, chariots — and then, devastatingly — “slaves, and souls of men.”
The Seer of Patmos understood that every empire’s commercial system eventually commodifies the human. And he understood that the kings who “committed fornication” with Babylon — who entered into the trade arrangements that made her rich — would stand “afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon” (18:10).
They stand afar off. This is the key phrase. The kings and merchants do not intervene. They observe the collapse from a safe distance and lament without acting. They have too much invested in the system to dismantle it and too little courage to defend it.
I watch this from the Strait of Hormuz and I recognize the behavior. When Panama canceled CK Hutchison’s concessions under American pressure, no Asian government moved decisively to defend the principle of contract sanctity. Hong Kong issued a statement of “strong dissatisfaction.” Beijing, whose geopolitical interests are most directly implicated, has been — at least at the public level — notably restrained. The merchants of Revelation’s Babylon stand afar off, and they weep, but they do not act.
The BlackRock-MSC consortium, meanwhile, is the entity that benefits from Babylon’s fall. It did not create the crisis. It appeared when the crisis created an opportunity. This is precisely the structure Revelation describes: not the architects of collapse but the inheritors of the cleared ground.
IV. The Voice of Hormuz: What the Straits Know That Lawyers Do Not
I have watched the British establish the Trucial States specifically to control my passage. I have watched the Americans station their Fifth Fleet in Bahrain for the same reason. I have watched Iran threaten to close me — repeatedly, credibly — and I have watched oil prices respond within hours across every exchange on earth. I know what chokepoint politics feels like from the inside.
What neither the lawyers nor the diplomats adequately account for is the doctrine of strategic precedent. Every concession cancellation under political pressure teaches the next government facing political pressure that concession cancellation is available. Every investment-protection treaty that fails to protect an investment teaches the next investor to price in political risk. These are not merely legal questions. They are the hydraulics of global commercial trust, and once the pressure drops, it does not rebuild quickly.
The Ezekiel-to-Revelation arc describes exactly this dynamic in theological terms: the accumulation of transgression against the order of creation — which includes the order of honest contract — eventually produces cataclysm. Not because God is vindictive, but because systems built on the violation of covenant integrity are structurally unstable. They collapse under their own weight.
Panama’s ports will continue to function. Ships will continue to pass. APM Terminals will likely operate Balboa with considerable competence. But something else has shifted — something in the aquifer beneath the legal surface — and that is the reliability of the concession contract as an instrument of long-term infrastructure governance.
V. Singapore as Tarshish: The Most Consequential Bystander
Singapore is the state with the most to lose from what Panama has demonstrated, and it has said the least about it.
This is understandable. Singapore is a small state in a neighborhood where both the United States and China are necessary partners. It cannot afford to be read as either Beijing’s advocate or Washington’s critic. Its foreign policy is built on the careful maintenance of equidistance, and that equidistance is not cowardice — it is the sophisticated application of a small state’s only real asset, which is its indispensability to everyone.
But the Panama precedent strikes at something deeper than Singapore’s diplomatic positioning. It strikes at the economic theology on which Singapore was founded.
Lee Kuan Yew’s foundational insight — later elaborated by Goh Keng Swee and refined through every subsequent iteration of Singapore’s development strategy — was that a city-state with no natural resources survives only by being more reliable than its neighbors. More reliable in contract enforcement. More reliable in regulatory consistency. More reliable in the neutrality of its port. Singapore became prosperous not despite its smallness but because its smallness forced it to build the institutional infrastructure that larger states could afford to neglect.
What Panama has demonstrated is that when a larger power — the United States — decides that a strategic infrastructure asset must change hands, the institutional infrastructure of contract law is insufficient protection. The Supreme Court of Panama has been instrumentalized, whether wittingly or otherwise, in service of a geopolitical outcome. The investment-protection treaty framework, which Singapore has relied upon and advocated for across decades of trade negotiations, has been activated by CK Hutchison but has manifestly failed to prevent the takeover it was designed to deter.
Singapore should be alarmed. Not because Chinese infrastructure interests are inherently aligned with Singaporean interests — they are not always — but because the principle being eroded is one that Singapore cannot survive without. If the major powers have decided that strategic infrastructure concessions are revocable by judicial decree shaped by political pressure, then Singapore’s own position as a neutral maritime hub — dependent on the confidence of every major power that their vessels, their cargoes, their commercial interests will be treated without political prejudice — becomes more fragile than it has been since 1965.
VI. Eschatological Conclusion: What Comes After Babylon
Revelation does not end with Babylon’s merchants weeping on the shore. It ends with a New Jerusalem — and critically, in Revelation 21:24-26, the kings of the earth bring their glory into it, and “the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.”
Open gates. Perpetual access. No closure, no exclusion, no strategic chokepoint managed for the benefit of one power at the expense of others. The eschatological vision is, at its core, a vision of free and equitable passage — of a world in which the control of waterways is no longer a mechanism of domination.
This is simultaneously the most utopian and the most practically urgent vision in the entire biblical canon. It describes what Singapore has tried, imperfectly and pragmatically, to approximate. It describes what the Panama Canal’s founders, at their most idealistic, claimed to be building. It describes what every international maritime law regime since Grotius has attempted to institutionalize.
And it describes what is now under serious pressure.
I am Hormuz. I have watched empires come and go. I watch Panama now, and I watch Singapore watching Panama, and I know what the merchants who stand afar off do not yet fully believe: that the system of open, reliable, politically neutral maritime commerce is not self-sustaining. It requires constant, active, courageous institutional defense — by the states that benefit from it most, in the moments when defending it is most costly.
The alternative is not another empire. The alternative is the storm in Psalm 107 — the one that swallows all wisdom — followed, eventually, by the deep silence of waters that no longer carry anyone’s goods, because no one any longer trusts that they will arrive.
The gates of the New Jerusalem do not close themselves. Someone has to keep them open.