ship approaching the Gulf with a load of Chinese-made Silkworm
missiles en route to Iran. The Navy believed the delivery of these
potent weapons would increase materially the danger to both pro-
tected and protecting U.S. ships and the Defense Department
therefore, quite cogently, argued for permission to interdict the
delivery. The State Department, however, countered that such a
seizure on the high seas, under the universally recognized rules of
war and neutrality, would constitute aggressive blockade tanta-
mount to an act of war against Iran. The U.S., if it enforced a
naval blockade, would lose its purchase on brokering peace as a
neutral. In the event, the delivery ship with its cargo of missiles
was allowed to pass. Deference to systemic rules had won out over
tactical advantage in the internal struggle for control of U.S. policy.

Why should this have been so? In the minds of those who
pride themselves on their hard-nosed realism--and they seem at all
times and in all places to comprise a formidable group of advo-
cates--this should not have happened. Obedience to rules, in the
minds of these persons, is a sign of weakness. It is an unworthy abdi-
cation of the prerogatives and responsibilities of national power. A
hard nose goes with a hard fist. Speaking of this "realist" form of
advocacy, Hugo Grotius observed with despair some 350 years ago
that there is "no lack of men" who make light of the international
rule system "as if it were nothing but an empty name. On most
men's lips are the words of Euphemus, quoted by Thucydides,
that for a kind or a free city nothing is wrong that is to their ad-
vantage." ¹

Yet, in this Persian Gulf encounter, Washington chose to play
by the rules. In microcosm, this focuses our subject, the puzzle we
have begun to explore. In the absence of a world government and
a global coercive power to enforce its laws, why did the U.S. lead-
ership, despite its evident power to do as it wished, opt to forgo
the obvious short-term strategic benefits of seizing the Silkworms?
Why did pre-eminent American power defer to the rules of the
sanctionless system? What was it about the rules of neutrality and
belligerency which exerted so strong a compliance pull on policy-
makers?

This is a different question from a more familiar one which

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