When a Navy Draws Moral Lines at Sea

A  brief CNN exchange in 2022 has enjoyed a long afterlife online. Don Lemon asked whether the British monarchy should pay reparations for slavery. His guest, British royal commentator Hilary Fordwich, answered by pointing to something rarely mentioned in our modern culture wars: after abolishing the slave trade, Britain sent the Royal Navy to hunt down slave ships from any flag, at the cost of British lives and treasure, for decades.

The clip went viral because it scrambled the usual talking points. But buried beneath the social‑media spectacle was a serious strategic idea. There was a moment in history when a navy did more than defend a coastline or fly the flag. It underwrote a new global norm.

That navy was the Royal Navy. Understanding what it did against the slave trade in the nineteenth century helps clarify what we are asking it to do today, whether in the Strait of Hormuz, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, or the South China Sea.

From Profiting to Policing

Any honest account must start with the obvious: Britain was deeply complicit in the Atlantic slave trade before it turned against it. British ships transported large numbers of enslaved Africans, and British commerce profited from their labor in the Caribbean and Americas. Britain’s later virtue came after a long period of vice.

In 1807, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, banning British involvement in the trade. What followed was strategically unusual. London directed its primary instrument of power projection, the Royal Navy, to enforce that decision at sea, far from British shores. The West Africa Squadron, also known as the Preventive Squadron, was stood up to patrol the African coast and Atlantic approaches, intercepting suspected slavers.

Over roughly six decades, the squadron captured around 1,600 slave ships and liberated about 150,000 Africans found on board. Those numbers represent only a portion of the total traffic. But they still translate into tens of thousands of people diverted from the holds of slaving vessels to some prospect of a future.

The human cost to the Royal Navy was substantial. Service on the West Africa Station was notorious as the “white man’s graveyard,” with malaria and other tropical diseases killing more sailors than combat ever did. Between 1830 and 1865 alone, almost 1,600 Royal Navy personnel died while serving with the squadron. Economic historians note that the campaign absorbed significant resources over many years for limited direct material gain, making it one of the more expensive humanitarian uses of sea power on record.​

None of this was pure altruism. Suppressing the slave trade disadvantaged rival powers and dovetailed with Britain’s commercial and imperial interests. Anti‑slavery patrolling often ran alongside gunboat diplomacy and coastal coercion. Yet, once we acknowledge those mixed motives, one strategic fact remains: Britain employed maritime power over decades to delegitimize a practice it had once treated as normal.

Sea power, in other words, was used to change the rules.

Sea Power as Norm Power

What does a nineteenth‑century anti‑slavery squadron have to say to a twenty‑first‑century world of missiles, drones, and grey‑zone coercion?

At least three things.

• First, endurance matters. The West Africa Squadron was not a short “surge” or a photo‑op deployment. It was a standing commitment. Slavers changed routes, flags, and hull forms; the Royal Navy responded by improving its propulsion, its intelligence networks, and its command‑and‑control arrangements. Norm‑enforcement at sea is a campaign, not a sortie.
• Second, law rides on the back of power. British anti‑slavery efforts pushed legal innovation, bilateral treaties granting search rights, mixed commissions, “equipment clauses” that allowed seizure of ships clearly fitted for the trade even when no captives were found. The presence of Royal Navy cruisers gave those legal instruments bite. We see the same pattern today in sanctions enforcement, embargo operations, and freedom of navigation patrols: paper rules require steel hulls.
• Third, behavior is contagious. Britain used its squadron as leverage to press other powers to sign anti‑slavery agreements and join suppression efforts. Visible maritime action helped shift what was considered respectable state behavior. Over time, trans‑oceanic slave trading became not just illegal under British law but stigmatized in international society.

That is the core strategic takeaway: navies are not just about kinetic warfighting. They are instruments for drawing and enforcing “moral lines in salt water”.

Today’s Contested Seas

Translate that logic forward and the parallels become clearer. Today, we are not confronting wooden slavers but a dense mix of threats and norm violations at sea.

In the Gulf of Hormuz and Red Sea, the stakes have risen sharply. The Red Sea campaign, Operation Prosperity Guardian, in which HMS Diamond and HMS Richmond engaged Iranian-backed Houthi drones and missiles, has now been overtaken by a more acute crisis. Following the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026, including the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards declared the Strait of Hormuz closed to all foreign shipping.

The IRGC transmitted VHF warnings to vessels stating that “no ship is allowed to pass”, then backed the declaration with drone and missile strikes on commercial vessels. By mid-March, Iran had conducted at least 21 confirmed attacks on merchant ships, causing tanker traffic to drop by roughly 70 percent.

The Royal Navy formally stated that the closure was not legally binding under international law but simultaneously acknowledged that safety could not be guaranteed, a formulation that captures precisely the gap between the law’s text and the fleet’s reach. On 19 March 2026, the United States launched an aerial campaign to reopen the strait, with France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom declaring support. The nineteenth-century lesson is exact: paper rules require steel hulls.

What has changed is the character of the threat. The IRGC relies not on massed surface battle but on swarming fast-attack craft, shore-based anti-ship missiles, armed USVs, and mine-laying, precisely the asymmetric toolkit that the West Africa Squadron could not have imagined, but that demands the same combination of persistence, legal architecture, and allied coordination.

In the Indo‑Pacific, Carrier Strike Group 21’s deployment in 2021, centered on HMS Queen Elizabeth and including US and Dutch escorts, signaled Britain’s declared “tilt” back to Asia. The group transited the South China Sea, tracked Chinese submarines, exercised with regional navies, and demonstrated that the UK still fields a credible, allied‑integrated carrier capability that can operate in contested waters. That deployment was about reassurance and deterrence as much as about training value.

In the Euro-Atlantic, the picture has clarified considerably. HMS Defender’s 2021 transit near Crimea was the opening salvo of a British maritime posture that has since proved consequential. British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles and training support contributed to Ukraine’s asymmetric maritime campaign, which by 2024 had disabled or destroyed roughly 40 percent of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and pushed its remaining major units eastward, rendering what was once a dominant regional fleet “functionally inactive” across large portions of the sea.

Ukraine achieved this without a conventional surface fleet, through a combination of Neptune anti-ship missiles, Magura V5 and Sea Baby unmanned surface vessels, and layered drone-and-missile strikes on Sevastopol, a campaign the Royal Navy has both supported and studied.

The Royal Navy’s current contribution has shifted toward mine countermeasures: divers and explosive ordnance teams from the Portsmouth-based Diving and Threat Exploitation Group have led Exercise Sea Breeze alongside Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish partners, developing the multinational Black Sea Mine Countermeasures Task Group that will be essential to any post-war reopening of the sea lanes.

The lesson for fleet planners is stark: uncrewed, low-cost systems combined with precision missiles can do what a conventional surface engagement could not and the Royal Navy must integrate that lesson into its own force development even as it sustains the alliance architecture that made Ukraine’s gains possible.

Add to this the less visible but vital tasks: protecting undersea cables and energy infrastructure, monitoring Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic, and working with partners on counter‑piracy, fisheries enforcement, and maritime security from the Gulf of Guinea to the Indo‑Pacific.

Once again, the underlying issue is whether rules hold in spaces where there are no fences.

The Integrated Review and the Shape of the Fleet

The United Kingdom’s 2021 Integrated Review, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age,” and its 2025 Strategic Defence Review explicitly re-elevated maritime power after two decades of land-centric campaigning. Both documents positioned the Royal Navy as a primary tool for projecting British influence, reassuring allies, and sustaining a “free and open” international order from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific.

The 2025 SDR’s explicit framing of making Britain “secure at home and strong abroad” has since been tested operationally, HMS Iron Duke has shadowed Russian corvettes in the North Sea, Royal Navy mine clearance teams have led coalition exercises for the Black Sea, and the UK has formally declared support for the multinational campaign to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The gap between declaratory ambition and executable capacity remains real; but the direction is now being stress-tested in live operations rather than seminar rooms.

That vision is backed if unevenly by force‑structure choices: two large carriers, a nuclear attack submarine force being recapitalized, the Type 26 and Type 31 frigate programs, a future commando force for littoral strike, and investments in uncrewed systems and seabed warfare capabilities. It remains constrained by budget, industrial capacity, and readiness challenges. But the direction of travel is clear: Britain intends to remain a maritime power that can deploy high‑end capability forward and sustain it.

This is not just about platform counts or prestige deployments. It is about determining whether the UK is in the business of enforcing rules at sea, or merely commenting when others do so.

A Different Kind of Legacy

There is a temptation, especially in Britain’s current domestic debate, either to sanitize imperial history or to wallow in it. Neither is particularly helpful for thinking about sea power.

The record of the West Africa Squadron shows that a state can be morally compromised in many areas and still undertake a sustained, costly campaign that produces genuine humanitarian and normative gains. That campaign did not absolve Britain of its role in creating the slave system; nor should it. But it did help entrench a new rule: that transporting human beings as cargo across the ocean was beyond the pale.

The policy analogue today is not to pretend that Britain is uniquely virtuous or to revive the language of moral crusade. It is to recognize that some maritime behaviors, holding global shipping at risk for leverage, salami‑slicing maritime claims, industrial‑scale exploitation of forced labour at sea, sabotaging undersea infrastructure have system‑level consequences. If those practices become normalised, the open trading system on which Britain and its partners rely will steadily erode.

The practical question is whether the Royal Navy, in concert with allies, has the capability, posture, and political backing to resist that erosion.

Drawing New Lines

Seen through that lens, the case for the “rebirth” of the modern Royal Navy can be made in language that an informed public can understand.

It is not primarily about nostalgia or blue‑water vanity projects. It is about who sets the terms of access to the global commons and what behaviors are tolerated there.

In the nineteenth century, Britain chose to spend lives and resources to make the Atlantic a more dangerous place for slavers, even as it wrestled with its own legacy.

In our own time, Britain faces a choice of comparable structure, if not of identical moral content: whether to field and sustain a navy capable of helping enforce basic rules of maritime conduct in a world of rising contestation or to subcontract that job to others and accept whatever order they choose to build.