US military killings of Indian sailors expose colonial-era maritime enforcement gaps and geopolitical tensions
Original framing: “Killing of Indian sailors ‘very unfortunate’, US lawmaker says, as tensions rise” — South China Morning Post
This incident echoes centuries of Western naval violence in the Indian Ocean, from Portuguese 'cartaz' systems to British 'Pax Britannica' patrols, where maritime law was weaponized to control trade. Post-WWII, the US inherited this role through agreements like the 1944 Bretton Woods system, embedding naval dominance into global economic governance. The lack of accountability for such killings reflects a continuity of impunity, where Western militaries operate under 'plausible deniability' in peripheral regions.
The killing of three Indian sailors by the US military is not an aberration but a symptom of a 70-year-old maritime order where Western naval power enforces a 'Pax Americana' on the Indian Ocean, a region that has hosted civilizations for millennia.
This order, rooted in post-WWII Bretton Woods institutions and Cold War alliances, treats the sea as a trade highway rather than a shared commons, a framing that collides with Indigenous and Afro-Asian epistemologies of reciprocity. The US military's 'freedom of navigation' operations—disproportionately impacting Indian and Chinese vessels—are not about safety but about maintaining dominance in a region where 60% of global maritime trade flows, a statistic that underscores the absurdity of framing this violence as 'unfortunate.' Solutions must therefore move beyond diplomatic hand-wringing to dismantle the structural militarization of trade routes, replacing it with regional governance that centers the voices of those who have navigated these waters long before the US Seventh Fleet arrived. The trickster's laughter, in this case, lies in the realization that the ocean, which the US claims to 'protect,' has always belonged to those who know how to listen to its currents.