Let no one doubt that the Entente Cordiale is alive and well, though its present incarnation resembles less a diplomatic memorandum than a gangster’s shakedown. This week, in a display of Anglo-French maritime resolve that would make Nelson and Villeneuve spin in their graves, a French frigate, supported by Royal Navy intelligence, seized a Russian oil tanker in the Channel. Macron, ever the theatrical emperor, hailed this as a triumph of European solidarity. I call it what it is: an act of state-sanctioned piracy dressed up in the language of international law.
Consider the facts. The vessel, the Natasha, was carrying crude oil from a Russian port. Its destination was a refinery in Rotterdam. The cargo, by all technical accounts, belonged to a private company trading within the labyrinthine grey zones of G7 sanctions. Yet France, with a tip-off from the British, boarded the ship, arrested its captain, and confiscated its contents. The justification? That the oil violated price cap agreements, though no court has proven this. In effect, Macron and Starmer have turned the Channel into a pickpocket’s alley, where might makes right.
This is not law enforcement. This is theatre. The seizure is a symbolic gesture aimed at placating domestic audiences who demand action against Russia, while doing precisely nothing to degrade Putin’s war machine. Russia will simply reroute its oil through other channels, as it has done with gas after the Nord Stream sabotage. Meanwhile, the precedent set here is dangerous. If France can seize a tanker on the mere suspicion of sanctions evasion, what stops China from doing the same to a British vessel in the South China Sea? The principle of mare liberum, so jealously guarded by the British Empire, is now sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics.
Moreover, the very spectacle of a British warship assisting a French one off the coast of Portugal reveals a deeper rot. National sovereignty, once the cornerstone of maritime law, has been replaced by the transient whims of political leaders. Starmer, desperate to appear tough, lends his navy to a foreign power, all for a photo op. This is the decadence of the late Roman Empire, where client kings fought Rome’s battles while the legions atrophied. Our leaders no longer act in the interest of their nations, but in the interest of a globalist abstraction called ‘the rules-based order,’ which is simply the rules that benefit the West at any given moment.
And what of the tanker’s crew? They are now hostages in a geopolitical game, their livelihoods destroyed by a legal fiction. The captain, a 58-year-old Georgian, faces charges that he violated a law he likely could not have fully understood, given the rapid proliferation of sanctions. This is the human cost of sanctimony.
Macron called the operation a ‘demonstration of European resolve.’ Resolve for what? To impoverish ourselves by cutting off energy supplies, to alienate the Global South, and to prove that the Age of Imperialism never ended, only changed flags. The British assisted in this folly because they have no identity left except as America’s deputy sheriff. And France, unable to project power anywhere else, clings to the memory of its naval glory.
There was a time when the Royal Navy and Marine Nationale policed the seas for necessary ends: to suppress the slave trade, to protect trade routes from pirates. Now they seize oil tankers to make a political point. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Macron and Starmer seize tankers while Europe deindustrialises. There is no nobility in this act. Only desperation.
The ghost of Trafalgar, where England and France fought for the soul of Europe, now watches as their descendants cooperate in a shoddy heist. It would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
