Clausewitz and the Cod War
The internet groans under the weight of attempts to make sense of recent events in the Middle East. Nonetheless, I suspect that the post that follows may well be the only piece of punditry that compares the missilades of June 2025 to the Third Cod War.
In November of 1975, Harold Wilson found himself in a bit of a sticky wicket. As prime minister of the United Kingdom, he wished to establish an exclusive economic zone off the east coast of Scotland, thereby giving his petroleum-poor polity a monopoly over the dragon’s hoard of oil and natural gas that lay beneath the floor of the North Sea. However, as leader of the political party supported by (among others) the sailors who worked on British trawlers, he could not endorse a comparable claim made by Iceland, for that would exclude said ships from their traditional fishing grounds in the waters surrounding the latter island.
As Prime Minister Wilson struggled with this conundrum, Oðin- and Ægir-class cutters of the Icelandic Coast Guard began to cut the nets of British vessels fishing within two hundred nautical miles of the coasts they guarded. (They did this by dragging a klippur - a simple device that did just what it sounds like - across the nets of the offending trawlers.) In response to this ‘clipping’, the Royal Navy deployed a number of frigates.
Much ramming ensued. In the biggest of these incidents, which took place on the evening of 6 May 1976, HMS Falmouth rammed V/s Týr, which had been cutting the nets of FV Carlisle.1 The collision deprived Týr of one of her two screws, obliging her to limp back to port.2
Celebrated in British tabloids, these incidents allowed Wilson to present himself as the champion of British fishermen while he worked to convince other interested parties to accept a British monopoly over the some of the richest petroleum deposits in Europe. Indeed, the Icelandic threat to retaliate for the ramming of its cutters by closing the NATO base at Keflavik seems to have played a key role in convincing the United States, which would have proposed that the North Sea remain open to all who wished to drill there, to support Wilson’s policy.
In the end, Iceland got its fish, the United Kingdom got its oil, and the United States traded the possibility of fee-free drilling for an extension of its lease on an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic.
In the sixth chapter of the eighth book of On War, Carl von Clausewitz famously describes war as ‘nothing but a continuation of politics with the addition of other means’.3 In coining this oft-quoted phrase, which might also be translated as ‘nothing but a follow-up to the give-and-take of politics with something extra thrown in,’ the Philosopher of War probably presumes that the ‘other means’ will involve some degree of violence. Apart from that, however, he places no boundaries on the peculiars of post-political activity.
Given this observation, I suspect that Brigadier General von Clausewitz would have seen nothing especially odd in the spectacle of the warships of two states, both of which sought the same end, playing chicken on the high seas. Likewise, he would have found nothing peculiar in recent events in the Middle East, in which Israel and Iran traded blows in earnest while Iran and the United States engaged in a carefully choreographed exchange of ordnance.
The prefixes abbreviate, respectively, Her Majesty’s Ship, Varðskip (‘watch ship’), and Fishing Vessel.
English-language accounts of this incident often claim that the skipper of Týr, Guðmundur Kjærnested, responded to the ramming by commanding his crew to ‘man the guns’. Having served under that officer, I can imagine him saying something like this. However, as the only rounds supplied to Týr for its single piece of onboard artillery were signal flares, I suspect that he was exercising his fondness for irony.
‘… Krieg ist Nichts als die Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderen Mittel’ Carl von Clausewitz Vom Krieg: Dritter Teil (On War: Part Three) (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler) page 140
History smiles indulgently