The case for a global coalition for maritime security

The third pillar is the regional frameworks that address maritime crime and institutional capacity. The IMO-supported Djibouti Code of Conduct and its Jeddah Amendment cover piracy, maritime terrorism, arms and narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, illegal fishing and other illicit activity. They promote information-sharing, interdiction, prosecution, training, legislation, and capacity-building. This demonstrates that maritime security is not exclusively military. However, the framework is regional and not designed to generate global political alignment in response to state-enabled coercion.

Fourth, individual states use sanctions, export controls, financial restrictions and criminal investigations against particular actors. These measures can expose front companies, vessels, financiers, and procurement agents, but differences in law, evidence, and political appetite allow activity blocked in one jurisdiction to migrate to another. The gap is therefore not an absence of naval assets or legal tools, but of an overarching political mechanism connecting them and conveying a strong international stance to Iran.

The anti-IS coalition

The global coalition that was formed to fight Islamic State (IS) is not directly transferable in purpose (Iran is a sovereign state and the IRGC belongs to a state apparatus), but it is useful as an organisational model. The anti-IS coalition brought together 90 partners around a defined objective while permitting voluntary and differentiated contributions. Its activities extended beyond military operations to counter-finance, foreign terrorist travel, stabilisation, communications, and law enforcement. Membership and contributions are voluntary and there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Several features are adaptable to the maritime security context. First, the anti-IS Coalition has a limited unifying mission. Members need not agree on every regional issue; they cooperate around a defined threat. A maritime coalition could unite governments around freedom of navigation, protection of commerce, and disruption of networks enabling attacks, without requiring overall agreement on Iran.

Second, participation is modular. Some members provide military assets; others offer intelligence, finance, policing, training, funding, or diplomatic support. This lowers the political threshold for membership and accommodates unequal capacities. Third, organisation is distributed and combines military and civilian expertise. Specialised working groups sustain technical activity; political-military consultations connect civilian policy with operations; and existing institutions implement much of the work.

Fourth, it is adaptable. As the threat changed, the coalition revised its working groups and geographic focus, later giving greater attention to financial networks, terrorist travel, recruitment, and regional threats.

Maritime security coalition

The mission of a newly established global coalition for maritime security and network disruption would be to protect freedom of navigation and global commerce; strengthen resilience against maritime coercion; and identify, expose and disrupt the financial, logistical, procurement, and operational networks enabling attacks on international shipping.

It would be conduct-based, not designation-based. Membership would not require an identical legal characterisation of Iran or the IRGC. Members would instead commit to act against defined behaviour: attacks on commercial vessels, unlawful seizures, mining, weapons transfers to actors attacking shipping, sanctions evasion, illicit procurement, deceptive shipping practices, and attacks on maritime infrastructure.

A full ministerial coalition would set priorities and provide legitimacy. Membership should include trading powers, flag states, port states, and countries whose energy or food security depends on these routes. A smaller steering group would meet regularly to assess threats and coordinate policy. It would combine military and economic contributors with meaningful representation for states bordering the Red Sea and Gulf. A compact coordination cell would maintain a shared threat assessment and ensure that coalition activity complements rather than duplicates CMF, ASPIDES, the IMO and regional frameworks. The coalition should not create another naval command.

There would be three core working groups. One would connect existing naval missions, coastguards, port authorities and information-sharing centres, coordinating maritime-domain awareness, defensive planning, exercises, mine countermeasures, port and coastal security, and protection of undersea infrastructure. Countries unable to deploy warships could contribute satellite imagery, cyber expertise, logistics, personnel, training or funding.

A financial working group would unite finance ministries, financial intelligence units, customs services, export control authorities, police, and sanctions bodies. It would map vessel and company ownership, identify procurement and commodity networks, coordinate evidence, improve beneficial-ownership transparency, and close jurisdictional gaps. Action would remain grounded in each member’s domestic laws.

A third working group would strengthen coastguards, customs, port governance, cyber defences and emergency systems; support repair of damaged infrastructure; improve search-and-rescue and environmental-response capacity; and develop contingency plans for prolonged disruption. Shipping companies, insurers, ports, energy firms, banks, and technology providers would be invited to participate because they hold essential operational data and bear immediate economic costs.

Legal, attribution and communications functions would cut across all three groups, but governments need not issue identical public statements. The coalition would be presented as defensive and rules-based, not interventionist nor a regime-change project. The coalition would aim to counter maritime disruption whether it is driven by Iran or any other countries or actors.

Political alignment

The coalition’s ultimate political value would be the alignment generated through cooperation. Iran benefits when European governments hesitate, when Europe and the United States diverge, and when Gulf and international states treat each incident separately. Fragmentation weakens deterrence by suggesting that pressure can be applied below the threshold of a collective response.

A coalition would change that calculation. Members would not need to participate in every naval operation or adopt every financial measure. Joint assessments, coordinated planning, simultaneous network disruption actions, shared attribution, and regular ministerial statements would cumulatively demonstrate that interference with Hormuz, Bab el-Mandab or the Red Sea is regarded as a global security threat.

This is also the strongest case for European domestic audiences. Participation would not mean joining another Middle Eastern war, but protecting energy supplies, trade, shipping, consumer interests, and the international legal order. Differentiated contributions would allow European states to participate through defensive naval missions, finance, customs, cyber defence, diplomacy, or capacity-building.

Political alignment would strengthen diplomacy rather than replace it. Negotiations are more credible when coercive behaviour does not divide the countries it affects. Governments could continue to disagree over wider Iran policy while uniting around a defined principle: no state or affiliated network should attack international shipping and weaponise maritime chokepoints to impose costs on the wider world.

The argument for a global coalition is not that existing mechanisms have failed, but that they remain incomplete. Naval, legal, regional, and financial components already exist in partial form; what they lack is the political architecture to connect them, broaden participation, and turn dispersed national actions into a coherent international strategy.

The anti-IS coalition offers a tested organisational model: a limited mission, broad membership, a steering group, specialised working groups, voluntary contributions, and implementation through existing institutions. Applied carefully—and without treating Iran as equivalent to IS—it could turn maritime security from a series of defensive reactions into a sustained global effort against both attacks and the networks that enable them.