Washington Watch News

Sometime back in the fall of 2025, I was contacted by a prominent national television, radio, and print news reporter with a surprising (but understandable under the circumstances) request for background information to inform her reporting. She was working on a story covering the numerous lethal military strikes on alleged drug trafficking speedboats (lanchas) in international waters and the waters of Central and South American countries that we all were seeing and hearing about in the news. The reporter’s core question for me?

In a spare few minutes I took a quick look at the U.S. Center for Maritime Innovation Report: Small Modular Reactor Technologies for Maritime Applications of May 19, 2026.As near as I can figure, it focuses on two major concerns with regard to the use of SMRs in commercial ships:1. Insurance obstacles and2. Possible adverse reactions by the public to nuclear commercial ships.That is weird to me, since my major concern would be that it is taking way too long to simply build a commercial ship with an SMR as its power source.

By Richard Gunn and Julia Cyrson, Reed Smith LLPIn the largest penalty the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) has ever levied, a Special Chamber ruled unanimously against Equatorial Guinea on May 27, 2026, ordering it to pay over €14 million in damages to the Republic of the Marshall Islands for the unlawful seizure of a commercial tanker and detention of its multinational crew. The ruling in the M/T Heroic Idun (No. 2) case represents a watershed moment for international maritime law…

When the EXXON VALDEZ ran aground in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, it was an action-forcing event that led to what was the most substantial overhaul of our federal oil spill prevention, preparedness, and response regime in the Nation’s history. But the event that really got policymakers and experts started thinking about such a sweeping re-rack of federal law actually occurred a decade earlier—the Ixtoc One blowout in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche in 1979.If Ixtoc sounds eerily similar to the Macondo blowout (i.e.…

Since the Iranian Revolution and overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, the Strait of Hormuz has been a geographic constant as a choke point for which closure has been threatened from time to time but never truly closed. The longstanding assumption of the continued openness of the strait collapsed on February 28, 2026. In the weeks since Iran effectively shut the strait to commercial shipping in response to U.S. and Israeli military strikes and the U.S. established its own blockade…

U.S.–Venezuela relations have entered a consequential phase for ocean transportation, energy markets, and trade compliance. Sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil sector and maritime networks now combine escalated enforcement, including tanker seizures, vessel interdictions, and intensified scrutiny of shipping structures, with narrowly-tailored licenses permitting specific oil exports, diluent shipments, and related maritime services. This has blurred traditional lines between operational risk, trade compliance, and risk transfer strategies.

Maybe it is a human trait, or maybe a Washington, D.C. trait, but when confronted with a difficult problem with unpalatable solutions, there is usually an impulse to delay the moment of difficult decision by ordering a study. The U.S. merchant marine industry is the poster child for this behavior. The industry has been studied and studied, and is currently being studied, but studies don’t build ships -- shipyards build ships.Going back to the Lynch Committee in 1870, the U.S. government has regularly produced studies on how to revive the U.S. merchant marine.